A Propos des Noms D'instruments: Relations Entre Forme et Sens

In this article, we attempt to find syntactic properties that might characterize instrumental nouns, i.e. nouns denoting a tool or a machine. We examine a number of properties, both distributional and transformational, that have traditionally been associated with instrumental nouns and demonstrate that those properties are neither specific to instrumentals nor common to all instrumentals. Such nouns, which typically appear in adverbial phrases, also raise the question of selectional restrictions between the verb, object and adverbial phrase in a sentence. Certain syntactic constructions help decide whether an instrumental adverb is semantically appropriate to the verb, but not with sufficient precision.