Un comme qui marque une fonction qui se démarque. L'attribut de l'objet en comme et les verbes de nomination

Abstract

This contribution examines, for the so-called nomination verbs, some of the hypotheses that have been formulated in order to explain the use of comme ( “as”) in object complement constructions. It will appear that comme is used in marked instances of the complement structure. The marking concerns the formal and lexical properties of the object complement, as well as the information structure of the sentence and the verb meaning. In presence of comme, the object complement conforms less often to the properties of a prototypical predicate and, even less so, to those of a resultative predicate. The secondary predication contained within the construction tends, moreover, to adopt some characteristics of what is considered to be a marked information structure. The use of comme, finally, correlates with non prototypical verb meanings in that the verb less often refers to the attribution of a professional duty that is intimately linked to the meaning of the verb.