Contenu du sommaire : Un bien grand mot de. De la préposition au mode de quantification., sous la direction de Lucien Kupferman

A Diachronic Study of the Partitive Article Medaevists sometimes deny that a partitive article could exist in Old French. On the other hand, some linguists notice that the contemporary partitive article shows constrained uses (e.g. they notice its infrequency before the subject noun). This study try to link the reservations of the firsts and the observations of the seconds. Among other things, it shows that an early partitive article does exist and how its uses in Old French foreshadow the contemporary ones (e.g. its connection with object nouns of a specific class of verbs in Old French explains its lasting infrequency with the subject).

An Interpretation Typology of French complex nominals with de This paper presents a two level interpretation model of French noun phrases with de. On the basis of semantic and argumentai properties of the head noun and the interrelationship between the two nouns it is argued that there is a limited set of prototypical semantic interpretations at the level of the NP itself, the micro-level. These prototypical relations are covered by two essential meanings, namely possession and origin. Syntactic tests support this dichotomy. The second interpretation level is a textual one where the complex NP is interpreted by contextual clues (salient themes in the preceding discourse) or by extra-linguistic knowledge of the referents of the two NPs and their interrelations. In the last two cases the interpretation demands a larger context (at the macro-level) than that of the complex NP itself.

L'« autre » de, une tête quantificationnelle ? In this article we consider the three following constructions, containing each the non-prepositional element de followed by an AP or an NP : (1) de chaud, il y a deux pizzas (2) j'ai pris la tienne, de voiture (3) j'ai beaucoup bu de lait We will show that semantically these constructions involve an intersection or a partition of domains. The NP/AN expresses a « virtual » domain of reference, which is linked to another element in the sentence that represents either the extension of the reference domain or a specimen of its class. We will translate this interpretation in syntactic terms by postulating the hypothesis that de in these constructions is the quantificational head of a functional projection that takes an AP or NP as its internal argument and an empty operator in its specifier position. We will demonstrate that if we adopt such a structure, general licensing principles of generative grammar predict the (partially similar) distribution of these constructions.

Which Complements of a Noun can one Cliticize or Relativize in French ? It is well-known that certain, but not all complements of a noun can be extracted (cliticized, relativized or turned into a question) in French. We examine a variety of facts which support the following generalization : only the first argument on a noun's argument list can be extracted (un livre dont j'ai aimé la fin /j'en ai aimé la fin), or can function as a wh-complement (included in a larger phrase in pied-piping constructions, as in un livre à la fin duquel je ne me suis pas intéressé). A second observation is that an element extracted from an NP must function as the complement of the highest noun (the head) in that phrase. By contrast, wh-expressions may be more deeply embedded within an NP. Casting our analysis in the HPSG framework, we propose two simple constraints on the lexical representation of (non-predicative) nouns. These constraints, which make reference to non-local features, interact with independently motivated aspects of the HPSG treatment of unbounded dependency constructions (e.g. relative and interrogative clauses) to predict the surprisingly complex domain of facts we survey.

Partitive and temporal localization The aim of this paper is an examination of the French partitive construction de + N, as far as event structures are concerned, that is time and aspect. A first part is devoted to an examination of the main distributional properties of this construction, along with its relationship with some problems of genericity. The second part provides arguments for the basic hypothesis : the French partitive construction is possible solely within the context of a temporally localized process. In the last part, some further examples are dealt within the above mentioned framework.

Les génitifs : gouvernement d'antécédent et gouvernement thématique This study puts in question the so-called Cinque's generalization (Cinque, 1979) which views the Determiner position as an escape hatch for adnominal NPs. It is shown on empirical grounds and for principled reasons that the pronominal determiner son and clitic en materialize two heterogeneous types of movement, the first one being regulated by a-government, and the second one by θ-government. This analysis could be best achieved if we consider de-insertion as a syntactic move which is postereous to son formation and is insensitive to the argument-structure of the nominal. Son is best categorized as a genitive D⁰. En, as a pro-PP, more accurrately a P⁰-D⁰, is generated after de-insertion and is sensitive to the argument-structure of the nominal.