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Telicity in French Light Verb Constructions - the case of creation/destruction

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2018

Abstract

The contribution deals with telicity in Light Verb Constructions in French (LVCs), such as faire une photocopie, and faire l'abattage des lapins, that correspond to creation/destruction semantics. Being the semantical root of LVCs, the predicative noun is a starting point for aspectual analysis.

Pauline Haas and Richard Huyghe (2010) have performed a rather elaborate nominal classification, but they do not consider aspectual ambiguity. Ray Jackendoff (1996) states his approach within a syntactic framework and his aspectual interpretation is drawn from the whole sentence and takes into account different aspectually relevant components.

He describes atelic-to-telic shifts within four semantic instances: creation and consumption verbs, verbs of performance, verbs of motion, verbs of covering and filling. The objective of this contribution is to examine the cases of creation/destruction semantics and to clarify whether and how the principle of lexical aspect shifting is applied in the context of LCVs with a focus on the predicative noun's complement and determination of the predicative noun.

The test for telicity observes the behaviour with prepositions pendant and en. The tests can be partially corrupted by the fact that these temporal prepositions coerce telic or atelic reading, so it is important to perform these tests carefully.