Reference in the French and Dutch noun phrase: The interaction between definite determiners and speech-act related referential adjectives.

This research project offers a corpus-based contrastive study of the way in which definite determiners (definite articles and demonstratives) and a particular type of adjectives contribute to the establishment of definite reference in the French and Dutch noun phrase. Speech act related referential adjectives differ syntactically and semantically from qualifying adjectives (e.g. un film passionnant) and from so-called relational adjectives (e.g. de Deense koning). They express a primarily temporal (e.g. la vie future), spatial (e.g. de aanwezige menigte) or deictic textual (e.g. onderhavig boek) meaning. The main objectives of this project are twofold: (1) descriptive objectives: (i) definition and delimitation of the French and Dutch speech act related referential adjective class, (ii) analysis of their syntactic and semantic properties and (iii) analysis of the distributional constraints they exhibit in interaction with the determiners introducing the noun phrase; (2) theoretic objectives: definition of the status of speech act related referential adjectives within the typology of the adjective class and within the structural make-up of the noun phrase (determiner, adjective or intermediate sphere), with a special focus on the relation between modifiers and determiners.

Keywords:Speec act related referential adjectives, Reference, French/Dutch, Definite determiners, Corpus linguistics

Disciplines:Theory and methodology of literary studies