Contenu du sommaire : Lexique-grammaire des adjectifs, sous la direction de Éric Laporte

This article is about a complex construction in French with an infinitive clause that seems to be an adverbial complement of a structure No être Adj with a human subject, for instance : Paul a été honnête d'intervenir. The properties of this construction are studied and contrasted with those of a construction with a closely related meaning but with a sentential subject : Que Paul soit intervenu est honnête de sa part. The human-subject construction is shown to be a feature of a class of adjectives which are independently characterized by the distribution of their subject. This construction defines them as adjectives of psychological qualities, as opposed to adjectives qualifying a physical behaviour or a look (gracieux, souple), a mood (mélancolique) or a feeling (triste).

During the comparative study of adjectives nominalization in Modern Greek and in French (E. Sklavounou, 1997) we have singled out constructions with specific syntactic properties and related them to lexical entries of different syntactic classes. In this article we study the specific syntactic properties of the adjectival constructions whose subject is a sentence or a deverbal phrase, for example Η απόφαση του Οδυσσέα ήταν έξυπνη (Ulysses' decision was clever) . These constructions are related to the construction with a human subject and a sentential complement ΝΟ είναι Adj QueP. The two adjectival constructions (sentential or human subject) have important syntactic differences. Both can be nominalized leading to two de-adjectival nominal sentences, indirectly related, with slightly different meanings and different support verb. We propose a representation with two families of constructions inside the lexical entry : one for the human-subject construction and another for the sentential-subject one. These specific syntactic properties and those of morphologically related nouns and adverbs define a class of adjectives denoting human psychological qualities.

In this paper, we study the restructuration of the subject in adjectival constructions containing an appropriate noun like Les cheveux de Léa sont frisés. The restructuration is studied in three steps. First, we examine on which syntactic conditions it can take place. Then we describe the syntactic properties of regular sequences Prep Det Napp which appear in restructurated sentences. Finally, we show that these sequences are also semantically homogeneous.

An adjective - traditionally qualificative - in constructions with strong syntactic and lexical constraints like those in which object complements appear, is a striking example of the fact that the meaning of a word results from a network of relationships between the various constituents of the sentence. Selectional compatibilities ? Combination rules ? The properties of complementarity and gradation of a pair of antonyms like the temperature adjectives hot and cold, applied to food, vary according to modality and aspect, and, as far as aspect is concerned, it is essential to deal with the adjective in close connection with the determiner of the noun it qualifies . This is a type of analysis which brings into play aspectual adverbs as "lexical keys" and offers a new approach to the question of calculation of meanings that diverge from literal meanings.