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Aspect in French Light Verb Constructions
VENUŠOVÁ, Alena
The dissertation deals with aspect in light verb constructions in French (LVCs). Light verb predicates such as faire du doublage, faire une découverte, and donner un conseil, constitute a specific kind of verb-noun construction recognizable by two transformational tests i.e., the cancellation test and the argument co-reference test. From the aspectual point of view, there are three parameters to be recognized: the lexical aspect (states, processes, events), grammatical aspect (perfectivity, imperfectivity), and aktionsart (quantity, quality, and phase of action). Being the semantical root of LVCs, the predicative noun is a starting point for aspectual analysis, nevertheless this aspectual interpretation is drawn from the whole sentence and takes account of the whole LVC, as well as of other aspectually relevant components (aspect shifting and aspectual composition). The objective of the research is to clarify the aspectual properties of the predicative noun and examine whether and how the principle of lexical aspect shifting is applied in the context of LCVs with a focus on the role of semantics (creation, motion containing a goal destination), of the predicative noun's complement (its quantization and cumulativity), countability, and determination of the predicative noun. It is observed that countability marked by articles has a crucial effect on the interpretation of the lexical aspect and aktionsart (faire un saut - sauter une fois, faire un emballage - emballer un cadeau, *emballer une fois). The research is based upon a systematic use of real corpora contexts (InterCorp 2018, FrWac, araneum), French lexicon-grammar data (Maurice Gross and his colleagues), and native-speaker competence.
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