Anglophonia ()
Sémantisme du nominal et de la position pré-nominale dans les dénominations de métiers du type high commissioner en anglais contemporain
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to show that the unit called a “nominal” bears a particular meaning, and more specifically, to identify the meaning of the link between a head noun and its internal dependants. A nominal has as head a lexical unit identified as a noun, and this noun can have adjectives or other nouns as internal dependants. In the analysed data, made of two-word job denominations such as high commissioner or top manager, attributive adjectives partly adopt the procedural meaning of the head-noun, as they contribute to create the category to which the referent of the whole constituent belongs. Conversely, dependant-nouns take on a form of adjectivity: they no longer refer to the extralinguistic world on their own, and they denote one property, explicitly attributed to the referent. Nominal and adjectival properties are thus re-distributed in the studied nominals, which shows that nominals and the pre-nominal position have a specific meaning: it bears witness to the mutual influence of parts of speech in a denomination, which triggers an important integration of the procedural meanings of nouns and adjectives. The nominal signals the fusion of an entity and its property into a complex, coherent new denomination.
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