L’asymétrie espace/temps dans les inversions locatives

Abstract

The aim of this article is to highlight the differences between two types of locative inversions in French: namely ‘spatial’ locative inversion (Derriere la place s’ouvre une esplanade) and ‘temporal’ locative inversion (En 1961 s’ouvre le proces Eichmann). On the syntactic level, spatial initial adverbials are shown to be more closely related to the predicative kernel than temporal initial adverbials. On the lexical–semantic level, ‘spatial’ vs ‘temporal’ locative inversions are shown to favour different types of verbs and different types of subjects. These observations are finally interpreted as resulting from the asymetry between ‘spatial’ locative inversion (viz locating an object in space), and ‘temporal’ locative inversion (viz locating an event in time).