Pour un recensement systématique des verbes supports

Abstract

Like all the major fields of research, the theoretical positions on support verbs have changed as descriptions of them have accumulated. It is surprising that it was not until the twentieth century that the notion was established. Thus, to take a beer and to take a slap have been analyzed in the same way in the grammatical tradition. I have described elsewhere how the notion of support verbs was elaborated and gradually developed (G. Gross 1993, 2004). The first works in the framework of the LADL started from lists of nominal predicates established by Maurice Gross. His first collaborators applied to these lists, each one on his own, this or that support verb, the number of which seemed to be quite small at the time. Thus, J. Giry studied the support faire; L. Danlos studied sentences with the support être Prép. From the very beginning, it was realized that the conjugation of nominal predicates was more diverse than that of verbs: a single verb has only one set of forms. R. Vivès studied the nominal predicates that take the three supports avoir-prendre-perdre. I myself have described the support verbs donner and recevoir by highlighting an active and passive conjugation thanks to the support recevoir. But all these works implied, by default, that the list of support verbs was reduced for each of the predicate nouns and for the whole. But, just as in the last century a systematic inventory of verbal conjugation was made, the time has come to make a systematic inventory of the means of conjugation for nominal predicates. This is what the present article is devoted to.