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Article Dans Une Revue Studia Linguistica Année : 2012

Number and adjectives: the case of French Activity and Quality Nominals.

Résumé

This article examines the role of Number with regards to adjective distribution in French, and focuses on two kinds of abstract nouns: activity nominals and quality nominals. We show, based on proposals by Knittel (2005), that two patterns of adjectival modification must be distinguished, on both semantic and syntactic grounds: (i) taxonomic modification, which corresponds to the expression of subkinds, is independent from the presence of NumP; (ii) qualifying modification, which occurs only if NumP is present in the nominal structure. Taxonomic modifiers qualify as direct modifiers in the sense of Cinque (2010), whereas qualifying modifiers behave either as direct or as indirect modifiers. Finally, we account for the particular behavior that activity and quality nominals display with regards to adjectival modification by suggesting, along the lines of Borer (2005), that the Num head un(e) is responsible for the partitioning of the noun s referent. This partitioning, in turn, enables the presence of a qualifying adjective.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-00951762 , version 1 (25-02-2014)

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  • HAL Id : hal-00951762 , version 1

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Delphine Beauseroy, Marie-Laurence Knittel. Number and adjectives: the case of French Activity and Quality Nominals.. Studia Linguistica, 2012, 66 (3), pp.207-244. ⟨hal-00951762⟩
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