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The acquisition of natural languages cannot be dissociated from metalinguistic choices and activities which call for one’s awareness of linguistic differences and for the elaboration of grammatical notions that need to be questioned. The comparison of equivalent structural schemata in different languages enables one to highlight differences between languages and to test the linguistic categories used to describe and explain the singular functioning of natural languages. The diversity of the data and the relevance of the categories determine the quality of the conceptualisation.
The microsyntactic unit around the verb has been the object of many linguistic research studies, under different denominations: valence, actance, predicative schema, predicative structure or relationship, argument structure, theta theory. These research studies have been carried out using different objects of investigation and different theoretical approaches.
The discursive use of verb units mobilizes syntactic, semantic and pragmatic mechanisms, the interdependence of which determines the interpretations that emerge as discourse unfolds.
The papers will allow confrontation between different theoretical frameworks in the field of verb semantics and syntax and will aim at a better understanding of the relations between formal and semantic constraints and pragmatic requirements for the production of meaning.
The question will be envisaged in different perspectives:
- the variability of the syntactic functions of verb arguments (for example, subject vs. object vs. adjunt) ;
- grammatical paradigms and semantic categories of verb units ;
- the discursive use of arguments : theme, rheme, topicalisation, focalisation… ;
- syntactic variability and syntactic constraints (government).
Participants with different theoretical frameworks (theories of “enunciation”, generativism, Guillaumian framework, Lexis-Grammar, etc.) will endeavour to make their papers intelligible to an audience prepared to welcome a variety of theoretical approaches.
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