L'Interprétation des Relatives

This paper deals with the problem of the opposition between restrictive and descriptive relative clauses. The syntactic and/or semantic nature and validity of this opposition are discussed. Based on recent semantic analyses which contest the necessity and the possibility of choosing in every case between restrictive or descriptive interpretations (Cf. C. Fuchs 1987, G. Kleiber 1987), the syntactico-semantic representation proposed here aims at predicting ambiguity and indeterminacy as well as non-ambiguous interpretations for relative clauses.