TY - BOOK AU - Mihatsch,Wiltrud TI - General nouns referring to humans: At the limits of grammaticalization PY - 2017///. N1 - 28 N2 - The specific status of the general noun chose between lexicon and grammar is irrefutable today. This noun is used rather as a means of building cohesion, a support noun or a placeholder, and thus its function is similar to that of pronouns. From a strictly logical point of view, general nouns referring to humans, such as personne, are situated on a much lower level of generalisation. Nevertheless, certain properties of these nouns testify to a similar tendency. The aim of this paper is to show the heterogeneity of these nouns. A survey based on considerations of acceptability judgments in several languages reveals a division between lexical general nouns for humans – not very frequent items, associated with a specialised field and well-integrated into lexical networks – and the class of high-frequency general nouns for humans, which are detached from lexical networks. The semantic information provided by these nouns tends to be minimised. They act as a support for quantification and modification and can, under certain conditions, take the place of indefinite pronouns UR - https://shs.cairn.info/journal-syntaxe-et-semantique-2017-1-page-67?lang=en ER -