NOMINAL VS ADPOSITIONAL ADJUNCTS

Benjamin Fagard (1)

1 Lattice - Lattice - Langues, Textes, Traitements informatiques, Cognition - UMR 8094

In this paper, we analyze the use of noun phrases as adjuncts, without adpositional marking. We first compare languages with and without a case system (with: Old French, Romanian, German, Russian, Polish and Finnish; without: Modern French, Italian, English, Bulgarian). We show that the use of these nominal adjuncts (NAs) is highly constrained, and that semantics in particular play an important role: NAs appear frequently with temporal meanings, in all of these languages; whereas those with spatial meanings seem more constrained, less frequent and mostly appear in languages that have a case system. We then go on to analyze in greater detail the conditions of use of these NAs, with a corpus study on Old French, which helps us confirm the hypothesis that semantics play a major role, more than other constraints which we take the trouble to evaluate: word order, presence of articles and modifiers, context.

Mots clés: nominal adjunct; adpositional adjunct; case marking; space; time; manner

Domaines: Linguistique

Benjamin Fagard. NOMINAL VS ADPOSITIONAL ADJUNCTS. Analele Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2012, 61, pp.47-59. ⟨halshs-01241386⟩