2010 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

French pronominal passive as a secondary predication construction

Research Project

Project/Area Number	20520372
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	Linguistics
Research Institution	University of Tsukuba
Principal Investigator	YAMADA Hiroshi University of Tsukuba, 大学院・人文社会科学研究科, 教授 (10200734)
Project Period (FY)	2008 – 2010
Keywords	フランス語 / 代名動詞 / 受動的用法 / 二次叙述 / 再帰動詞 / 中間構文 / 中間態
Research Abstract	The French pronominal passive has often been observed to exhibit some differences from English middle constructions. In our previous studies, we pointed out that from a semantic interpretation viewpoint, the French pronominal passive does not constitute a homogeneous class but rather is divided into two groups. The first group expresses the modality of possibility and demonstrates characteristics similar to those of English middle constructions. On the other hand, the second group shows the modality of necessity and has no English counterpart. In the present study, we introduce yet another group which, when compared with the second group, equally expresses the modality of necessity but shows syntactic and semantic differences. The characteristics of the three groups as well as their similarities and differences are analysed in this study.