of producing an automatic parsing system which will produce a constituent bracketing-and hence a surface-structure tree-for any given sentence or fragment of English.The most technically advanced and hence difficult chapter is a description by Roger Garside and Fanny Leech of the work in progress on the UCREL (Unit for Computer Research on the English Language) parsing system, which it is claimed has already reached approximately 50% accuracy.The statistical basis for the UCREL operation comes from two sources.The first is the tagged Brown corpus, which was produced over a period of ten years or so, beginning with a computer routine which successfully tagged about three quarters of the words in the corpus.The remainder were done manually.The second foundation is a manually parsed random selection of sentences from the LOB corpus, amounting to 50,000 words, or about 4.5%.The product of this parsing was a 'treebank' of over 2000 parsed sentences.Ch. 7 of the book, also by Sampson, describes the parsing scheme he developed for this purpose and the difficulties he encountered in using it with actual sentences drawn from a corpus of 'natural language'.Regrettably this chapter is placed after that of Garside and Leech, though it is essential to an understanding of their work.Other chapters deal with such interesting topics as 'Problems in the automatic parsing of idioms' and 'Dealing with ill-formed English text'.One is left with the impression that a number of intelligent and devoted scholars have made significant progress in a concerted 'effort to teach computers (in certain respects) to be capable of understanding and processing human language' (1).Their success, which is considerable though obviously incomplete, is largely due to their willingness to develop modes of analysis which are neither traditional nor particularly fashionable in today's linguistics.It is the hope and expectation of Leech and his colleagues that their work will be a major contribution to the linguistics and cognitive science of the future.[W.N. FRANCIS, Brown University.] Les predicats nominaux en francais:Les phrases simples a verb support.By JACQUELINE GIRY-