7 A panoramic overview of the extended uses of taxonomic nouns in Romance languages

Abstract

The articles of this section focus on the extended functions of taxonomic nouns in four of the major Romance languages, i.e. French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The aim of the present survey is to compare and contrast the functions originating from these nouns in these four languages as well as in other Romance languages. The synchronic and, wherever possible, diachronic observations of this chapter are partly taken from the contributions to this volume as well as previous analyses, particularly in the case of Romanian. In order to obtain a broader picture, new observations on further Romance languages were collected in a pilot study combining lexicographic and complementary corpus data with a small selection of non-representative speakers’ judgments for Galician, Catalan and Romanian. From the linguistically highly diversified Rhaeto-Romance languages Romansh has been taken into account. For Sardinian observations from Campidanese and Logudorese have been included, and, to a far lesser extent, complementary lexicographical data from Occitan and Franco-Provencal. This overview starts with an inventory of taxonomic nouns in the above-mentioned Romance languages and their etymological sources and then proceeds to a comparative presentation of the most important functions derived from subtype binominals (such as a type of NP), i.e. attributive modifier and semi-suffix uses which support nominal modification, emerging postdeterminers where the taxonomic noun unites with determiners or quantifiers, and nominal qualifier or approximator (or qualifying) uses. The chapter closes with a survey of the pragmaticalized expressions based on taxonomic nouns, including mitigators, quotative markers, focus markers and other pragmatic marker functions. While the derived functions based on subtype binominals can be observed to a greater or lesser degree in all the Romance languages presented and start to arise very early on, the more recent pragmaticalized uses seem to be restricted to the standardized national Romance languages, however, in some cases start to spread to other Romance languages.