[art] Abstracts [résumés] Langages Année 1999 135 pp. 123-125

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Abstracts
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Abstracts. In: Langages, 33ᵉ année, n°135, 1999. Les auxiliaires : délimitation, grammaticalisation et analyse. pp. 123-125;
https://www.persee.fr/doc/lgge_0458-726x_1999_num_33_135_2207
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Abstracts
Maurice GROSS : « Sur la définition d'auxiliaire du verbe »
The common notion of verbal auxiliary is presented and various situations which
lead to generalize the notion are discussed. It is shown that aspectual auxiliaries
should have the same status as tense auxiliaries. It is also shown that numerous
nominal constructions are better analyzed when their main verb is considered as
an auxiliary (e.g. Bob stopped selling this books = Bob (stopped + interrupted) the
sale of his books).
Jean-Claude CHEVALIER : « La notion d'auxiliaire. Origine et développement »
A historical perspective is presented by Jean-Claude Chevalier who studies the
origin and the development of the concept « auxiliary ». The interpretation of
verbal morphology in French, within a Latin frame, encourages the first French
grammarians to try and understand the reasons for replacing Latin forms such as
amavi or amor by French periphrases. The first step would be to list all the forms
called « notae » . The second step would be to restrain them to forms of être and
avoir named « auxiliaries ». A third step discovers in the use of the two main
auxiliaries a very productive range of significations (Ramus). Henceforth, the
category « auxiliary » tends to be incorporated in the verbal analysis (Maupas,
Oudin, Vaugelas). Nevertheless, it is only with the Grammaire Générale de Port
Royal that a complete analysis is suggested.
Béatrice LAMIROY : « Auxiliaries, Romance languages and grammaticalisation »
The aim of the paper is to compare the class of auxiliary verbs in three Romance
languages, French, Spanish and Italian, in the framework of grammaticalization
theory. Grammaticalization is defined as the process by which lexical items are
gradually converted into grammatical markers, i.e. a dynamic operation by which
elements can move over time from one linguistic component to another (from the
lexicon to the grammar and eventually, to the morphological component).
Auxiliaries are defined both on a syntactic and a semantic basis : formally, they are
verbs followed by a non finite verb form (only infinitives are considered here) and
semantically, they express one of three notional concepts : time, aspect or
modality.
The major claim of the paper is that French is the most grammaticalized of the
three languages, and Spanish the least. The empirical evidence that supports this
hypothesis relates to three kinds of data : the number of verbs that can be
analyzed as members of the category AUX, the selectional properties concerning
the subject NP (± human NP) and the possible alternation of the infinitival
complement with NP complements.
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Lélia PlCABIA : « Morphologie autonome et Morphologie verbale du français :
une représentation de l'auxiliaire »
Within a Generative framework, specifically the Minimalist Program (Chomsky
1995) combined with what is known as Distributed Morphology theory, Picabia
presents a description of verbal inflections thereby offering a syntactic analysis of
auxiliary verbs in French.
She discusses the status of the auxiliary, which is largely studied by French
grammarians. Picabia raises the question whether auxiliary verbs form a lexical
or a functional category. In order to demonstrate her point of view, she develops an
analysis of avoir et aller, two verbs that can be considered close to functional
category, and whose auxiliarity is undoubted.
Hava BaT-Zeev ShylDKROT : « Analyse sémantique d'une forme passive
complémentaire : se laisser »
Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot describes and analyses a series of alternative passive forms,
which express a meaning that is not 'an active transitive one'. She particularly
examines structures with se voir I sefaire/ se laisser followed by an infinitive, where
the conjugated verb is considered to be an auxiliary. Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot expounds
the two parallel methods that are used in order to define passive forms. One
method compares other structures to an unmarked passive structure with être. A
second method considers the meaning of the sentence as a distinctive feature, and
looks for other structures that seem to convey the same meaning. She tries to define
the difference in meaning between the various non-canonical passives and the
canonical ones .
Danielle LEEMAN : « La préposition : « un auxiliaire » du nom ? »
Danielle Leeman evokes the resemblance existing between the preposition's
fonction with respect to the noun on the one hand, and some tenses with respect to the
verb, on the other hand. She rejects, like many others, the partition between
lexical and grammatical items and offers to elaborate a hypothesis regarding the
meaning of these forms.
She presents different categories of nouns and examines their compatibility
with the preposition dans. Leeman further demonstrates that dans is susceptible
to forming both temporal and causal complements. She concludes that whatever
the noun category introduced by dans is, the preposition presents the event as a
whole. Leeman supports the hypothesis that the preposition establishes a certain
aspectual feature of the noun, in the same way as the auxiliary establishes an
aspectual interpretation of the verb.
Anne DalADIER : « Auxiliation des noms d'action »
In various languages, such as French, which do not have nominal assertions, a
specific auxiliation has taken place for nouns, prepositions, adverbs and
adjectives. This auxiliation has « gramma ticalized » verbs, nouns and prepositions with
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aspectual, causative and « modal » values which are complementary to those of
the verbal auxiliation. The grammaticalized elements involved in this auxiliation
do not have a compositional lexical meaning, but a regular grammatical one, as in
the verbal auxiliation. Current linguistic formalisms are unable to represent the
distribution properties of the elements entering this rich auxiliation system. The
analysis of its genesis in Indo-European languages makes it possible to understand
its syntactic and semantic role as well as its striking similarities in Romance and
Germanic languages.
Annie MEUNIER : « Auxiliaire de modalité et complément adverbial »
In a Lexique-Grammaire framework, Annie Meunier analyzes the sequence Paul
a eu l'honnêteté d'intervenir, which conveys a modality parallel to the one
expressed by par N (par honnêteté). The first sequence presents certain
properties. It carries tense inflections before an infinitival predicate. It also carries a
negation mark extended over the entire sentence. The insertion of this modality
within the predicate evoked the term auxiliary. Meunier enumerates the
properties of the two modalities and the constraints imposed on their usage. It is suggested
that the two modalities can be considered modal auxiliaries of a « psychological »
nature in the sense of Gross 1975 (table 1). She further demonstrates that despite
the differences, the two modalities display semantic and distributional similarities.
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