The Argument Structure of Elementary Sentences

Abstract

We present here a global view of the syntactic shapes of the elementary sentences of French. This paper constitutes a synthesis of the numerous observations made on a set of about 12000 verbs studied in the framework of lexicon-grammar CM. Gross 1975; J. P. Boons, A. Guillet, C. Leclere 1976; G. Gross 1989; A. Guillet, C. Leclere 1992). The point of view is strictly formal, according to the now classical methodology developed by Z. S. Harris and N. Chomsky. No semantic notion is involved in the descriptive apparatus; in other terms, the metalanguage of the description is built from combinatorial notions applied to sets of words. This metalanguage is entirely derived from the basic concepts that emerged out of Z. S. Harris' work in syntax. Moreover, the approach is systematic, namely for a given phenomenon, one has always attempted to reach a complete coverage of the description in a language.