French event nominals and number-inflection

Event Related Nominals

into two categories, depending on whether they retain the event from their verbal base or not. The original observation is due to Chomsky (1970); see also Lees (1960), Marantz (1997), Borer (2003). For English -ation and -ing nominals (e.g., destruction, examination; forming, examining) and for zero-derived nominals (e.g., form, exam), this has led to distinguishing two classes of nominals: com...

Bare plural nominals in Romanian and French

In this paper we investigate Bare Plurals (BPs; NPPL) in English and Romanian and Bare Plural Partitives (BParts; i.e. des NPPL) in French. Romanian BPs and French BParts only share with English BPs the existential interpretation with obligatory narrow scope. We propose that this reading shared by all three comes from the same pieces: a non-kind-selecting predicate, a kind-denoting argument, an...

Number and Adjectives: the Case of French Activity and Quality Nominals

Event Nominals: Annotation Guidelines and a Manually Annotated Corpus in French

LIMSI-CNRS & Univ. Paris-Sud 91403 Orsay, France [email protected] Abstract Within the general purpose of information extraction, detection of event descriptions is an important clue. A word referring to an event is more powerful than a single word, because it implies a location, a time, protagonists (persons, organizations. . . ). However, if verbal designations of events are well stu...

Regularity and irregularity in French verbal inflection

Can regular and irregular verb forms be accommodated by a single representational mechanism or is a dual mechanism account required? In a first experiment, we used a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm to investigate the mental representation of regular and irregular verb forms in French. Participants heard a spoken prime (such as aimons, ‘we love’) immediately followed by lexical decision ...