Spécificités morpho-syntaxiques des constructions à verbe support en allemand

Abstract

In this article, we give evidence for a detailed morpho-syntactic description of support verb constructions (SVCs); we claim that SVCs must be described at the same level of detail as single word items. We give examples from French and German, concerning both, morphosyntactic specificities of the nominal and of the verbal element of a SVC. Furthermore we show that methods of corpus analysis are well suited or the extraction of such data form large amounts of text; the corpus-based aproach is all the more necessary, as most morphosyntactic phenomena within SVCs are preferences rather than categorical features. We describe a range of extraction methods, and we argue for a robust syntactic analysis as a basis for extraction. The article ends with a small case study on preferences of German support verbs with respect to active vs. passive.