Les noms composés de type nom + nom à accent tardif en anglais : un cas d’adjectivité

International audienceWe look at English compound nouns which receive late stress (e.g. "cotton dress", "silk scarf", "back door", etc.). In terms of stress pattern (contrary to early stress compounds such as ashtray or coffee table), they do not differ from adjective + noun sequences ("pretty dress", "long scarf", "heavy door"). We discuss the possibility that the first nouns of these sequences become adjectives, through a process of “adjectivation”. The study is based on 624 occurrences extracted from a variety of contemporary sources.In the first part of the chapter, we compare the first nouns of the sequences under study to typical adjectives. We note that 1) the meanings of those nouns are close to adjectival meanings 2) the forms occur in descriptive contexts; 3) we then discuss the possibility for those nouns to occur in all adjectival functions (not just predicative); 4) we look at the possibility of having a noun and an adjective at the same syntactic level (e.g. "postal and telephone services"; 5) we test the possibility for the first noun to be preceded by an adverb; 6) we discuss the (absence of) gradability of the first noun (*very front door). We conclude that although the first nouns of our sequences resemble adjectives to a certain extent, the syntactic criteria in particular forbid us to label them as such.In the second part, we describe how a noun (as opposed to an adjective) may modify another noun - the modifying function being typical of adjectives. Those first nouns are synthetic (they summarize a whole discourse). In context, three cases are identified: 1) the first noun occurs in the preceding context, and is taken up in the compound, 2) the first noun is pre-constructed, but that preconstruction remains remains implicit; 3) in the absence of any contextual preconstruction, the discourse conveyed by the noun is simply its definition, which (along with connotations) may be used as indirect characterization.We finally conclude that those first do remain nouns, and only acquire an adjectival function. This is a case of adjectivity, rather than adjectivation: a noun is exceptionally used with modifying function. By doing so, it loses its usual referential function; but it remains a noun, with all its characteristic semantic complexity (as opposed to the one-dimensionality of adjectives)