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The Complementation of Aspectual Verbs in French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Béatrice Lamiroy
Béatrice Lamiroy*
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
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Abstract

This paper addresses the question of the syntactic analysis of aspectual verbs in French from the point of view of two contrasting complementation structures: raising and control. Data generally overlooked in syntactic studies are given to show that specific constraints exist between aspectual verbs and the embedded predicate. It is argued that these constraints are relevant for the contrast between raising and control, and that they are complementary with the well-known contrasting properties of the matrix subject.

The paper also attempts to give a satisfactory account of the apparently unrelated syntactic and semantic characteristics of aspectual verbs. It is claimed that implicational universals, which are generally invoked to explain the semantics of these verbs, can also be used to account for their particular status from the viewpoint of syntactic complementation.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , June 1987, pp. 278 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This paper was written during a stay as visiting scholar at Harvard University during fall 1984. It was presented at the Université du Québec à Montréal in October 1984, and at the Université de Paris VIII in March 1985, and has benefited from questions and comments made by colleagues and students on these occasions. Special thanks for valuable comments on an earlier draft go to Violeta Demonte, Joseph Emonds, William Frawley, Carol Georgopoulos, Odo Leys, Ludo Melis, and Nicolas Ruwet. This work was supported in part by a grant from the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research.

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