Contenu du sommaire : Événements, prédicats, arguments

Eventualities, predicates, arguments : some landmarks. 1. After an introductory presentation of basic categories of eventualities, such as events, actions, states, situations, facts, of the Lexicon, such as proto-roles, ranks in argupent-structures, we address controversial topics : anti-causative alternation predicates, the Inaccusative Hypothesis, motional predicates. On the first topic, we defend a causativity-type analysis, on the second one, an achievement/activity contrast-based description of sets, and on the third an argument-structure based. one.

A class of non-quantifiable predicates : the holist predicates. This article works out a semantic typology of predicates which is needed for the explanation of some strong linguistic data : 1) some predicates cannot combine with any quantifier (dubbed in the paper holist predicates, e.g. to be numerous) ; 2) the inferences from the satisfaction of a predicate by an individual to the satisfaction by its parts is a lexical matter. The paper discusses and extends previous work by Dowty (1987), Yoon (1996), and related works ; its main focus is to connect this lexical typology of predicates to some known problems of classical theories of plurality for handling definite references.

Events and twofold Iterativity in gnomic Utterances. Like the scientific law, the sententious phrase – maxim, aphorism or proverb – is a linguistic structure purporting to state a general truth by means of a predicate expressing either a permanent state of the subject or a characteristic event inherently related to it. The present article is an analysis of the sententious phrase whose predicate asserts the latter. It focuses on phrases that create a generic meaning by implying a twofold, virtually endless repetition of the event : not only for an infinity of different members of the category defined by the subject, but also for multiple occurrences of this event for the specific subject of the phrase.

Event and partitivity in French temporal [Preposition – Definite article – Noun – Preposition] sequences. Our goal consists in establishing the analytical nature of French temporal sequences sharing the morphosyntactic pattern [Preposition – Definite article – Noun - Preposition]. These sequences, frequently classified as “prepositional locutions” in the French linguistic literature, appear to be regular prepositional phrases comprising a predicative nominal nucleus which represents an interval of a temporal event. Thus, the absolute use of the PP, due to the omission of the complement representing the temporal whole, can no longer be unconditionally attributed to ellipsis, but should rather be ascribed to associative anaphora. Are only stage level predicates (SLPs) acceptable as secondary predicates (SPs), and are all individual-level predicates ruled out in this position ? The paper shows that the first generalisation is wrong and argues in favour of a distinction between two types of SLPs. The first kind (e.g., “malade” 'sick', acceptable as SPs) denotes a “pure state”, while the second one (e.g., “bavard” 'talkative', unacceptable as SPs) denotes an “action-dependent state”. These two kinds of SLPs are defined through properties independent of the SP construction, and arguments are offered against the assimilation of “bavard”-SLPs to agentive predicates.

Motion verbs and their Source role. In this study on puzzling properties of the en clitic when binding Spatial positions, a Source and a PP positions for motion predicates are defined. At first, a thematic analysis is presented, and then rejected. A categorical descriptional distinguishing ADV and PP positions is then proposed, but it shows up as bearing a major flaw for not being able to take into account {sortir} predicates. The solution given incorporates the argument-structure component : the {descendre} and the {monter}sets are in argument and adjunct positions. The goal of this paper is to trace an analogy betwenn event quantification operated by verbal inflections (such as imparfait or passé composé) and object quantification operated by nominal quantifiers. The key notion used for this purpose is that of homogeneous reference. We show here that quantification operated by homogeneous inflections and nominal quantifiers can be characterized as partitive, analytic and non-bounded whereas quantification operated by heterogeneous inflections and nominal quantifiers is non-partitive, synthetic and bounded.