A Syntactic and Discursive Description of Nominal Syntagms of the Type Noun + dit + Adjectival, Prepositional, or Nominal Complement

• Published in: Journal of French language studies Vol. 15; no. 1; pp. 83 - 96
• Main Author: Whittaker, Sunniva
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: French
• Published: 01.03.2005
• ISSN: 0959-2695

French noun phrases of the type le seuil dit de pauvrete 'the so-called poverty threshold', in which a head noun is modified by a phrase consisting of the passive participle of dire 'to say' + a complement that may be a noun, adjective, or prepositional phrase, are extracted from a corpus of articles in two French newspapers, Le Monde & Liberation & analyzed in terms of their syntax & discourse function. Of the 270 examples in the corpus, 99% correspond to constructions of dire with a single complement, in this case a direct object; it follows that the verb assumes a metalinguistic sense & refers to the discourse in progress. Two discourse functions are found: (1) one typical of popularization texts that signals the introduction of a complex term supposed to be unfamiliar to the interlocutor or reader & (2) a function indicating the speaker's or writer's disagreement with the label supplied by the complement of dire, typically found in argumentative texts. References. Adapted from the source document