Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 15, Issue 2, 1991

This article deals with the automatic description of N de N phrases. The initial observation is that it is impossible to make a clear distinction between structures of that type (i.e. N de N) that are frozen structures and those that are not frozen or partially frozen. The problem, then, consists in finding criteria that may be useful for the description of those sequences, in grouping these criteria and using them to distinguish the different types of N de N structures. This is equivalent to constructing a complete syntax of the noun complement introduced by de.

We examine here several constructions that are characteristic of a subclass of French subordinating conjunctions termed "consecutive", e.g. à tel point que, tellement que, etc. In some of these constructions, the conjunction alone ( without the subordinate clause introduced by que) can be permuted to various points of the main clause, so that it is perceived as a sentence adverb.In other constructions, a special case highlights as category change in the subordinating conjunction and so in the process itself: subordination gives way to a pure coordination of sentences. This is the second phenomena of this type that we have been able to observe in our general study of subordination in French.

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.

La voix désigne une catégorie morphologique par opposition à la diathèse qui désigne une catégorie sémantique. On a affaire, d'un côté, à la structure formelle du verbe, qui peut être actif, passif ou relatif selon le type d'affixe en présence; de l'autre, à l'orientation sémantique du procès du verbe, qui peut être transitif, intransitif, passif, instrumental, destinataire, datif, locatif, de moyen ou circonstanciel, selon le type d'argument focalisé en sujet grammatical.

In this article it will be argued that in contemporary French an underlying suffix //ese// has to be admitted in order to account for the surface (lexical) representations /-ess/ and /-so/ (cf. /delikatese/ delicatesse "delicacy" and /obeisase/ obeissance "obedience"). Several arguments will be put forward to make the claim plausible, most important of which are the distributional argument (/ese/ and /se/ do not occur in the same environment) and the phonological argument (/ess/ and /so/ can both be derived from //ese// by otherwise well established rules).