Copular constructions and adjectival uses of bare nouns in French: a case of syntactic recategorization?

Abstract

This paper deals with three copular constructions in French that take bare nominals as a predicative complement (attribut du sujet). From a lexical point of view, these constructions, which are typical of colloquial French, are very open frames. After a detailed analysis of the syntactic and semantic properties of these constructions, I will examine them in the light of a more theoretical question, viz. that of the categorial status of the bare nouns involved. More precisely, I will determine to which extent they are ‘recategorized’ into adjectives.

On the basis of a fine-grained syntactic and semantic analysis, I provide a nuanced—gradual—account of adjectivization. First, I discard what I call the ‘lexicalized’ cases of recategorization, i.e. the fully adjectivized ones (vache, chatte,…), in order to focus on ‘syntactic recategorization’, i.e. the occasional adjectival use of (bare) nouns in the constructions under investigation. Then, I show that the first of the three constructions involves a primarily syntactic (i.e. non permanent), contextual recategorization of the bare noun. By contrast, the second adjectival use, which is characterized by a superficial adjectivization, involves the copula as well and should be considered as a copular construction sui generis. Finally, the third use is somewhere in between the two other syntactically as well as semantically.

By way of conclusion, I suggest that the best way to account for the recategorization of bare nouns into ‘adjectival’ nodes might still be Tesnière's (1959) concept of translatif. A parallel will be drawn with the role of determiners in nominalizations.

Keywords:

• Word class change
• Adjective
• Bare noun
• Subject complement
• Contextual change