Chapter published in:
Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance
Edited by Martin Hummel and Salvador Valera
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 242] 2017
► pp. 113–139

Chapter 4
Adjectives and adverbs in the Grande grammaire du français

| LLF, University Paris Diderot & CNRS
| LLF, University Paris Diderot & CNRS
| LLF, University Paris Diderot & CNRS
| University of Bretagne Occidentale
The distinction between adjectives and adverbs is a traditional issue in French grammars:
  1. many adverbs are derived from adjectives, usually with a -ment suffix (facile ‘easy’ > facilement ‘easily’) but not always (juste > juste ‘just’)
  2. many adjectives may modify verbs without being inflected (voir clair ‘see clear’) with a manner or result interpretation.
We show how the principles of the Grande grammaire du français (Abeillé & Godard 2012, to appear) allows one to draw a strict division, based on morphosyntactic criteria, for modern French:
  1. only adjectives may vary in gender and number
  2. only adverbs may occur between the auxiliary and the past participle (a clairement/*clair vu ‘has clearly seen’), or before the infinitive (*clair voir), with an integrated prosody.
Article outline
  • 1.The distinction between French adjectives and adverbs
  • 2.Categories and functions in the Grande grammaire du français
    • Syntactic categories in the GGF
    • Syntactic functions in the GGF
  • 3.Adverbs in the Grande grammaire du français
    • The GGF definition of adverbs
    • The distinction between prepositions and adverbs
    • A further test for French adverbs
    • The subclasses of adverbs in the GGF
    • The semantic subclasses of adverbs in the GGF
  • 4.Adjectives in the Grande grammaire du français
    • The GGF definition of adjectives
    • The distinction between nouns and adjectives
    • Adjectives inside the Noun Phrase
    • Adjectives inside the Verbal phrase
      • Agreeing adjectives inside the VP
      • Non agreeing adjectives inside the VP
  • 5.The GGF distinction between adjectives and adverbs
    • Adjectives and adverbs with adjectives and nouns
    • The case of tout
    • Adjectives and adverbs with verbs
    • The case of fort, juste, soudain
    • Adjective and adverb distinction in contemporary informal registers
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 21 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.242.05abe
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