Possession vs. pseudo-incorporation in the nominal domain: Evidence from French event nominals dependencies

Abstract

This article examines the syntactic behaviour of French Event Nominals (henceforth ENs), that is, nouns resulting from verb nominalization, and that of their complements. Our main claim is that the syntactic behaviour of such nouns (obligatory complements and regular use of definite determiners) does not result from their deverbal character, as originally suggested by Grimshaw (Argument structure, MIT Press, 1990), but is simply due to the fact that they regularly occur as lexical heads of possessive DPs (Szabolcsi, Acta Linguistica Scientiarum Hungaricae 31: 216–289, 1981, Kayne, Studia linguistica 47: 3–32, 1993, Zribi-Hertz, Les syntagmes nominaux possessifs en français moderne : Syntaxe et morphologie, Publidix, 1998). Our analysis is supported by syntactic evidence (pronominalization vs possessive determiners) as well as semantic observations (partitive reading). We also suggest that the shifting operation hypothesized by Grimshaw (Argument structure, MIT Press, 1990), which turns Complex ENs into Simple ENs, does in fact shift a mass EN into a count one.

After establishing these fundamental observations, we then turn towards an examination of the properties of EN complements. We show that, when they vary for number, EN bare complements are understood as mass or plural nouns, but cannot be interpreted as singular, a property reminiscent of semantically incorporated nominals (Farkas & De Swart, The semantics of incorporation: From argument structure to discourse transparency, CSLI Publications, 2003). We also show that such nominals display the other recognized properties of pseudo-incorporated nominals, both semantic (narrow scope) and syntactic (adjacency, reduced modification). We then suggest that pseudo-incorporation into nouns is an option available in the grammar of French.

The last part of the article is dedicated to a syntactic analysis of DPs headed by ENs. Basing our analysis on cross-linguistic data, we first claim that any noun may be dominated by a Rel(ational) P(rojection) turning it into a relational noun (Heller, Possession as a lexical relation: Evidence from the Hebrew construct state: 127–140, Cascadilla Press, 2002). In French, the head of RelP is realized by de. The Specifier position of RelP is the merging site of nominal dependencies occurring into DPs. When such dependencies are DPs, an Agr(eement) Projection insuring their case-checking is inserted above RelP. No such projection is present when a NP is inserted into the structure.

The advantage of the analysis suggested in the article is that it provides a unified syntactic analysis for ENs and simple nominals, as well as for possessive and incorporating DPs.