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Two categories of nouns denoting events [ENs], i.e. of nouns which can be the subject of avoir lieu (‘take place'), can be distinguished. Autonomous ENs (e.g. concert ‘concert', avalanche ‘avalanche') provide a sufficient description of events, whereas dependent ENs (e.g. augmentation ‘increase', démantèlement ‘dismantling'), need a complement to denote events. The distinction between these two categories is not equivalent to the one proposed by Grimshaw (1990), between « simple event nominals » and « complex event nominals ». It is shown that the distribution between autonomous and dependent ENs does not rely on pure syntactic or morphological properties, and that the semantic structure, i.e. the relevant semantic features, is not the same for all ENs. Furthermore, the autonomy or dependency of ENs may determine the ontological type of events denoted by ENs.

Invariable adjectives have been considered adverbs in traditional grammar. If it is true that in earlier times the distinction between nature and function was not accepted, which favoured an analysis in terms of recategorisation through adverbialisation, the separation of nature and function went along with an analysis in terms of categorical mismatch, which yielded some difficulties. Although the split of the set of invariable adjectives into two groups is nowadays the object of a consensus, our review of the theoretical approaches (both traditional ones and those inspired by Guillaume's psychomechanics) shows that these approaches constitute different ways to account for the distinction and the criteria used to make this distinction. We intend to enlighten our reflexions by means of the analyses of our predecessors and, finally, propose a new solution for the future.

Although it has been unanimously accepted that the articles le, les and un can fill the syntactic position of subject bearing a universal interpretation, a similar statement is less obvious for des and du. In this paper, we examine those cases in which des N and du N can be the subject of a generic sentence. Indeed, provided certain conditions and a particular context – usually polemic and, in any case, argumentative – the des N and du N NPs can lead to a universal interpretation, when placed before a characterizing predicate of the individual-level or stage-level types, or before a kind-level predicate. However, despite their apparent similarity a difference can be observed between the genericity expressed by utterances introduced by these NPs, and that of the utterances introduced by le N, les N and un N, due to the thetic interpretation which is related to the articles des and du. Moreover, the athematic character of these utterances has often been neglected, resulting in strongly diverging acceptability ratings among grammarians and linguists with regard to generic utterances introduced by des and du.

In this article, we propose to study the comparative plus particulièrement based on the focus particle particulièrement in initial position, and its role in discourse. Since our main goal is to identify cues and markers of the discourse relation Elaboration, particular attention is paid to focus adverbials which can introduce details in discourse. Two functions of plus particulièrement in initial position emerge from our analysis and the implications of these functions with respect to discourse relations are highlighted.

On the basis of three distinct corpora (fiction, newspaper articles, scholarly writings), this paper focusses on the possible links between textual genre and different types of cataphora. What are the provisional results of our investigation ? First, cataphoric elements may vary within a genre, according to the writer's stylistic choices, and metalinguistic cataphoras do not only occur in linguistic work. Finally, only newspapers seem to use specific devices by making use of different enunciative levels.