Abstract

In this presentation I discuss three types of deverbal nouns in French that are all flexible, but in a different way: (i) derived nouns such as destruction, which are nouns although they also still have some verbal properties; (ii) nominalized infinitives in (old) French such as au metre le en terre (litt.: the putting him into the ground) which have both verbal and nominal properties, but which do not contain an overt nominalizing suffix; (iii) derived deverbal nouns such as signataire 'signatory' which can be used both as a noun and as an adjective. I present a syntactic analysis of these three cases in which the root, which can also be a suffix, plays an important role in the categorial flexibility.

Petra Sleeman (Universiteit van Amsterdam) hält diesen Vortrag im Rahmen des Forschungskolloquiums der Romanistischen Sprachwissenschaft.