Les constructions à attribut de l'objet et le marquage de la prédication seconde (French object complement constructions and the marking of secondary predication)
This dissertation investigates French object complement constructions of two types : the direct object complement : Jean croyait sa mère malade ('John believed his mother to be ill') ; and the object complement introduced by comme ('as') : Jean considère son père comme un ami ('John considers his father as a friend').
The first part of the thesis is a critical study of the syntactic analyses that have been proposed with regard to these constructions in different theoretical models (HPSG, TGG). The main conclusion it arrives at is that a purely syntactic approach fails to give a precise account of the functioning of both object construction types and of their distinct distribution on the verb lexicon.
The second part studies the formal properties of the object complement constructions from a semantic-pragmatic point of view. Starting from a model based on typological studies on copular sentences (a.o. Higgins 1976, Declerck 1988, Van Peteghem 1991), on Lambrecht's theory (1994) on Information structure and on Croft's marking theory (1991) on grammatical categories, it shows that the secondary predication relation contained in the non introduced object complement constructions presents the formal and semantic-pragmatic characteristics of the unmarked copular sentence type, whereas the secondary predication relations which contain comme have (alternatively) the properties of the different types of marked copular sentence types. This part also demonstrates the existence of certain compatibilities between the semantic-pragmatic interpretation of the secondary predications containing comme or not and the semantics of the verbs respectively implied in the object complement constructions. This way it supports the hypothesis that the distribution of the non introduced and the introduced object complement on the verb lexicon can be explained by the existence of a semantic selection operated by the verb on the secondary predication type.
The investigation makes use of a corpus of about 10.000 examples, extracted from several editions (1994 to 1998) of the Le Monde sur CD-Rom corpus.
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