We call "generalized adverbs", "adverbials" or "circumstantial complements" various syntactically different structures termed by traditional terminology as underived (primary) adverbs (demain ‘tomorrow’), derived adverbs (prochainement ‘soon’), circumstantial complements (à la dernière minute ‘at the last minute’) or circumstantial subordinate clauses (jusqu’à ce que mort s’ensuive ‘until death comes’).
This concept of "generalized adverb" was proposed by M. Gross (1986, 1990a, 1990b).
By compound adverbs, or frozen or idiomatic adverbs, we mean generalized adverbs that are composed by several elements, with some or all of their elements frozen, that is, semantically and/or syntactically non-compositional. In the following example, de nos jours ‘nowadays’ is a compound adverb:
(1) Il est très difficile de nos jours de suivre l’évolution de l’ordinateur
‘It is very difficult nowadays to follow computer evolution’
The lack of compositionality is apparent from lexical restrictions such as:
*de nos nuits, *de nos soirs, *de nos semaines
In order to build an electronic dictionary of compound adverbs of French, several sources were used, including various dictionaries, grammars and large-scale corpora, and completed with linguists’ knowledge as native speakers of French.
These compound adverbs have been classified according to their internal syntactic structure. The classification is based on the number, type and position of the frozen and free lexical components of compound adverbs. The syntactic structures are described at the elementary level of sequences of parts of speech (PoS). Symbols with obvious interpretation have been used such as Prép, Dét, Adj, N, C (for constraint noun), V, Conj (for conjunction) and W for a variable ranging over verb complements, etc. Thus we have:
Structure Example
Prép C=: par exemple ‘for example’
Prép Dét C=: de nos jours ‘nowadays’
Prép Dét Adj C=: à la dernière minute ‘at the last minute’
Prép Dét C Adj=: au moment opportun ‘at the right moment’
Prép Dét1 C1 de Dét2 C2=: dans la limite du possible ‘as far as possible’
Prép Dét1 C1 de N2=: à l’insu (du rédacteur+de Max) ‘unbeknownst to Nhum’
Prép V=: pour commencer ‘to begin with’
Prép W V=: pour ainsi dire ‘so to speak’
…
Table 1, below, shows the 15 formal classes that have been defined on this basis, together with their internal structure, an illustrative example and the number of entries in each class:
Table 1 – Classification of compound adverbs in French
Compound adverbs have been described and represented within the Lexicon-Grammar framework of M. Gross (1986, 1990a, 1990b).
The electronic dictionary of French compound adverbs is displayed as a series of tables or binary matrices, one per class (see §2.). Table 2, below, is a small sample of class PAC. This class groups adverbs which share the main syntactic structure: Prép Dét Adj C, where Adj is a pre-nominal modifier.
Table 2 –PAC class table (sample)
In these matrices, each row corresponds to a lexical entry, and the columns represent different types of information such as:
Feature values are either binary ("+" if the adverb admits the feature, "-" if it does not), as all the features in this table, or textual (e.g. Prep="de"), as in some features in Table 3.
Table 3 –PJC class table (sample)
When a syntactic or semantic feature is the same for all entries in a class, it is not displayed in the corresponding class table. It is stored in a general table that takes the form of Figure 4. The rows correspond to classes of compound adverbs. All the features described in any of the 15 class tables are represented in the columns of the general table. Moreover, it also takes into account certain features that have not been encoded in any of the 15 tables: for example, the features used to define the classes of compound adverbs.
Figure 4- General table of compound adverbs (sample)
Values used at the intersection of rows and columns indicate that the feature in the column:
References
GROSS, Maurice. 1986. « Lexique-grammaire des adverbes : deux exemples », Révue Québécoise de Linguistique 15 : 2, Montréal : Presses de l’Université du Québec à Montréal, pp. 299-311.
GROSS, Maurice. 1990a. Grammaire transformationnelle du français : 3. Syntaxe de l’adverbe, Paris : ASSTRIL.
GROSS, Maurice. 1990b. « La caractérisation des adverbes dans un lexique-grammaire », Langue Française 86, Paris : Larousse, pp. 90-102.
HARRIS, Zellig S. 1976. Notes du cours de syntaxe, Paris : Éditions du Seuil.
LECLÈRE, Christian. 1990. « Organisation du lexique-grammaire des verbes français », Langue Française 87, Paris : Larousse, pp. 112-122.