Compounds or phrases: The analysis of nominal constructions with à in French

Abstract

In French, the preposition à has a very general meaning. It can be used in various syntactic functions, but also to introduce a modifier of a noun, producing a naming expression, e.g. vache à lait (‘milk cow’). On the basis of the definition of compounding proposed by ten Hacken (2021), we analysed the status of these complex names. We compiled a large data set of expressions with à and compared them with the periphrastic genitive with de as in usine d’automobiles (‘car factory’) and with other prepositional constructions, e.g. with sur (‘on’). For the expressions with à, we analysed the influence of the preposition on the range of possible relations between the head and the non-head and the possibility of referring to the non-head by means of a pronoun. The results show that à is more similar to de than to sur. We argue that naming expressions of the type N+à+N are compounds in ten Hacken’s definition.