Predicationele en specificationele objectcomplementen in het Frans

Abstract

In this article it is shown that the direct object complement and indirectobject complement of the French verbs of nomination élire andnommer function differently with regard to information structure. Thedirect object complement has the characteristics of the "predicate-focus"structures, whereas the indirect object complement can be considered tobelong to the "argument-focus" structures. This way it seems possible torelate the two types of object complement to the typology of subjectcomplements, the direct object complement corresponding to the predicationalsubject complement, and the function of the indirect objectcomplement being analogous to that of the specificational subject complement.It is shown, furthermore, that the word order potential (i.e. thepossible positions of the direct object constituent and the object complementconstituent) is different for both object complement types. Onceagain, a parallelism can be drawn with the subject complement sentences.