Appropriate Nouns with Obligatory Modifiers
E. Laporte (LIGM)

TL;DR
This paper analyzes the role of appropriate nouns with obligatory modifiers in French sentences, exploring their syntactic properties, transformations, and classification to better understand their contribution to sentence meaning.
Contribution
It introduces a classification of approximately 300 French nouns with obligatory modifiers based on their syntactic behavior and relations to adjectives and sentence transformations.
Findings
Identifies syntactic transformations involving appropriate nouns.
Classifies nouns based on their obligatory modifiers.
Links sentence structures with and without nouns through transformations.
Abstract
The notion of appropriate sequence as introduced by Z. Harris provides a powerful syntactic way of analysing the detailed meaning of various sentences, including ambiguous ones. In an adjectival sentence like 'The leather was yellow', the introduction of an appropriate noun, here 'colour', specifies which quality the adjective describes. In some other adjectival sentences with an appropriate noun, that noun plays the same part as 'colour' and seems to be relevant to the description of the adjective. These appropriate nouns can usually be used in elementary sentences like 'The leather had some colour', but in many cases they have a more or less obligatory modifier. For example, you can hardly mention that an object has a colour without qualifying that colour at all. About 300 French nouns are appropriate in at least one adjectival sentence and have an obligatory modifier. They enter in a…
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Taxonomy
TopicsLinguistics and Discourse Analysis · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · French Language Learning Methods
