A Classification and Analysis of "Noun + De + Noun" Constructions in French [Reprint 2017 ed.] 9783110812343, 9789027924346

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JANUA LINGUARUM STUDIA

MEMORIAE

N I C O L A I V A N WIJK D E D I C A T A edenda curat C. H. V A N

SCHOONEVELD

Indiana

University

Series Practica,

227

A CLASSIFICATION AND ANALYSIS OF "NOUN + DE + NOUN" CONSTRUCTIONS IN FRENCH

by

M A R V I N D. M O O D Y

1973 MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1973 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 7 3 - 8 0 5 8 8

Printed in The Netherlands

ACKNOWLEDGMENT To Professors Householder and Mazzola, my sincere thanks for their comments and suggestions.

To Professor Rosenberg, who first suggested

this topic to me, and whose counsel has been invaluable to me, both from a scholarly and a personal point of view, my wannest graticude. And to Professor Hatcher, who has worked closely with me these past three years, my heartfelt appreciation and gratefulness for her unfailing devotion to this work, for her impeccable scholarliness, and for her continual inspiration.

Marvin D. Moody May 31, 1972

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION Purpose of the Study Delimitation of Constructions to Be Considered Selection of Classificational Criteria Data CHAPTER I. 1. — A 2.—A 3.—A 4.—A 5.—A 6.—A

= = = = = =

ACB:

1.—A 2.—A 3.—A 4.—A 5.—A 6.—A

= = = = = =

A:B:

= = = = = =

CHAPTER IV. 1.—A 2.—A 3.—A 4.—A 5.—A 6.—A

= = = = = =

SUMMARY

29 32 34 35 35 61

"A is contained in B"

"Person" 65 "Animal" 68 "Plant" 72 "Organic Part" 74 "Concrete Object/Concrete Substance/Concrete Condition". 86 "Place" 101

CHAPTER III. 1.—A 2.—A 3.—A 4.—A 5.—A 6.—A

"B is contained in A "

"Person" "Animal" "Plant" "Organic Part" "Concrete Object/Concrete Substance/Concrete Condition". "Place"

CHAPTER II.

1 1 7 28

A+B:

"B is the source of A "

"Person" 103 "Animal" 107 "Plant" 108 "Organic Part" 108 "Concrete Object/Concrete Substance/Concrete Condition". 109 "Place" 120 A+B:

"B is the destination of A"

"Person" 122 "Animal" 153 "Plant" 159 "Organic Part" 161 "Concrete Object/Concrete Substance/Concrete Condition". 162 "Place" 225 241

APPENDIX A ACB A IB A+B A+B

243 246 257 259

APPENDIX B ACB A3B A+B A+B BIBLIOGRAPHY

270 271 272 273 275

INTRODUCTION Purpose of the Study. The specific purpose of this study is to present a systematic analysis and classification of a particular type of noun complement construction in French, 1 namely, noun complements which modify another noun and which are introduced by the preposition de,2 as, for example, une robe de nuit 'an evening gown', une maison de bois 'a woouen house', une langue de boeuf 'an ox-tongue', etc. 3 Delimitation of Constructions to Be Considered. In building up my corpus of examples of the nominal construction which I shall refer to as A de B, I have imposed certain limitations: first, the referent of the expression must be a concrete entity (e.g. maison de bois), not an abstraction (e.g. air de famille ness', point d'honneur

'family like-

'point of honor')—which means that the head

*It should be emphasized that this is not a prescriptive analysis, that is, rules for formulating the particular structure in question will not be given. 2 It is hardly necessary to state that noun complements modifying another noun may be introduced by other prepositions than de: boîte à lait 'milk carton', manteau en serge 'serge coat', etc. 3

In these examples, it is obvious that the prepositional phrase (e.g. de bois) qualifies or determines the meaning of the head noun (e.g. une maison) in the same way as an adjective (e.g. une petite maison 'a small house') or a relative clause (e.g. une maison qui coûte très cher 'a house which is very expensive'). As a matter of fact, this type of complement can occasionally be replaced by an adjective without significant change of meaning, as in un horme d'esprit/un homme spirituel, both of which mean 'a witty man'.

2 noun A must always refer to a concrete entity, though the referent of B may be either concrete (bois de lit 'bedstead' [wooden part of a bed]1* or abstract (bois d'allumage 'kindling wood').5

Secondly, the comple-

ment noun must always have a generic reference; as an attribute it must always be what is called an "attribut d'espèce", not an "attribut individuel".

Accordingly, I have excluded from my discussion in the text

all cases in which B is a proper name or is accompanied by the definite article.6

As regards the second type, it is true that in not a few

**In those cases in which the idiomatic meaning is somewhat different from the literal meaning, the literal translation will be given in square brackets. 5

I define a concrete noun as one which can be used to refer to an entity that has physical extension, that is, an entity which occupies space, such as, montagne 'mountain', homme 'man', table 'table', or 'gold', mer 'sea', terre 'land', air 'air', etc. The noun air refers to a gas, that is, to a concrete substance like or, charbon 'coal', eau 'water'. That it happens to be invisible is irrele.vant to our purposes. All collective nouns which refer to groups of concrete entities will also be considered concrete nouns, e.g. service 'set' (of dishes), 3eu 'set' (of needles, etc.), etc. There is one area in which it is difficult to determine whether the referent of A de B is concrete or abstract, namely, when the referent designates such a concrete object as a card, letter, ticket, book, etc., which contains a written message: carte d'actresse 'business card' [address c.], lettre d'invitation 'letter of invitation', etc. I have decided to exclude examples of this type from the text, on the grounds that the fact that A is a concrete object is incidental to the fact that it contains a message, and therefore abstract. These examples will be included in Appendix B, however, for the reader's consideration. Note that books which are used for record-keeping, writing, etc., will be included in the text: livre de dépenses 'expense book', etc. 6 For a discussion of "attribut d'espèce" versus "attribut individuel" (the latter being represented only by common nouns preceded by the definite article), see C. Ayer (iGrammaire comparée de la langue française, Ath ed. CParis, 1900D):

L'article est ce qui fait qu'un mot est ou devient

3 cases, the noun complement of A. du B is a pure "attribut d'espèce", as in gens de la campagne 'country folk' versus gens de village 'town folk'; I have thought it worthwhile to include (without explanation)

substantif ... et un substantif n'est réellement substantif qu'à la condition d'être précédé de l'article ou de l'un de ses équivalents (cet, mon, etc.) ... Quand il en est privé, il cesse d'être substantif, parce qu'il n'en remplit plus la fonction comme sujet ou objet déterminé; il est alors précédé d'une préposition ... Cavec laquelle! il forme une expression adjective, comme dans un désert de_ sable (= sablonneux), temps d'orage (= orageux), patience d'ange (= angélique), conseil d'ami (= amical), etc. (p. 403.) Le substantif faisant fonction d'attribut peut être un attribut d'espèce ou un attribut individuel. Ainsi, dans un luxe de_ prince, on parle d'une espece particulière de luxe qui est qualifiée par de prince ou princier; prince ici joue le rôle d'un attribut d'espèce. Mais, dans le luxe du prince, le sens devient individuel; il s'agit du luxe d'un prince en particulier, prince est un attribut individuel.—La même différence existe entre une ¿oie d'enfant et la joie de l'enfant, entre la forme de gouvernement et la forme du gouvernement, entre un palais de roi et le palais du roi. (p. 401.) and G. Guillaume (Le Problème de l'article et sa solution dans la langue française [Paris, 19193): Soit: le chien du berger. Ce dont il s'agit ici, c'est d'un berger et d'un chien, le second appartenant en fait au premier, et tous deux réellement présents à l'esprit du sujet pensant. Mais si l'on dit: un chien de berger, il n'est plus de même. Ce n'est pas d'un berger possesseur d'un chien qu'il est question, mais uniquement d'un chien qui, par sa race, sa nature, semble destiné à servir un berger. Ainsi berger, dans l'esprit, se réduit en hypothèse de destination. Comme tel, il ne fait plus partie du plan des réalités, mais du plan des possibilités. Le raisonnement implicite qui forme l'appartenance virtuelle pourrait être nommé assimilation analogique. Lorsqu'on dit chien de berger, on pense: un chien comme ont coutume d'en avoir les bergers, (pp. 125-126.)

4 all such examples in Appendix A, but I have excluded them from the text:

I shall discuss only one formal type, that of A de B, In the at-

tempt to show exactly what possibilities this particular type offers.7 Finally, I exclude from the text (but include in footnotes) all examples of what might be called "fanciful" creations.

This includes face-

tious or slangy expressions, often involving hyperbole, and usually pejorative (aoureur de fitles 'woman chaser1, pourfendeur de geants 'braggart1 [cleaver-in-twain of giants]), as well as all examples involving metaphor:

not only those with affective connotations, such as

tailte de guepe 'wasp-like waist', but also the quite matter-of-fact type represented by tongue de carpe 'cold chisel' [carp's tongue].8

7 It is obvious that examples of A du B should not be sprinkled among the examples of A de B, even if they show the same (sub)relationship between the two nouns (and they do not always do so); and to offer a separate treatment of A du B as "attribut d'espèce" would involve an attempt to explain the presence of the article—a phenomenon which is still a mystery to linguists, and whose solution lies outside the scope of the present study.

®These two examples of metaphor differ not only in regard to affective nuance: it is also true that in tangue de aarpe the phrase as a whole is a metaphor, whereas in taitte de guêpe, only B is metaphorical. When only one element contains a metaphor this will usually be the second one, as in the last example, but occasionally it is the first element, as in pitier de taverne 'bar pillar', applied to a habitue of bars. As for homme de bois 'man of wood', B is metaphorical when the expression refers to a dull stolid man, but when it means 'dumb jockey', then A is metaphorical. The reader will note that the degree of metaphor which exists in the speaker's mind will vary with different expressions. For example, main de fer 'iron handle' might also be interpreted as 'hand of iron'. The first interpretation would of course allow the example to be included in the text, whereas the second would relegate it to a footnote. In cases of this type, I have let the source of my examples, the dictionary, be my guide: if the noun is listed as having the literal meaning when it stands alone (as is the case for main), I have included the example in the text; otherwise, it is listed in a footnote.

5 These examples throw little if any light on the possibilities of forming "straight" noun complement phrases of the type A de B:

the forma-

tion of these two expressions in a literal meaning is unimaginable, as the reader will come to see in Chapter II. As has been said, I exclude from discussion all examples in which the noun complement is an "attribut individuel"; I limit myself to cases of "attribut d'espèce".

I shall make no distinction, in my clas-

sification of A de B that follows, between a "true compound" and those noun-complement constructions which have not achieved such a status. To most grammarians, a compound is a phrase (of any kind) which, though composed of more than one term, evokes a single image in the mind of the speaker.9

9

To me, the idea of a "single image" is a very nebulous

Cf. Michel Bréal (Essai de sémantique, 3rd ed. CParis, 19043): Il faut (c'est la condition primordiale) que, malgré la présence de deux termes, le composé fasse sur l'esprit l'impression d'une idée simple. ... C'est la condition nécessaire et c'est en même temps la condition suffisante. Ainsi, en français, beau-frère, belle-fille, grand-père, quoique n'ayant rien qui les distingue extérieurement, sont des composés, parce que l'esprit, sans s'arrêter successivement sur les deux termes, ne perçoit que l'ensemble. (p. 161.)

From this follows the impossibility of separating the phrase into its components, for example, by modifying one or other of its terms individually: On reconnaît le mot composé d'après la règle vante: il est impossible de déterminer séparément l'un ou l'autre des éléments qui le constituent; ainsi, on peut parler d'une bonne porrne de terre (la qualification porte sur l'ensemble), mais non d'une *pomme jaune de terre ni d'une *pomme de bonne terre. (Grammaire Larousse du français contemporain CParis, 1964D, p. 55.) Brunot discusses the difficulty of determining the conditions

6

idea; I prefer to think of a compound as a phrase which has an extended meaning beyond the sum of the meanings of the single terms.

Compare,

for example, robe de soie 'silk dress' and robe d'intérieur 'tea-gown' [inside dress].

In the first construction the meaning of the whole is

necessary for one to say that compounding has taken place: Mais précisément comment déterminer quels sont les composés uniformément indécomposables pour tous? Avec certains, point de doute, ils sont anciens: fer à cheval, pierre de touche, cheval de frise, maréchal des logis, pot de vin. Chemin de fer, plus récent, peut hardiment être compté dans le nombre. Quand on a changé la matière des rails, il n'est venu à personne l'idée de défaire le mot et de dire: chemin d'acier; aussi dit-on: voyager en chemin de fer, prendre le chemin de fer. De même femme de ménage, homme de peine, bateau à vapeur, juge de paix, hotel de ville, corps de garde. Mais une foule d'autres ne présentent une idée unique qu'à un groupe de Français plus ou moins restreint, tel gardien de la paix, composé pour les Parisiens, non pour les Lyonnais, qui disent garde urbain; blanc de zinc familier aux enduisturs, architectes, entrepreneurs de peinture, mais que les parlementaires ont probablement décomposé, quand il s'est agi de discuter la substitution obligatoire du blanc de zinc au blanc de cêruse. Dans le monde aisé, robe de chambre, robe d'intérieur, coin de feu, sont des noms des vêtements; à un autre degré de l'échelle sociale où il n'en est pas fait usage, on les interprète encore par leurs éléments. Et ainsi l'existence d'un assez grand nombre de composés, très réelle, est limitée ethnographiquement et socialement. (La Pensée et la langue CParis, 1922D, pp. 55-56.) Note that in some of his examples which are- supposedly analogous to chemin de fer, the second noun has not changed meaning, e.g. femme de ménage is still 'a woman who takes care of the house(work)' and bateau à vapeur is still 'a ship that is propelled by steam'. I should say that the reason these expressions are compounds is that they refer not to any woman who does housework nor to any boat that is propelled by steam (see above); rather, femme de ménage is a woman who is hired by someone to do housework for him and bateau à vapeur is a large transoceanic liner.

7 directly bound to the literal meaning of its terms and can be derived therefrom:

une robe 'a dress' plus de soie 'of silk'—that is, une

robe (qui est faite) de soie ('a dress that is made of silk'): soie refers to any dress that happens to be made of silk.

robe de

But the

meaning of une robe d'intérieur cannot be deduced from the two terms une robe and d'intérieur; it refers not simply to any dress which one might wear while inside a house—a woman could conceivably wear any kind of dress at such a time—but must have as a referent a particular type of dress, determined by standards of social acceptance, namely, a long dress that is properly worn by a lady to a special social function, an afternoon tea, and is contrasted with such other types as robe de chambre 'dressing gown' [bedroom dressj, robe de ville 'walking dress' J town d.], etc. But, for my purposes, this distinction, interesting and suggestive as it may be, is unimportant in itself; it could never serve as the basis of a systematic classification of the nominal construction A de B, which can be sought only in terms of the two main elements, each considered separately (whether or not a "fusion" may have taken place between them). Selection of Classificational Criteria. The first task to be undertaken in setting up a classification is, of course, to determine the criteria according to which the categories of this classification are to be defined.

It appears that with regard

to the constructions under study here one has a choice of criteria, that is, categories may be set up in one of three ways:

1) on the

8 basis of the reference of the nouns which may form the noun complement construction, such as "person", "place", "time", "animate", "inanimate", "concrete", "abstract", etc.; 2) on the basis of the relationships which are observed to occur in noun complement constructions, such as "is a part of", "is made of", "is used at", "is used by", "comes from", etc.; or 3) on the basis of both reference of nouns and relationships.

Before discussing the criteria to be used here, let us

examine the types of classifications which have been previously done. Scholars of French have traditionally neglected to devote much discussion to analyses of the type of noun complement under consideration here.

On those occasions when analyses and/or classifications

have been attempted, they are, for the most part, superficial and unrevealing with regard to the relationships which obtain between the two component nouns, as well as to the types of nouns which may enter into constructions of this type.

The grammar of the French Academy, for ex-

ample, allows a scant three paragraphs to all noun complements of other nouns, of which complements with de form only a part.10

Kr. Nyrop11

and C. de Boer12 discuss only the six genitive constructions:

subjec-

tive (une charge de cavalerie), objective Çla peur de la mort), possessive (le lit de Jean), appositive (la ville de Rome), partitive (deux de ces hommes), and genitive of substance (une table de bois), thus

1

^Grammaire de l'Académie française (Paris, 1932), pp. 31-32.

11

Grammaire historique de la langue française (Copenhagen, 1930), VI, 99-102. 12 Essai sur la Syntaxe Moderne de la Preposition en Français et en Italien (Paris, 1926), pp. 66-67.

9 excluding such catégories as "source" (extrait de boeuf 'beef extract'), "destination" (salle d'attente 'waiting room1), etc.

A more

complété classification is given by Maurice Grevisse:13 TABLE 1 La préposition qui joint au nom le complément déterminatif est le plus souvent de; ce peut être aussi à, autour, en, envers, contre,•par,pour', sans, etc. Toutes ces prépositions servent à marquer des rapports très variés: elles peuvent indiquer, relativement au nom complété: Le possesseur: moi.

La crinière du lion, mon idée 5_

L'espèce ou le genre: cor de_ chasse. La matière: or.

Des oeufs de mouche, un

Une statue de bronze, une montre en_

La destination, le but: Une salle de spectacle, un canon contre avions, un mot pour rire, une table a ouvrage. La quantité, la mesure, la valeur: Une rente de mille francs, un froid de_ dix degrés, un trajet de_ deux lieues, un échantillon sans valeur. L'origine:

/

Un jambon d'Ardenne, le vent du_ nord.

La qualité, la manière d'être: Un homme d'esprit, un homme a préjugés, une pièce à tiroirs , un navire au_ repos, un portrait d'après nature. Le lieu: Un banc de_ jardin, la bataille de_ Waterloo , un séjour à la_ campagne, un appartement sur le devant, une promenade dans Bruxelles, une chute dans le vide. Le temps: La foi du moyen âge, les hommes d_'à_

13 Le bon usage, 8th ed. (Gembloux, 1964). pp. 154-155. We will be concerned, of course, with only those constructions which are formed with the preposition de; the other examples are included here only in order to present the entire classification of the author.

10 présent. L'instrument, le moyen, la cause: Un coup de bâton, un signe de_ tête, un moulin a_ vent, la traction par l'électricité, la preuve par neuf, une pluie d'orage. L'auteur:

Les tragédies de Racine.

Le contenu: fraises.

Une bouteille de vin, un panier de

Le tout, l'ensemble dont le nom déterminé désigne une partie: La lame d'une êpée, les pieds d'une table, le pire de_ tous. Upon examining this classification, we find several weaknesses, among which the most obvious is the inclusion of several criteria within one category, such as "L'espèce ou le genre" (where espèce apparently means an animal species, and genre means any type of anything), thus making possible the inclusion of types as disparate as 'hunting-horn' and 'fly-eggs'.

What is more important is the fact that some of the

categories refer solely to the noun reference of the second noun, e.g. "Le lieu", "Le temps", etc., while others involve only the relationship which obtains between the nouns, without any consideration of the reference of the nouns involved, e.g. "Le tout, l'ensemble dont le nom déterminé désigne une partie".111

It is évident that this classification

is not logically consistent, since different criteria are used to establish the categories set up. As a result of the logically inconsistent classification, some types would belong to two categories at the same time:

jambon d'Ardenne

11, Note, too, that Grevisse does not distinguish constructions in which the article is used with the second noun from those in which it is missing; nor does he distinguish proper nouns from common nouns.

11

is placed under Origin; it also belongs to Place.

And robe

d'intérieur

(see above) would have to be split between Place and Destination, since it means (though it means more than that) 'intended to be worn inside'. Thus the type of classification given above does not suffice for the type of analysis which we anticipate for the categorization of noun complements of the type to be considered here. Another scholar, Anna Granville Hatcher, in her article on noun compounds of the type timbre-poste,15

has provided some discussion of

the type of noun complement construction in which we are interested. Here is her thirteen-fold classification: TABLE 2 matière

1

robe de

2

homme de

3

drôle

4

trognon de pomme\ visage d'enfant J

une partie du tout

5

bâton de

appartenance

6

maison

7

représentation

8

tremblement

9

distribution

10

cours

laine talent

trait caractéristique génitif d'apposition

d'homme

magicien

de

campagne de

de

rapport local soirée

terre

de prix

d'histoire

rapport temporel génitif subjectif génitif objectif sujet

15 " L e type timbre-poste," Word, 2 (August 1946), 216-228. It is to be pointed out here that the author is not directly concerned in this article with de-phrases; rather, the focus of her discussion is on compounds with no connecting particle, as the title indicates. And in her explanation of the ellipsis of the prepositions de and a, she had occasion to point out, roughly, the semantic areas, originally limited to the prepositional type, into which new formations chose to e n t e r — hence, a brief classification of the type A a B, and a longer one, here reproduced, of A de B.

12 11

extrait de boeuf

source

12

coup de main

agent

13

salle d'attente

destination

This classification is much less of a miscellany than that of Grevisse and, accordingly, is more suitable for our purposes:

only the

preposition de is considered, and the noun complement is always an "attribut d'espèce".

(Nor does it contain such a saugrenue category as

"L'espèce ou le genre".)

But Hatcher's classification reveals the same

fatal flaw that vitiates the classification of Grevisse:

recourse now

to the reference of B, now to the relationship of B with A.

For, in

the two categories, "rapport local", "rapport temporel", though the term 'relationship' is used, it is obvious that in the first, B must refer to Place and, in the second, to Time—whereas in all the rest only relationship, regardless of reference, is involved. It is of course preferable to have a classification whose categories are all based upon the same type of criteria, in this case either on relationship (independent of reference) or on reference.

Now, Nyrop

and Boer, in their meager (but consistent) list of possibilities for A de B use only the criteria of Relationship; Grevisse and Hatcher use mainly this criterion, and Hatcher's reference to Place and Time in terms of "rapport local", "rapport temporel", shows that she wanted to think in terms of relationship.

And surely that must be the first cri-

terion to be considered in the attempt to classify the construction A de B: and B?

what are the different relationships that can obtain between A But the relationships must all be "pure":

conceived first as

totally independent of the reference of B (and, obviously, of A as

13 well), and conceived in terms broad enough to account for all occurrences of A de B.

As such, they could serve as criteria for our pri-

mary categories. In fact, Hatcher herself (among others) has suggested the search for such abstract concepts in attempting the analysis of noun compounds in English, 16 and she has offered a set of categories which she believes can account for all (non-appositional) noun + noun formations: (1) (2)

"A is contained in B", for example, gold ring, sandpaper; "B is contained in A", for example, broomstick;

(3)

"A is the source of B", for example, cane sugar;

(4)

"A is the destination of B", for example, sugar cane.17

16

"An Introduction to the Analysis of English Noun Compounds," Word, 16 (December 1960), 356-373. Lees has given a transformational analysis of English compounds which of course differs significantly from that of Hatcher. For our purposes, however, Lees' analysis is of little help, since his approach is purely syntactic with no concern for semantic similarities or differences among the various examples of a given group of constructions which may be derived by the same set of transformational rules. As a result, such items as April showers, armchair diplomacy, basement apartment, China tea, mass execution, top sergeant, and dollar income all fall into the same classificational group (p. 184). Consequently, since we are concerned here with precise semantic relations, Lees' analysis serves no particular clarificational purpose in respect to the explanatory problems encountered in the present work. (Robert B Lees, The Grammar of English Nominalizations CThe Hague, 19653.) Similarly, Hans Marchand offers some interesting observations on compounds in English, some of which are quite similar to those found in Hatcher's article, but again are in no way useful in the present work. ("On the Description of Compounds," in Linguistic Studies Presented to André Martinet on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday. Volume I: General Linguistics, ed. Alphonse Juilland CLondon, 1967D, pp. 379387.) For other works, see Lees' bibliography (pp. 202-205). 17

Hatcher, "English Compounds," pp. 363-365. Hatcher does not include appositional compounds in her treatment of English compounds, and it should be immediately obvious that none of her four categories could

14 Here we have a logically consistent classification, since each of the four categories is determined by the criterion of a relationship that is completely independent of nominal reference.

Also, the four

categories fall into two pairs, each of which contains symmetrical members, that is, "A is contained in B" is the mirror-image of "B is contained in A" and "A is the source of B" is the mirror-image of "A is the destination of B", 18 which fact contributes to the overall simplicity and appeal, at least to this analyst, of the classification.19

Fi-

nally, the designation of the relationship refers explicitly to the expression as a whole:

both head noun and complement noun.

But, if ap-

plied to French, would they be adequate to account for all the varieties of A de B that may turn up in an extensive corpus?20

account for them. She would need a fifth category concerned with the "equality" of A and B: "A is always a B" (pwnice-stone) or "This B is also an A" ([mother bird). I, too, am excluding appositional expressions from my corpus of examples; in fact, I could not include them in the text if I wanted to, given the three-fold restrictions I have introduced at the beginning: A de B cannot have an abstract referent (cf. la somme de cinq francs); B cannot be an "attribut individuel" (cf. la ville de Rome); A de B may not represent fanciful creations (cf. drôle d'homme, monstre de femme). 18 Note that the first two relationships are exact opposites in that the same relationship holds in both cases, "containment", but works in opposite directions in the two cases. With regard to the second pair, on the other hand, the direction is the same in both cases (A is defined in terms of B), but there are two distinct relationships that are opposed to each other: "source", "destination". 19

The last two categories might be called "dynamic": there is the sense of movement from one member to another. But the first two, illustrating the concept of "containment", are completely static. 20 There is of course no reason to suppose, a priori, that classificational criteria which may be adequate for English are likewise adequate for French. Proof that Hatcher's criteria work not only for English but also for French would suggest that perhaps she has discovered

15 In order to do a little preliminary testing, let us begin by adjusting the categories in question to the type A de B in French:

be-

cause of the difference of word-order between French and English in the formation of noun complement constructions, A and B must change places throughout, and Hatcher's four categories become (I shall also indicate them by the use of symbols): (1) ACB:

"B is contained in A"

(2) AUB:

"A is contained in B"

(3) A*-B:

"B is the source of A"

(4) A+B:

"B is the destination of A"

Compare: ENGLISH

FRENCH

gold ring

A3B

armeau d'or

ACB

orange-peel

ACB

èooroe d'orange

A3B

earthquake

A+B

tremblement de terre A-