Une coordination particulière : les syntagmes N Conj N en français

Abstract

This article examines French NPs of the form N Conj N (Il a rangé livres et cahiers ‘He put away books and notebooks’). Since French does not allow NPs without a determiner as semantic arguments of a predicate in a general way, it is clear that their acceptability derives from the presence of the coordinating conjunction, an intriguing phenomenon. Moreover, such NPs raise serious problems for the widespread assumption according to which French is a language with no “Bare Nouns”. On the basis of a cross-linguistic analysis comparing both their distributional and their semantic properties with their (non)-coordinated equivalents in Romance languages like Italian and Germanic languages like English, it is shown that the presence of the conjunction leads to striking and unexpected similarities of the French N Conj N construction with Bare Nouns of the Germanic type.