LINGUIST List 17.54
Wed Jan 11 2006
Diss: Syntax: Tobback: 'Les constructions à attribut...'
Editor for this issue: Meredith Valant
<meredithlinguistlist.org>
Directory
1. Els
Tobback,
Les constructions à attribut de l'objet et le marquage de la prédication seconde (French object complement constructions and the marking of secondary predication)
Message 1: Les constructions à attribut de l'objet et le marquage de la prédication seconde (French object complement constructions and the marking of secondary predication)
Date: 11-Jan-2006
From: Els Tobback <els.tobbackugent.be>
Subject: Les constructions à attribut de l'objet et le marquage de la prédication seconde (French object complement constructions and the marking of secondary predication)
Institution: Ghent University
Program: French Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2005
Author: Els Lieve Tobback
Dissertation Title: Les constructions à attribut de l'objet et le marquage de la prédication seconde (French object complement constructions and the marking of secondary predication)
Linguistic Field(s):
Syntax
Subject Language(s): French (fra)
Dissertation Director:
Dominique Willems
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation investigates French object complement constructions oftwo types : the direct object complement : Jean croyait sa mère malade('John believed his mother to be ill') ; and the object complementintroduced by comme ('as') : Jean considère son père comme un ami ('Johnconsiders his father as a friend').
The first part of the thesis is a critical study of the syntactic analysesthat have been proposed with regard to these constructions in differenttheoretical models (HPSG, TGG). The main conclusion it arrives at is thata purely syntactic approach fails to give a precise account of thefunctioning of both object construction types and of their distinctdistribution on the verb lexicon.
The second part studies the formal properties of the object complementconstructions from a semantic-pragmatic point of view. Starting from amodel based on typological studies on copular sentences (a.o. Higgins 1976,Declerck 1988, Van Peteghem 1991), on Lambrecht's theory (1994) onInformation structure and on Croft's marking theory (1991) on grammaticalcategories, it shows that the secondary predication relation contained inthe non introduced object complement constructions presents the formal andsemantic-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 copularsentence types. This part also demonstrates the existence of certaincompatibilities between the semantic-pragmatic interpretation of thesecondary predications containing comme or not and the semantics of theverbs respectively implied in the object complement constructions. Thisway it supports the hypothesis that the distribution of the non introducedand the introduced object complement on the verb lexicon can be explainedby the existence of a semantic selection operated by the verb on thesecondary predication type.
The investigation makes use of a corpus of about 10.000 examples, extractedfrom several editions (1994 to 1998) of the Le Monde sur CD-Rom corpus.
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