Les noms de matériaux au crible de l'opposition massif-comptable: une étude de corpus

Subtitle:Nouns for materials and the mass-count distinction in French : a corpus study

Based on data gathered from WebCorp, we conduct a morphosyntactic and semantic distributional study of names of materials in French. We find 1) a common mass reading, regardless of the variety of profiles, denoting U+2018building materialU+2019, and 2) two distinct phenomena underlying the observed count usages: productive, transferred readings (Sorter and Collector), and lexicalized readings (objects and collections of objects). From a theoretical point of view, our study puts forth 1) a correlation between knowledge of the morphosyntactic behavior of nouns, and surface distributional profiles, and 2) a double representation of the mass/count distinction, both at a lexical, distributional level, and at a supra-lexical level of semantic regroupings that have predictive power as to the mass or count realization of nouns in context.

Publication year:2014

BOF-keylabel:yes

IOF-keylabel:yes

Authors:National

Authors from:Higher Education

Accessibility:Open