Contenu du sommaire : Regards sur les adjectivaux

Nominal designations referring to human beings (except proper nouns) show many similarities with adjectives, whether from a morphological, lexical, semantic or syntactic point of view. Transfers from one category to another, both through “adjectivation” leading to permanent categorical change and ad hoc “adjectivity” (Fr. adjectivité), are frequent. Based on a corpus of more than 60 000 human nouns and a frequency dictionary (containing one million tokens), the differences and similarities between human nouns and adjectives are studied more specifically for derivations with the suffix -iste.

This work aims to demonstrate a particular behavior of Human Nouns (HN) and their derived adjectives in French. In the combination [Non-Human Noun (NonHN) + HN of kinship or sovereignty], the cooccurrence of two nouns is constrained by their grammatical gender as well as human sex (pays frère [brother country, m+m], *pays sœur [*sister country, m+f], *ville frère [*brother city, f+m], ville sœur [sister city, f+f]), while [NonHN + affixed HN] features ordinary morphological gender agreement (mouvement étudiant [student mouvment, m+m], vie étudiante [student life, f+f]). On the other hand, such gender agreement does not occur between two NonHNs that have grammatical gender but no sexual denotation (mot clé [keyword, m+f], position clé [key position, f+f]). Detailed analysis of these combinations based on the corpus data shows that the cooccurrence constraint of the first type does not necessarily come from analogy with the second type. Some HNs such as mère [mother], roi [king] directly transfer female or male sex to the gender of the derived adjective without this dichotomous pattern of morphological agreement. Finally, we affirm that analogy between Adjectivity and human traits in French derives from the association between grammatical gender (masculine / feminine) and human sex in that language.

French has so-called “affective adjectives”, such as foutu, satané, maudit, sale, pauvre, malheureux that occur in front of the noun. They are often considered atypical adjectives, since they exhibit particular syntactic properties. This case study of sale and foutu highlights differences related to their adjectivity. Based on a series of criteria for adjectivity, it is shown that sale behaves more like an adjective than foutu, both in its qualifying function and in its affective use.

This paper aims to examine the construction [jouer + du + music instrument]. It stems from the widely accepted theory that the verb jouer is intransitive and, thus, that the determiner du is a contracted form of the definite article le and the preposition de. To argue against this thesis, we suggest reexamining the syntactic-semantic structure of the verb jouer in light of the semantic properties of nouns referring to music instruments. On the assumption that these nouns are polysemous, we will assume that the meaning as well as the grammatical structure of the verb jouer change, depending on whether the music instrument noun denotes a ‘physical object' or a ‘musical activity'. In short, the verb jouer will be shown to be intransitive when the musical noun used is [+count], and transitive when it is [+mass].

One of the main problems one faces when studying French adverbial correlative structures is the lack of homogeneous criteria that allow us to set up a defined typology. The relation of syntactic dependence underlying correlative clauses is not easy to identify. Moreover, the criteria suggested for a plausible classification, being morphological, semantic and syntactic at the same time, do not solve the problem but add more confusion instead. In the same vein, the traditional terms used are ambiguous and allow for a number of different interpretations, e.g. juxtaposition, parataxis, and even correlation. Therefore, a simplified view of adverbial correlation should prevail so as to facilitate the teaching / learning of the grammatical metalanguage around it, which would lead us to a modification of standard syntactic relations and to a revision of the corresponding terminology.

In contemporary French, il est évident que p expresses a modality with meta-predicate status (Gosselin, 2010). From the perspective of instructional semantics, we show that this impersonal form indicates neither the objectivity (which is true regardless of any subject) nor the collective subjectivity (which is true for most) but rather an intersubjectivity (which is true for any subject). Because of this intersubjective value, il est évident que not only intensifies the speaker's commitment but systematically indicates the stabilization of the judgment, whether the judgment is a priori or based on a further examination of the situation (a priori / à y regarder de plus près, il est évident que p).