Are superordinates such as furniture and belongings collective nouns?

Nouns as Adjectives and Adjectives as Nouns

Many languages have morphological devices to turn a noun into an adjective. Often this morphology is genuinely derivational in that it adds a semantic predicate such as ‘havingN’ (proprietive), ‘lacking-N’ (caritive’), ‘similar-to-N’ (similitudinal) and so on. In other cases the denominal adjective expresses some vaguely defined notion of possession as in Russian Ivan-ovo (detstvo) ‘Ivan’s (chi...

Concord with collective nouns revisited

We are such stuff / as dreams are made on

“W are all doubles... but at night... we meet our sleeper,” wrote Tom Stoppard in his play “Hapgood” (1988). He was approaching a common theme, identity, and how we use disguises to change it. In literature, as in life, we turn the world into a carnival to address personal, social, and cultural objectives. In microbiology carnival de-structuring abounds within the living cells of organisms. And...

Are French –ité Suffixed Nouns Property Nouns? An Analysis of /alite/ and /aʁite/ending Nouns

The present paper is about French -ité nouns formation. More specifically, we are dealing with their interpretations. A deadjectival noun is a complex noun morphologically coined on an adjectival base. French deadjectival nouns formation (noted A > N) includes at least eight suffixes, as reported in Table 1. Actually, -ité is the most represented suffix in the biggest multivolume French diction...

Relational Nouns as Anaphors

This paper examines the syntactic and semantic properties of a set of nouns recently called "Relational Nouns" like mother, neighbor, etc. Relational nouns denote relations between individuals, rather than sets of individuals regular nouns denote, and are referentially dependent on individual-denoting expressions. In Japanese relational nouns may appear 'bare' with no genitive possessors in the...