Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 23, Issue 1, 2000

We begin this paper with a detailed study of Possessor Raising in Malagasy. Possessor Raising is shown to be exceptionally productive; moreover it largely conforms to the generalizations offered by Relational Grammar for Possessor Raising in general. But the incorporation it triggers is not of the same sort as studied in Baker (1996). Then we argue that Possessive Raising is a special case of a more general syntactic/semantic relation we call Raising from NP. This more general operation violates some tenets of Relational Grammar and appears to be a new type of derivational relation within generative grammar.

We present a syntactic analysis of the French “double conjunctions” class, which contains ninety one items: some of them are subordinating items, and in majority coordinating items. We analyse their specific syntactic properties by means of the “parallelism constraints” (see Z. S. Harris (1968)), related to the specific nature and order of these items and their sentences. Study of restrictions in their positions and combinations reveals complete independancy between “double conjunctions” and some homonymous “simple” ones, excluding any analyse of the last ones from the first ones.

Around forty Italian studies of French grammar running from the early 60s to 1997 are described in this Guide bibliographique. They are all undoubtedly noteworthy for their scientific interest, but in Italy the subject they deal with is in need of further exploration. Not only do such studies represent individual initiatives (no large common project has ever been carried out), they also take different approaches, which is inevitable in so far as grammar encompasses phonetics, lexicon, comparative analysis and teaching. In fact, the degree of diversity is not as high as one might expect. Only six trends are observable: pedagogic grammars, psychomechanical, pragmatic and énonciation-oriented studies, lexicon-grammars and manuals. In spite of this, the works in Schena’s Guide clearly show the evolution which the concept of grammar has undergone during the last three decades; research into meaning and the introduction of the human being into language have undermined the widely accepted priority that generativism and formalism give to syntax, since all levels — syntactic, semantic and pragmatic — are now treated as a sort of continuum which excludes any global model. The author’s aim is to present the key ideas of the studies mentioned above and to point out their innovative function in the Italian panorama of French linguistics.

The paper studies the meaning and the cooccurrence of four French prepositions used to express the causal relation: À CAUSE DE, SOUS L’EFFET DE, DE, and PAR. Each preposition is characterized along the three following aspects: (1) the type of causation it expresses (direct? with contact? with unity of time?); (2) semantic restrictions on the complement of the preposition — the noun phrase that denotes the cause, as well as on the phrase governing the preposition and denoting the effect; (3) the preposition’s lexical and syntactic restricted cooccurrence. The lexicographic descriptions of the four prepositions are presented.

A lexical approach of the trademark names integrates to the scope of lexicology a type of sequence which usually is disregarded. The formal structure of the items is bound to restraints which are imposed to the signifier by the juridical statute of the name (capital letter, absence of plural mark, question of graphic variant...). It results, on semiotic plan, an ambiguous functionning coming under terminology and proper noun. A lot of graphemics transgressions effect, for the items, a categorial transfer towards common vocabulary. This instability presents an original feature because it doesn’t cancel the efficience of the juridical rule whiche defines the use of the word, and because it sets the (illegal) conditions to a stabilization and normalization of the linguistical statute of the items (the inclining to lexeme releases them from the ambiguity term vs proper noun). On semantic plan, the interpretation of this type of names infers the presence of a notion or of an individual concept. However, the transfer of category which comes with the spreading of the items inside of the common vocabulary produces the emergence of a signified. Then is set the question of an possible polysemization of the name, and particularly the question of the definitions criterions which make the nomination possible. The lexicographic definitions have, for a large part of them, the structure of a metalinguistical text refering at the statute of trademark name of the définite item. Under such circumstances, far from appearing as a proper noun, a lexeme or a term, the trademark name reveals its partially sui-referential, intrinsically deictic and quasi-unamenable to a categorial definition nature.