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Marie Laurence Knittel

Some remarks on adjective placement in the French NP

This paper introduces a typology of adjectives and adjective uses in French that is based on a division between NP-internal and NP-external adjectives. These two classes may be distinguished by their lexico-semantic relationship to the noun, and also by their syntactic properties. I argue that adjectives entering into a close relation with nouns exhibit positional properties that leads to the idea that they are NP-internal. It is shown that, in contrast, regular qualificatives admit postcopular use and thus occur NP-externally. The last part of the paper sets up a syntactic analysis of postnominal NP-external adjectives according to which these adjectives enter into a marked predication relationship with the noun they qualify.

Probus, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0921-4771
Volume: 17, 06/2005
Pages: 185 - 226

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