Publicaties

A doubly quantified sentence, such as All hikers climbed a hill, allows two interpretations: Did all hikers climb different hills, or did they climb the same hill? Previous work has shown that comprehenders construct disambiguated logical representations of these interpretations (Raffray & Pickering, 2010). We extended this line of research by investigating whether bilingual logical representations are shared between languages or separate ...

This paper deals with fronting of predicative adjectives (e.g., Big was his surprise) in French. From the present-day usage emerge two main constructions, both with their own surface forms and syntactic, semantic and information-structural properties. The first one, CxA, is a quasi-specificational copular construction, with narrow focus on the post-copular subject. The second one is a predicational copular construction, though with inverted word ...

This paper offers a diachronic analysis of a pair of subject complement constructions (repondre present/absent: litt. 'to answer "present"/"absent") originating from quotative expressions. It shows how they lexicalized into fixed expressions denoting a routinized "delocutive" (Benveniste) procedure and how they finally got reanalyzed into a subject complement construction with an internalized projective and proactive meaning ("to act as ...

This paper offers a corpus study of two reflexive (semi-) copular verbs, viz. se trouver and se retrouver, which at first sight appear to be mere morphological variants. In a first stage, the study is devoted to the comparison of the reflexive copular construction with the object complement construction of trouver and retrouver. We show the observed differences between both constructions may be explained by a process of grammaticalization, which ...

This paper proposes a corpus-based analysis of a set of constructions expressing chromatic change with peindre and colorer as 'emblematic' verbs. In a verb-framed language such as French, such resultative constructions constitute a typological anomaly. This paper presents three advances: (i) contrary to the common view, French does tolerate adjectival resultative complements, albeit marginally and under specific conditions; (ii) the array of ...