No abstract

Though components of subordinate NN compounds may in principle display a wide variety of semantic relationships, data from Romance suggest that in languages where the NN pattern is still new and peripheral, the different subtypes of NN compounds do not necessarily emerge at the same rhythm. The aim of this article is to verify the assumption that French, unlike Italian, does not have an available word-formation pattern of verbal-nexus NN compounds (i.e. compounds in which the verb-argument relationship is featured). With reference to extensive corpus data, it will be demonstrated that in both languages many different subtypes of verbal-nexus NN compounds are attested, but Italian has already developed a consistent and regular word-formation paradigm based on one particular subtype of verbal-nexus NN compounds, while French data do not display such regularity, and the verbal-nexus pattern is much more peripheral in this language.

The paper aims to show that light verb constructions (LVC) are formed not only with predicative nouns, but also frequently with result nouns and some concrete nouns. We propose a quantitative verification of the hypothesis that in Czech, result nouns are at least as frequent in LVC as event nominalisations (“verbální substantiva”). The paper tries to explain reasons of this phenomenon and it shows the mechanism that allows concrete nouns to appear in LVC, not only in Czech, but also in French.

No abstract

This paper aims at examining the causes of the emergence of French subordinate Noun-Noun compounds. It is well known that the Noun-Noun pattern in French remains marginal compared to other lexicogenic processes, especially N-PREP-N or N-A, and it is supposed that its appearance as well as its progressive development took place during the last two centuries (19th-20th). The aim of this paper is to examine more in detail when and why French Noun-Noun structures emerge. As for the first question, empirical data from the Frantext corpus allow to hypothesize that both the type and the token frequency of French Noun-Noun compounds remain stable since the thirties of the nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War and that after this period, especially during the sixties, it begins to grow exponentially. Contrary to Arnaud's estimate (2003, p. 141), no significant change in frequency or productivity was observed around the middle of the 19th century. As for the second question, the author claims that the emergence of subordinate N-N compounds was triggered by an increase in the productivity of the attributive N-N compounds, for which there is no competitive pattern in French. The theoretical rationale of this hypothesis is anchored in paradigmatic approaches to word formation, with specific reference to the formalization made according to the Construction Morphology framework (Booij, 2010).