1996 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
A Fundamental Syntactico-Lexical Study of the System of Construction Types in French
| Project/Area Number |
06610455
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
仏語・仏文学
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| Research Institution | Tokyo University of Foreign Studies |
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Principal Investigator |
TSURUGA Yoichiro Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Faculty of Foreign Studies, Professor, 外国語学部, 教授 (30155444)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1994 – 1996
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| Keywords | direct object function / indirect object function / dative function / locative function / attributive function / passive voice / pronominal verb / impersonal construction |
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| Research Abstract |
The principal object of thie research is analyze and classify in detail various sentencial constructions' types and to have exact frequencies. Our main corpus is constituted of 119 days' editorials of the newspaper Le Monde. There are about 3000 examples (sentence as unit).
From the point of view of frequency, the most important construction is overwhelmingly that transitivity (1240 occurrences : 42%). Particularly, the ones with a nominal object have 553 occurrences (18%). The transitive constructions with a direct object and an indirect object (a-N/Vinf : 92 occurrences, de-N/Vinf : 45 occurrences, N=noun, Vinf=infinitive) are also frequent.
The constructions with an indirect object have 246 examples. The prepositions a and de are, here too, remarquable. The pronominal verb constructions have 185 occurrences.
The intransitive construction (N-V ; V=finite verb) has 90 occurrences. The passive ones have 201 occurrences. It is interesting that the passive constructions compete with the pronominal verb constructions.
The attributive constructions (except those with etre) have 104 examples. 36 among them have an infinite berb as an attribute. The verb etre is very frequent (415 occurrences : 14%, except etre in impersonal constructions). The total occcurrences of etre (including the impersonal ones but excluding the auxiliary uses) are 493 and exceed 16.7%, which is very impressive.
The impersonal constructions have 184 examples (with il) and 69 examples (with ce of cleft sentences). 147 out of 253 (=184+69) are the ones with etre.
The constructions with a verbal nucleus but without subject function can be neglected in our corpus.
The non-verbal constructions have 211 examples. 119 of them are titles of editorials. But the remaining types (92 occurrences) are nevertheless frequent in comparison, for example, with the 90 intransitive examples.
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Research Products
(14 results)
