Prepositional-free constructions of the type «parler politique» in modern French: morphosyntactic nature and semantics

Abstract

Prepositional-free verbal-nominal constructions of the type «parler politique» in modern French, functioning alongside prepositional constructions «parler de (la/une) politique». The study addresses the morphological, syntactic, and semantic changes accompanying this transformation: loss of the article and nominal class features, a syntactic shift from indirect object to adverbial modifier, and a generalization of lexical meaning. Also examined are stable distributional differences between the two variants — headline position, logical subject position, attributive modification, and argument structure (two- and three-argument models) — along with competing interpretations grounded in valency theory, part-of-speech transposition, and the concept of the nominative binomial in Guillaume's terms. Method, methodology of the study: Data from twelve authoritative French dictionaries; contextual analysis of 400 examples extracted by continuous sampling from 320 articles in French online periodicals; a survey of 100 native speakers. The theoretical framework draws on valency theory and the concept of part-of-speech transposition. Novelty of the study, conclusions: For the first time, the construction «parler politique» is interpreted as the result of adverbialization of the noun «politique»: it loses its article and nominal class features, shifts from indirect object to adverbial modifier, and semantically acquires a generalizing meaning of politics as a subject of conversation. Stable distributional differences between the constructions are established: the prepositional-free variant tends toward headline position, logical subject position, and two-argument models; the prepositional variant is more common with attributively modified nouns and three-argument constructions. Explanations via colloquialism or calquing from English are insufficient; the construction is substantiated also as a binomial, complementing adverbialization.