Appositions nominales et déterminant zéro : le cas des appositions frontales

Abstract

Lélia Picabia - Appositions nominales et déterminant zéro : le cas des appositions frontales Nominal appositions exhibit anaphoric properties and are linked to their antecedent by a BE-type relation. The initial assumption of this paper is that nominal appositions behave as nonref erring, nominal predicates. The comparison of fronted appositions and specificational sentences reveals that in both constructions, the fronted (nonrefe- rential) phrase receives a list-reading, a type of interpretation typically associated with an event-type, stage-level predicate. It further appears that apposed nominals which include a null determiner are steadily associated with a stage-level reading, whatever their linear position with respect to their antecedent; contrastively, apposed nominals which include the overt indefinite determiner (un) are associated with an individual-level readin. A correlate appears to exist between the type of determiner and the syntactic locus of the apposed nominal : the null determiner occurs in fronted appositions (even though these may be moved to the right), while the indefinite determiner occurs in postposed appositions. These descriptive results lead us to conclude that the null and indefinite determiners must have their own syntactic function, and more precisely, must correspond to some functional heads.