Sujets existentiels et génériques – La position du français dans une théorie des noms « nus »

Existential and generic subjects ‒ The position of French in a theory of bare nouns. It has been shown that, semantically, noun phrases introduced by the partitive article des in French show on the one hand similarities with bare nouns in Germanic languages, and on the other with those in Romance languages. This would justify their integration in the debate on bare nouns, even though in French the noun phrase is almost exclusively introduced by a determiner. Noun phrases introduced by des have been placed between Germanic bare nouns and bare nouns in the other Romance languages on a semantic scale. The notion “deficiency” has replaced the notion “morphological bareness”. In this paper the behavior of plural nouns with an existential or generic interpretation in French is compared with those in Germanic and in one of the Romance languages, viz. Italian, in subject position with the help of an empirical study: the analysis of professional translations of existential and generic bare subjects from Dutch into French and Italian in a literary corpus. It is shown that in the function of subject the positioning of plural nouns in French between Germanic and the other Romance languages on the scale is justified, but on a syntactic and lexical basis rather than on a semantic basis.