La complémentation des auxiliaires français

Abstract

Anne Abeille, Daniele Godard : The complementation of French auxiliairies We show the set of French auxiliaries to be syntactically heterogeneous. We present new arguments in favor of a flat structure for French compound tenses, with the tense auxiliary as the head of a flat VP, inheriting the arguments and the semantics of its complement participle to which it adds it own agreement and aspectual contribution. We contrast the properties of tense auxiliaries with those of the passive auxiliary, for which we show a hierarchical structure (with a VP complement) to be motivated. Moreover, the so-called passive auxiliary should be identified with the copula. Although most of our arguments are neutral with respect to formalisms, we formulate our analysis in the framework of HPSG, whose mechanism of feature inheritance is well adapted to our findings. In addition, we offer new solutions for auxiliary selection, clitic placement, participle agreement and word order constraints.

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