Contenu du sommaire : Les périphrases verbales : de la morphosyntaxe à la sémantique

This paper deals with the French periphrasis “s'en aller + Verb in past participle”, which was in use during the 16th and 17th centuries before becoming obsolete. Within the framework of a holistic compositional approach of the construction (Gosselin 1996, 2017), we develop an assumption, according to which the produced meaning marking the impending completion of an action (Gougenheim, [1929] 1971:111) stems from the interaction between the grammaticalization of s'en aller as an auxiliary signifying the abstract movement towards the verb on one hand, and the distensive aspect of the past participle of the verb for the semantic feature of completion on the other hand. We compare the French construction with others in Spanish and Italian.

We deal with compound tenses in French, from the point of view of the past participle. We address the issue in the field of diathesis. We propose a unitary analysis of the past participle, as a marker of inaccusativity (in a broad sense), integrating its uses in compound tenses. Consequently, the auxiliary avoir, in addition to its role on the aspectual-temporal level, also plays a role as a diathesis operator. We conclude that it is possible to propose a compositional semantic analysis of compound tenses based on the meaning of the auxiliary and the meaning of the past participle.

We explore here the intrinsic characteristics specific to three periphrases found in French –“va + INF”, “allait + INF” and “devait + INF”– which allow them to substitute orthonymically for a simple past (PS). We start by offering an overview of the diachronic restriction of the PS in French before establishing the distinctive features of this tense in contemporary French. Based on examples from contemporary and microdiachronic corpora of sports reports and obituaries, we show how the periphrases in “va + INF”, “allait + INF” and “devait + INF” can be used as narrative tenses in the past, and therefore as partial substitutes for the PS.

Some French verbs have senses that construct verbal periphrasis when they are followed by a verb in the infinitive (commencer à, être en train de, cesser de, etc.). The fact that a verb is followed by a verb in the infinitive is not, however, a sufficient condition to say that it is a verbal periphrasis. Several verbs are automatically rejected from this list, based on a simple syntactic test, which is the subordinate clause test. This paper questions the sole use of this test by an in-depth examination of the distribution of the verb apprendre, a verb commonly excluded from the analysis of aspectual verbal periphrasis.

This study deals with a set of French verbal periphrases (PV) such as “avoir le N`indicebpc`/indiceb de V`indicebinf`/indiceb”, where N`indicebpc`/indiceb stands for “body part term”. At first, we identify N`indicebpc`/indiceb fitting that construction. Then, we check that it is indeed a PV, in which the meaning of the N`indicebpc`/indiceb –viewed as a “quality”– gives rise to the expression of a modal concept. Finally, we characterize the modal concept related to the meaning of each N`indicebpc`/indiceb in “avoir le N`indicebpc`/indiceb de V`indicebinf`/indiceb” relying on Gosselin's theoretical frame (2010).

This paper deals with the order of auxiliaries and semi-auxiliaries within complex verbal periphrases. We adopt the concept of syntactic position of Milner (1989) and we propose a positional structure for complex periphrases in French. This structure reflects the fact that there is both a rigid overall order and areas for a relatively free placement of semi-auxiliaries.