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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2014

A paradoxical case of locative inversion in French

Un cas paradoxal d'inversion locative en français

Résumé

This paper is devoted to a particular construction in modern French, occurring in various kinds of texts (newspapers, novels), such as Sur la table du directeur de l'école, trônent une cinquantaine de lettres d'encouragement, or Après l'ondée torrentielle de la nuit, brille un soleil ardent. Such examples are paradoxical, since they contain two contradictory markers, namely: (a) VS word order (i.e. nominal subject inversion), and (b) a comma after the initial adverbial; whereas in a canonical locative inversion, no comma separates the initial adverbial (which occupies the first position in the kernel) and the verb. Therefore, the status of the initial adverbial is problematic: is it the first element of the kernel or a detached peripheral element? I first consider (§1) cases where several commas occur, and show that they can be accounted for in terms of demarcation: commas signal the closure either of several adverbials, or of successive sub-constituents of a complex adverbial.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-01382604 , version 1 (17-10-2016)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01382604 , version 1

Citer

Catherine Fuchs. A paradoxical case of locative inversion in French. L. Sarda, S. Carter-Thomas, B. Fagard & M. Charolles. Adverbials in Use : From Predicative to Discourse Functions , Presses universitaires de Louvain 2014. ⟨hal-01382604⟩
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