Contenu du sommaire : Nouvelles recherches sur l'apposition, sous la direction de Franck Neveu

Contemporary studies on apposition no longer take into account, as one of its characteristics, the traditional criterion of co-reference , understood as a virtual (lexical) or actual (referential) identity; from this point of view, certain adverbial complements may be considered as appositions. However, the study of numerous prepositional groups introduced by dans shows that the notion of co-reference is useful when it comes to distinguishing analytically between two types of functions an adverbial complement may have, in so far as its meaning may be circumstantial (e.g. of cause, manner, place) or else correspond to the verbal idea : thus, the decision to dissolve the National Assembly constitutes a mistake in a sentence such as Dans sa décision de dissoudre l'assemblée, Chirac a commis une erreur.

This contribution deals with a plaidoyer for unifying the description of the much- debated category of apposition, viewed here as one of three syntactic modes of semantic predication on referents of noun phrases, the two others being modification (fr. épithète) and attribution (fr. attribut). Starting from the pragmatic view-point that apposition represents primarily a propositional speech act — a secondary predication — and a discourse strategy, the author attempt to find common denominators at langue level, in terms of basic constructional and semantic criteria, which are hierarchically ordered, with the aim to isolate some prototypical appositive predicates, as invariants covering the different contextual cognitive interpretations, as described by others (eg. Blumenthal, 1980; Combettes, 1998; Neveu, 1998a and b). Special attention is given to identifying and locative appositive predicates.

When two NGs are adjacent, their logical relationship may be of three types, which are not always easy to distinguish: either they form an asyndetic coordination, in which case it is possible to furnish a connector; or it is a reformulation, and the second NG acts as if it was a substitute for the first, as a better approximation of the referent; or finally it is a case of apposition. It is the analysis of these cases of apposition which are the subject of this article. They are examined according to the nature of the determiner of each of the two groups , first when these determiners differ, then in the more subtle case where the two NGs have the same determiner.

The definition one takes as a basis for studying appositions in spoken French can vary from broad stereotyped types to more limitative cases. Largely dependent on the particular register of language, as well as the definition one takes as a basis. From the to the limit cases, the range of examples that can come under the category of "appositions" is broader than in the written language, although one can dispense with some of the descriptive criteria such as punctuation.

Nominal appositions exhibit anaphoric properties and are linked to their antecedent by a BE-type relation. The initial assumption of this paper is that nominal appositions behave as nonref erring, nominal predicates. The comparison of fronted appositions and specificational sentences reveals that in both constructions, the fronted (nonrefe- rential) phrase receives a list-reading, a type of interpretation typically associated with an event-type, stage-level predicate. It further appears that apposed nominals which include a null determiner are steadily associated with a stage-level reading, whatever their linear position with respect to their antecedent; contrastively, apposed nominals which include the overt indefinite determiner (un) are associated with an individual-level readin. A correlate appears to exist between the type of determiner and the syntactic locus of the apposed nominal : the null determiner occurs in fronted appositions (even though these may be moved to the right), while the indefinite determiner occurs in postposed appositions. These descriptive results lead us to conclude that the null and indefinite determiners must have their own syntactic function, and more precisely, must correspond to some functional heads.

This paper considers different types of functionally motivated principles which determine the placement of the apposition phrase in clause first position; from a diachronic point of view, it is possible to distinguish a textual constraint (the initial place as a marker of topic continuity), and a semantic one (the apposition as a marker of temporal relations).

This paper studies the means used by front appositions to connect with primary predication and the part of anchoring point of the detached segment in referential continuity. We develop the assumption, that in the appositive system, whatever the order and the kind of the components, the detachment and the second predication lead blocking of any referential mechanism of the segment thougt to be apposed, whose function is to predicate the properties of the support. This describing detached term forms with its controller a referential cell and its place must be described as an icon index of the interpretation field of the controller [+/- accessibility]. continuity. We develop the assumption, that in the appositive system, whatever the order and the kind of the components, the detachment and the second predication lead blocking of any referential mechanism of the segment thougt to be apposed, whose function is to predicate the properties of the support. This describing detached term forms with its controller a referential cell and its place must be described as an icon index of the interpretation field of the controller [+/- accessibility].