Le jeu de la prédication dans certains composés nominaux

Abstract

Jean-Claude Anscombre: The role of predication in some French nominal compounds The aim of this article is to account, in terms of 'deep predication' for syntactic and semantic properties of those of French nominal compounds N₁, N₂ that are not idioms. Such a word formation, extremely productive in Modern French, mainly provides terms that refer to subsets of things: N₁ à N₂ is a hyponym of N₁. The study is carried out within the framework of the theory of linguistic stereotypes, especially as regards genericity. The first part is devoted to an examination of the possibility/impossibility for such nominals to be built up, and shows that it crucially depends on the existence of a peculiar generic connection between N₁ and N₂. The second part is an attempt to find out the conditions under which the N₂ of a compound noun N₁ à N₂ can be anaphorized by means of le N₂, son N₂, and en respectively. Once again, such possibilities are closely related to the above mentioned generic connection, especially as regards the type of (deep) predication involved.