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This article aims to describe the diversity and plasticity of uses of the concept of “détermination” in the discourse of the French grammarians. It covers the period from the Renaissance to the late 17th century, before the invention of the concept of “complément”, replacing ‘détermination' in some of its uses in the work of Girard, Dumarsais and Beauzée. The purpose is to show how grammarians used the very broad spectrum concept of détermination, before applying it specifically to the field of verbal complémentation and, later on, preferring a more specific term. The analysis is based on the complete record of instances of the verb “to determine” and its derived forms, extracted from the Grand Corpus des Grammaires Françaises des Remarques et des Traités sur la Langue (Classiques Garnier numérique), and on the study of all their contextual uses.

Certain linguists identify an extended predicative complement function, a syntactic function sui generis capable of being associated both with the direct object and with the subject and including subject complements (AS), different types of object complements (AO) or the predicative adjuncts of intransitive verbs (ASS). This paper intends to specify the syntactic status of the AO and ASS constructions by examining the following aspects: (1) the degree of syntactic equivalence of these constructions with the AS construction on the one hand, or with the adjectival and participial adjuncts on the other; (2) their relation with nuclear complementation, since these constructions seem to form a secondary predication beyond verbal complementation. Our approach characterizes and delimits the function of AO and ASS constructions without taking as a criterion a relation based on the predicative copula être, hazardous from a syntactic point of view, and thus distinguishing these constructions from the AS constructions. It allows us to include the AO and ASS constructions in the group of adjectival co-predications and to situate the constructions under study on a line leading from macro to micro syntax.

This paper deals with collocations of the type V de N (e.g. hurler de rage, rayonner de bonheur, mourir d'ennui…, in which the noun denotes an emotion, a psychological condition or a sensation, and the verb its manifestation). On the basis of a corpus of French texts published on the Web, we can conclude that the initial interpretation in terms of cause vs. consequence gradually shifts to one in which the noun acts as the main predicate, and the verb as an intensifier.

Complement ellipsis in situational expressions constitutes a paradox, revealing an overlap between language and discourse. Whilst benefiting from an often unpredictable situational element which remains unexpressed, they are “preconstructed” according to rules of syntax and lexical properties of matching verbs and even appear in sui generis constructions which could be adequately dealt with in Construction grammar.

This paper examines noun-governed syntactic dependencies in a simultaneously grammatical and lexicographic descriptive approach. We first focus on specifying the very notion of noun-governed syntactic dependency. Then, we show why part of the modeling of these dependencies has to be embedded in the description of the syntactic government patterns of lexical units—information that is ideally taken care of in the dictionary. Finally, we apply this lexico-grammatical approach to the specific case of so-called evaluative constructions

Adjectives in French sometimes involve particular correspondence between semantic and syntactic relations. For instance, a semantic argument of an adjective may have restricted means of expression (Paul est pressé de partir lit. ‘Paul is in-a-hurry to leave' – *Paul en est pressé lit. ‘Paul of-it is in-a-hurry'); it may also appear as a syntactic dependent of the noun that syntactically governs the adjective (le sport préféré de Paul ‘Paul's favorite sport'). Similarly, some attributive adjectives bear on a specific component foreseen in the noun's definition (double meurtre ‘double murder'), and some are related to the categorization implied by the noun (ancien clown ‘former clown'). The paper deals with the description of these phenomena within a formal framework.

This paper deals with asyndetic binary constructions of the type {Pinv, Q} with a subject-clitic inversion in its first member, as in the following newspaper example: [Est-ce l'effet du printemps ?]P [Les esprits qui veulent réformer nos institutions s'échauffent.]Q. After a comparison between these constructions and the related structures connected by the marker toujours est-il que, and an analysis of recurrent clues in these constructions, we show – from an argumentative point of view – that somehow the assertion of Q retroactively strengthens the plausibility of the cause expressed by P.