Systemic organization of French predicate adjectives of relation

Abstract

This paper examines modern French adjective and nominative constructions with a qualitative adjective, a noun defined by it and a dependent prepositional noun, complement to the adjective. The adjective in such construction is a predicate adjective that assigns semantic roles and category features to its arguments. The rection of the adjective is a transitive usage of adjective, and the adjectives that enable such usage are included in the inter-part-of-speech lexico-semantic field of relation. The topicality of the research is determined by insufficient knowledge of rection of the adjective in the modern Romanic studies. This paper offers a new systemic approach to the predicate adjectives of relation and their semantic valences. Prototypical attributes, relevant to the French transitive adjectives, were formulated. It was established that predicate adjectives of relation constitute a dynamical system and are disposed according to the degree of expression of their features from the center to the periphery inside the system and its sub-systems. As a result, semantic roles of predicative actants of each particular system were described and the role of hidden grammar categories of nouns in the differentiation of meanings of governing adjectives and of their explicitly expressed arguments was elucidated. Methods used are contextual analysis, componential analysis, synonymic transformation and paraphrasing. The linguistic material for this study was French works of fiction of 19th and 20th centuries and modern French dictionaries.