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Number and Adjectives: the Case of French Activity and Quality Nominals *
Author(s) -
Beauseroy Delphine,
Knittel Marie Laurence
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/stul.12002
Subject(s) - adjective , noun , referent , linguistics , quality (philosophy) , expression (computer science) , noun phrase , mathematics , computer science , psychology , philosophy , programming language , epistemology
. This article examines the role of Number with regards to adjective distribution in French, and focuses on two kinds of abstract nouns: activity nominals and quality nominals. We show, based on proposals by Knittel (2005), that two patterns of adjectival modification must be distinguished, on both semantic and syntactic grounds: (i) taxonomic modification, which corresponds to the expression of subkinds, is independent from the presence of NumP; (ii) qualifying modification, which occurs only if NumP is present in the nominal structure. Taxonomic modifiers qualify as direct modifiers in the sense of Cinque (2010), whereas qualifying modifiers behave either as direct or as indirect modifiers. Finally, we account for the particular behavior that activity and quality nominals display with regards to adjectival modification by suggesting, along the lines of Borer (2005), that the Num head un(e) is responsible for the partitioning of the noun’s referent. This partitioning, in turn, enables the presence of a qualifying adjective.