Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 34, Issue 2, 2011

The common co-occurrence of words in a given context reflects both the extra-linguistic knowledge of a language user, and the specific intra-linguistic rules. We can say that lexicon and grammar are interpreters of the extra-linguistic reality. The purpose of our research is to consider, in French-Polish constrastive perspective, the relation between the pronoun and the meteorological verb (such as il and venter in Il vente) on the one hand and, on the other, the relation between the meteorological noun and the special kind of support verb named verbe d’occurrence on the Lexicon-Grammar ground (such as vent and mugir in Le vent mugit). We then raise the question of the particular status of meteorological nouns in the grammatical subject position and explain the non-predicative character of verbs in constructions such as Le vent mugit. In the end, we present a list of Polish and French examples containing meteorological support verbs or their stylistic and aspectual variants.

The paper aims to show that light verb constructions (LVC) are formed not only with predicative nouns, but also frequently with result nouns and some concrete nouns. We propose a quantitative verification of the hypothesis that in Czech, result nouns are at least as frequent in LVC as event nominalisations (“verbální substantiva”). The paper tries to explain reasons of this phenomenon and it shows the mechanism that allows concrete nouns to appear in LVC, not only in Czech, but also in French.

This article describes the class of Italian frozen sentences that are defined by the relation N0 V (1C di N) = N0 V C1 a N2. These sentences are represented in a matrix table named CAN where each entry has ben analysed on the basis of distributional and transformational properties. This study has taken into account the complex net of relations among frozen sentences, sentences with support verbs, predicative nouns, compound words. The analysis of the class CAN has also shown the regularity of the syntactic behaviour of frozen sentences.