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Abstract Partitive articles raise several research questions. First, whereas a vast majority of the world’s languages do not have articles at all, and only some have a definite article as well as an indefinite article for singular count nouns, why did some Romance languages develop an article for indefinite plural nouns (Frdes hommesart.indf.m.pl man:pl ‘men’) and singular mass or abstract nouns (Itdel vinoart.indf.m.sg wine ‘wine’, Frdu bonheurart.indf.m.sg happiness ‘happiness’)? Secondly, unlike the definite article and the indefinite singular article, whose source is already a determiner (or pronoun), that is, the distal demonstrative and the unity numeral respectively, the partitive article derives from a preposition contracted with the definite article. How did the Latin preposition de grammaticalize into an article? And why was the grammaticalization process completed in French, but not in Italian? Thirdly, given that the source of the partitive article was available for all Romance languages, since some form of partitive construction was already attested in Late Latin, why did the process not take place in Rumanian and the Ibero-Romance languages?

The paper focuses on verbal idioms. On the one hand, drawing on data from a small corpus study dedicated to French idioms and their Dutch translations, we argue that contrastive linguistics may function as a discovery procedure of certain typological features. Thus we show that syntactic structures with several prepositional phrases as argument are common in Dutch idioms, whereas they are rare in French. On the other, we adopt a variationnist approach with respect to French by studying verbal idioms in Belgian French, showing that although the overwhelming majority of idioms are common to the francophonie, Belgium, like all the other regions, has its stock of unique fixed expressions with lexical and syntactic features of its own.

Résumé L’article aborde le phénomène du figement en analysant des expressions figées verbales. Nous présentons d’une part une petite étude de corpus dans une approche contrastive français-néerlandais et comparons d’autre part le français de Belgique au français commun. Nous montrons comment la mise en regard de deux langues différentes peut être révélateur de certains traits typologiques, notamment la présence de structures à plusieurs compléments prépositionnels actantiels, typiques du néerlandais. L’étude du figement en français de Belgique se situe dans une perspective variationniste. Si le français est en grande partie commun à la francophonie, chacune des régions dispose de son stock d’expressions qui présentent des propriétés lexicales et syntaxiques bien spécifiques.

Our paper is devoted to a contrastive analysis of the French discourse markers d'ailleurs and par ailleurs and their Dutch equivalents, which we carried out as part of a multilingual research project. The first part of the paper is a syntactic, semantic and discursive analysis of the two topic shifters in French, while the second part examines their Dutch translations in a sample of each marker taken from the Dutch Parallel Corpus.

In this article we present an overview of current debates in the analysis of cleft sentences. The types of sentences that are often seen as prototypical examples of the cleft category are introduced by it is or a cross-linguistic equivalent; in addition, they have specificational semantics and a focus-background information structure articulation. We argue here that other, less prototypical types of constructions, which have received less attention, also belong to the cleft category: sentences that are introduced by expressions such as there is and you’ve got (and their cross-linguistic equivalents), as well as sentences introduced by it is which do not have specificational semantics and which express other types of information structure articulations (e.g. all-focus or topic-comment). We argue that it is fruitful to analyse these ‘non-prototypical’ clefts in more depth, not only to come to a better understanding about these sentence types in their own right, but also to arrive at insights in the phenomenon of ‘clefts’ in general.

This article is devoted to the emergence of a new paradigm in French and Romance: that of nominal determiners. Latin had no articles, and although possessives, demonstratives and indefinites could determine the noun, they could also be used as pronouns or adjectives, so that the morpho-syntactic category of nominal determiners did not exist as such. We first examine the diachronic evolution of French, where a far-reaching grammaticalization process took place. Syntagmatically, all determiners end up in the NP-initial position as the only available syntactic slot, contributing to the highly configurational NP pattern characteristic of Modern French. From a paradigmatic viewpoint, determiners no longer correspond to a syntactic function, but to a separate morpho-syntactic category. We also evaluate to what extent this evolution took place in two other Romance languages, Italian and Spanish. Through the analysis of this particular evolution, based on parallel corpora consisting of a Latin text and its translations in Old, Middle, and Modern French on the one hand, and in Spanish and Italian on the other, our study also provides evidence for more general mechanisms, analogy in particular, at work in the creation of new paradigms.

The focus of the paper is the relationship between the syntax and the semantics of speech verbs. We hypothesize that speech verbs are naturally transitive because they refer to an activity which normally entails an object, viz. the produced speech. Most speech verbs are in effect transitive. However, to account for those verbs which are intransitive (e.g. bégayer, zozoter), we explore a second hypothesis based on a principle of semantic saturation: if the semantics of a verb is highly specific, then the verb is lexically saturated, and hence, syntactically intransitive. Verbs that indicate animal cries occupy a special position in that they are basically intransitive but lend themselves to transitive uses, especially in reported speech.

RÉSUMÉNous montrons dans cet article que les phrases introduites parc'est ainsi quecorrespondent à deux structures différentes: une vraie clivée avec l'adverbe de manière en focus et un connecteur à sens consécutif, récapitulatif ou illustratif. Nous décrivons le comportement syntaxique et sémantique dec'est ainsi quegrâce à une analyse de corpus. Pour rendre compte des emplois connectifs dec'est ainsi que, nous plaidons pour une double hypothèse : d'une part la grammaticalisation, à la fois de l'adverbeainsiet de la clivée, et d'autre part la lexicalisation dec'est ainsi que.

In several works on grammaticalization, one of the authors of this paper has established a grammaticalization cline which posits three major Romance languages: French at one extreme, Spanish at the other, and Italian in between (Lamiroy, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2011, Lamiroy & De Mulder, 2011, De Mulder & Lamiroy, 2012, Van de Velde & Lamiroy, 2017). Our purpose is to place Catalan on this cline. To achieve our goal, we use data of Catalan related to several topics, viz. auxiliaries, past tense, existential sentences, mood and demonstratives. Catalan shows contradictory evidence: whereas the grammaticalization process in certain domains suggests that it parallels Spanish and Italian, in many others, it patterns with French. Thus the hypothesis for which we provide evidence here is the following cline : French > Catalan > Italian > Spanish.

As far as I can see, it was Antoine Meillet (1912) who coined the term 'grammaticalization' and first applied it to the concept for which it is still used today.We will return to him in a moment.The concept itself, however, and the ideas behind it, are considerably older.The idea that grammatical formatives evolve from lexemes, that affixes come from free forms, was already expounded by the French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac.In his work Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746), he explained the personal endings of the verb through agglutination of personal pronouns and maintained that verbal tense came from the coalescence of a temporal adverb with the stem.Again, John Horne Tooke, in his etymological work }+B," BJ,D`,

This paper deals with the regional variation of French idioms of native speakers from France, Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec. Its main aim is to oppose the traditional view which used to describe French from a single vantage point, viz. the French spoken in France, and in particular Parisian French. The claim here is that variational French has to be conceived as a whole, i. e. as an aggregate of both the specificities of each variant as well as the part of French that is common to all users of the language. However, this set is difficult to come to grips with empirically because it has yet to be described in any dictionary.

This paper deals with the regional variation of French idioms of native speakers from France, Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec. Its main aim is to oppose the traditional view which used to describe French from a single vantage point, viz. the French spoken in France, and in particular Parisian French. The claim here is that variational French has to be conceived as a whole, i.e. as an aggregate of both the specificities of each variant as well as the part of French that is common to all users of the language. However, this set is difficult to come to grips with empirically because it has yet to be described in any dictionary.