Grandes lignes de partage structurelles de la grammaire française se retrouvent-elles dans la description du portugais et de l’espagnol?

Abstract

It is our purpose in the current paper to examine, within a French-Iberian contrastive perspective, the rendibility of the main dichotomies structuring the French-speaking grammatical universe. We shall start by dealing with the opposition «complément» / «attribut» originally stemming in the eighteenth century with the Encyclopaedic grammarians thus yielding, in the nineteenth century, the main dividing line in the grammatical dimension, notably amidst grammarians like Chapsal. Then, we shall proceed with the opposition «attribut» / «épithète», more recent in the history of the French grammar, with its origin on the verge of the twentieth century. Concerning the dichotomy direct object / indirect object, which has directly developed from the former opposition direct regime / indirect regime we shall observe that its application is extremely hard to be realised in the Iberian dimension. Lastly, we shall conclude with the rather latest but well-known opposition, verb complements / clause complements, dating as far back as the early seventies in France. However, we shall offer a brief survey on the latter since it is completely missing in the Portuguese grammar, though taken up by the generative grammar proponents.