Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 26, Issue 2, 2003

SummaryThe purpose of this work is to present a classification of frozen expressions in Brazilian Portuguese. We established ten classes for 3,400 expressions which have free subject and only one verb. Each of these classes constitutes a Lexicon-Grammar table. To the distributionnal properties usually presented in the tables of Lexicon-Grammar we also added in each table four columns which represented semantic properties. This process enabled us to highlight some semantics regularities related to each class.

SummaryThis work demonstrates the assignment of multi-word expressions in print dictionaries to POS classes with minimal linguistic resources. In this application, 32,000 entries from the Wörterbuch der deutschen Idiomatik (H. Schemann 1993) were classified using an inductive description of POS sequences in conjunction with a Brill Tagger trained on manually tagged idiomatic entries. This process assigned categories to 86% of entries with 88% accuracy. This classification supplies a meaningful preprocessing step for further applications: the resulting POS-sequences for all idiomatic entries might be used for the automatic recognition of multi-word lexemes in unrestricted text.

SummaryThis article analyses variation in some set phrases in four French variaties: the French of Belgium, France, Quebec and Switzerland. The comparative perspective adopted reveals many types of constraints on the idiomatic properties of the set phrases. The article also demonstrates how observation of this variation can act as a heuristic for the study of theoretical problems related to the definition of the notion of “set phrase” itself.

SummaryThe purpose of this article is to present the general organization of the Greek verbs lexicon-grammar and to explain the properties that play a decisive role in the distribution of the verbs in the tables of the lexicon-grammar. This long-term operation started a year ago and has not finished yet. Our results are therefore incomplete and limited to the verbs for which the proprieties of structure have been studied. After briefly recapitulating the general principles taken into account in our work, we present a first classification of the Greek verbs and the syntactic proprieties taken into account. Finally, we attempt to analyze automatically a text on the basis of two tables of the lexicon-grammar.

SummaryThe purpose of this paper is to offer an insight into the syntactic properties of two left-detachment constructions in French which display a head-positioned constituent introduced by de on the one hand (De livre, il n’en a lu aucun) and by quant à on the other hand (Quant aux livres, il n’en a lu aucun). Both constructions appear to differ substantially on each one of the parameters taken into account, i.e. the detached constituent, its syntactic and semantic relation to the clause and the embedding possibilities. While the de construction proves to be more similar in many respects to left-dislocation (Les livres, il les a lus), the quant à construction is syntactically more peripheral.

SummaryThe aim of this paper is to explain how the group comme quoi works. The subordinate clause with comme quoi differs from a relative clause, a completive clause or an integrative clause. Considering its use in indirect speech (verb + comme quoi/nominal group + comme quoi), it seems that this group introduces an indirect interrogative (percontative), with quoi as interrogative (percontative) pronoun and comme as an integrative adverb concerning enunciation. Nevertheless, we show the differences between the clause with comme quoi and the percontative clause. Actually, being first an interrogative group about the manner (in the seventeenth century), it became a word introducing an indirect speech with an enunciative meaning.

En français, l’aspect itératif est souvent mentionné pour rendre compte d’une des valeurs du présent et de l’imparfait, comme on peut le constater à travers leurs appellations présent d’habitude et imparfait d’habitude. Mais le type de répétition que dénote ces deux temps n’en est qu’une parmi d’autres; ils ne présentent qu’un type particulier de la répétition. Dans cet article, nous présenterons les éléments lexicaux qui permettent d’exprimer cette idée dans les deux langues, français et coréen. Nous prendrons en particulier des cas où on trouve des glissements catégoriels entre ces deux langues et chemin faisant, nous défendrons l’idée que cette notion, aussi bien en français qu’en coréen, relève d’une valeur aspectuelle extrinsèque au prédicat.En français, l’aspect itératif est souvent mentionné pour rendre compte d’une des valeurs du présent et de l’imparfait, comme on peut le constater à travers leurs appellations présent d’habitude et imparfait d’habitude. Mais le type de répétition que dénote ces deux temps n’en est qu’une parmi d’autres; ils ne présentent qu’un type particulier de la répétition.1 Dans cet article, nous présenterons les éléments lexicaux qui permettent d’exprimer cette idée dans les deux langues, français et coréen. Nous prendrons en particulier des cas où on trouve des glissements catégoriels entre ces deux langues et chemin faisant, nous défendrons l’idée que cette notion, aussi bien en français qu’en coréen, relève d’une valeur aspectuelle extrinsèque au prédicat.

SummaryThe object of this paper is to explore the constructions of the French verb venir with a infinitival complement, through the analysis of a large corpus. We conclude that differences between verbs and auxiliaries are a matter of degree. Contrary to the cases of the movement verb venir (Table 2 in M. Gross, 1975, ex. Pierre est venu voir Marie), the subject, in some constructions of «venir + infinitive» is an inanimate noun. We propose to distinguish, among the constructions mentioned above, the aspectual use of venir (ex. Cet incident est venu compliquer encore la question). This use of venir is to be analyzed as an intermediate state between movement verbs and auxiliaries. In this aspectual construction, whose subject can be caracterized as an abstract noun, the verb venir does not take a locative complement, contrary to any other constructions of «venir + infinitive» (with the exception of the auxiliary use venir de). Such aspectual constructions do not exist with the verb aller, the counterpart deictic verb of venir. If venir in aspectual use is on the way to becoming an auxiliary, aller without this use can be considered as more advanced in the axe of auxiliarity.

SummaryIn this paper, we present a unified hypothesis about «focusing» conjunctional adverbs and subordinating conjunctions in French. A similar hypothesis is to be taken to hold at all romance languages as we argue after Piot (2003) mentioned above. At first, differences are to be observed between this case (with “focus”) and another case in which the same conjunctional items are purely conjunctions (coordinating or subordinating, but without “focus”). Then, we point out which are the common semantic and syntactic properties of the global “focus” operation related to all these items (parallelism between sentences and nominal phrases correlated by these conjunctional items, inclusion or union semantic relations between nominal phrases in some respects ensembles theory relations alike: the addition of syntactic-semantic specific items shares this inclusion or union relation). In particular, this study highlights, as a result, the role of the subject nature of the conjoined first sentence and the syntactic-semantic nature of the verb-phrase in the second sentence. Another study (to appear) will present the results about distinctions in this operation according to the particular significance of each different item.