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

• VerfasserIn: Kleineberg, Désirée,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Beihefte Zur Zeitschrift Für Romanische Philologie
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XVII, 317 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- List of abbreviations -- Introduction -- I Theoretical foundations -- 1 Nominal aspectuality and number -- 2 Interim summary: From nominal aspectuality to collection nouns -- 3 Collection nouns: State of the art and definitional delimitation -- II The synchronic characteristics of collection nouns in present-day language -- Introduction -- 4 Semantic-syntactic characteristics: An acceptability judgement study on count collective nouns and object mass nouns -- 5 Morphological characteristics: A corpus analysis of collective nonce-formations -- 6 Conclusion: Linguistic characterisation of Romance collection nouns in present-day language -- III The diachronic development of French collection nouns -- Introduction -- 7 State of the art: The assumed paths of lexicalisation of collection nouns -- 8 Lexicalisation of collection nouns: Corpus analysis in Frantext -- 9 Conclusion and discussion: Linguistic characterisation of collection nouns in language evolution -- IV General conclusion and outlook -- 10 Summary of the results and conclusion -- 11 Outlook -- 12 References -- Subject index