La construction absolue attributive française comme une catégorie radiale

Abstract

The aim of the article is to propose an analysis of French attributive absolute constructions in the paradigm of cognitive linguistics, and to show the advantage of their description as a linguistic category with a particular prototype. Based on the analysis of 2,635 occurrences of these constructions in the French corpus Frantext, the study tries to identify the factors determining the prototypical attributive absolute construction and to sketch the aspects in which the less typical structures differ from it. The main factor seems to be the presence of the inalienable possession relation between the absolute construction and the head NP and the semantics of the head NP. Other factors are the type of the determiner in the absolute construction, its (potential) adverbial function, the modification of the predicate and the syntactic function of the head NP.

Keywords

• absolute construction
• attribute
• french
• inalienable possession
• prototype