The expression of “collectivity” in Romance languages: An empirical analysis of nominal aspectuality with focus on French

Désirée Kleineberg

book: The expression of “collectivity” in Romance languages

Open Access Published by De Gruyter 2022

The expression of “collectivity” in Romance languages

An empirical analysis of nominal aspectuality with focus on French

Désirée Kleineberg

Volume 472 in the series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110784695

Overview
Contents

About this book

Open Access

While previous research on collective nouns in Romance languages mostly adopts a semasiological and theoretical perspective focusing mainly on one single language, the present study takes an onomasiological and comparative approach which is strongly based on empirical evidence.

Against this background and in analogy to the verbal domain, the work elaborates further the functional category of nominal aspectuality which describes the construal of extra-linguistic entities as well as the linguistic means reflecting it. In this sense, collective nouns are systematically compared with other (nominal) means of expression of collectivity in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, focusing especially on object mass nouns, which have hardly been studied so far for Romance languages. On the basis of corpus analyses and acceptability judgement studies, a holistic picture is thus drawn of the semantic-syntactic and derivational properties of various noun types in the synchrony of present-day language as well as of the diachronic lexicalisation paths of these very nouns.

The work thus contributes to the understanding of the verbalisation of pluralities by linking and complementing previous monodimensional approaches and, above all, by placing them on a broad empirical basis.

Author / Editor information

Désirée Kleineberg, Bielefeld University, Germany.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Acknowledgements Publicly Available Download PDF	V
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
List of figures Publicly Available Download PDF	XI
List of tables Publicly Available Download PDF	XV
List of abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	XVII
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	1
I Theoretical foundations
1 Nominal aspectuality and number Open Access Download PDF	11
2 Interim summary: From nominal aspectuality to collection nouns Open Access Download PDF	35
3 Collection nouns: State of the art and definitional delimitation Open Access Download PDF	37
II The synchronic characteristics of collection nouns in present-day language
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	83
4 Semantic-syntactic characteristics: An acceptability judgement study on count collective nouns and object mass nouns Open Access Download PDF	85
5 Morphological characteristics: A corpus analysis of collective nonce-formations Open Access Download PDF	147
6 Conclusion: Linguistic characterisation of Romance collection nouns in present-day language Open Access Download PDF	197
III The diachronic development of French collection nouns
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	203
7 State of the art: The assumed paths of lexicalisation of collection nouns Open Access Download PDF	205
8 Lexicalisation of collection nouns: Corpus analysis in Frantext Open Access Download PDF	227
9 Conclusion and discussion: Linguistic characterisation of collection nouns in language evolution Open Access Download PDF	285
IV General conclusion and outlook
10 Summary of the results and conclusion Open Access Download PDF	289
11 Outlook Open Access Download PDF	295
12 References Open Access Download PDF	297
Subject index Open Access Download PDF	317

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Audience: Academics working in the fields of Romance Studies and Linguistics (es. nominal semantics and syntax, derivation morphology)
Pages
- Front matter: 17
- Main content: 317
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 51
- Tables: 11
Keywords: Collectivity; Nominal Aspectuality; Construction Morphology; Lexicalization

eBook

Published: August 22, 2022
ISBN: 9783110784695

Hardcover

Published: August 22, 2022
ISBN: 9783110784589