Findlay, Jamie Y. & Senior, Hannah: Lexical and Grammatical Meaning: Attributive adjectives in French
This paper gives an LFG+Glue account of
some of the positional constraints on adjectives in French. We argue
that the two attributive positions for adjectives in French, pre- and
post-nominal, differ in that the latter, but not the former, is
associated with a specific kind of meaning (in this case, an
intersective meaning). This is formalised by associating the
type-lifting meaning constructor which takes predicative < e t > adjectives
to the modifier type << e t >,<e t >> with a syntactic position (the
post-nominal AdjP) rather than, as is standardly assumed, with the
lexical entry of the adjective itself. This correctly predicts that
predicative adjectives can always appear post-nominally (there are no
predicative-only adjectives in French), and that intensional adjectives
can only appear pre-nominally, since they are lexically assigned the
higher modifier type directly. We also provide additional explanation of
adjectives which can appear in both positions, and discuss some apparent
counterexamples to our claims.
December 22, 2022 |
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