Conversion Versus Coercion in the Nominal Domain: Two Phenomena at the Lexis-Grammar Interface

This chapter focuses on the dynamic interaction of lexical items with their syntactic and discourse environment in Modern French. If one adopts a multi-criterial approach of class membership, one is forced to conclude that many (ephemerous) tokens resulting from non-canonical yet productive uses of lexemes in conflicting syntactic constructions only exhibit partial class membership. As such, these instances of coercion need to be distinguished from genuinely lexical shifts (lexical conversions), which sometimes appear as homonymic forms. The relevance of this distinction is illustrated with evidence taken from two areas of research: the adjective-noun gradience and count/mass shifts. These case studies inform a typology of morphological (further derivations), syntactic (determination, modification potential), semantic (idiosyncrasy, polysemy, be-hierarchies) and discursive (contextual clues, anaphoric uptake) properties one may rely on to distinguish both phenomena.