Proposition pour une conception modale des noms dits sous-spécifiés

Abstract

Since the term ‘shell nouns’ was coined and even before that, this nominal category has proven notoriously hard to grasp. In trying to tackle that issue, several linguists produced their own classification, among whom Francis (in 1986 and 1994, and later with Manning in 1998), Schmid (2000), and Flowerdew and Forest (2014), but without considering the evaluation factor that comes with shell nouns, or at least without putting it at the centre of their typology. Indeed, the notion of encapsulation (Conte 1996), which has been shown to fill in the gaps left by their informational incompleteness, and the ability of shell nouns to categorise (Legallois 2008) are all proof that these nouns do form a category on their own, lying somewhere between lexical and grammatical categories. However, little work has been done on their textual and discourse functions, which could be, according to us, the starting point of a comprehensive typology. The modal classification that we thus offer focuses on unveiling modal patterns behind the use of shell nouns and draws on the works of Chevalier and Léard (1993 and 1994) as well as Gosselin (2010, 2015, 2018).

Keywords

• modality
• shell nouns
• evaluation
• nominal semantics
• textual function
• discourse function