That at least some syntax is necessary to support semantic processing is fairly obvious. To know exactly how much syntax is needed, however, and how and when to apply it, is still an open and crucial, albeit old, question. This paper discusses the solutions used in a semantic analyser of French called SABA, developed at the University of Liege, Belgium. Specifically, we shall argue in favor of the usefulness of two syntactic processes: fragmentation, which can he interleaved with semantic processing, and part-of-speech disambiguation, which can be performed as a preprocesslng step. .
