Cette description grammaticale de l’afar s’appuie essentiellement sur des données recueillies sur le terrain auprès de très nombreux locuteurs afarophones, vivant à Djibouti, en Erythrée et en Ethiopie. La richesse des données a permis de prendre en compte les variantes dialectales tout au long de la description. Celle-ci s’organise autour de plusieurs parties : système phonologique et phonétique, système nominal, système verbal, et syntaxe de l’énoncé. Cette étude a permis de mieux évaluer l’originalité de certains traits connus mais aussi de mettre en valeur des traits peu connus voire ignorés jusqu’à présent. Citons entre autres : redéfinition du statut de la rétroflexe ; approfondissement des valeurs sémantiques et syntaxiques attachées aux différents procédés de dérivation nominale et verbale ; illustration du rôle primordial de la relative dans une langue où il n’y a pas de catégorie « adjectif » ; étude détaillée de la polarité de genre et de l’accord du verbe en genre non en nombre (accord au singulier avec un nom marqué comme pluriel) ; distinction entre noms adverbiaux et adverbes sur des critères syntaxiques; mise en valeur de la portée syntaxique et sémantique des quatre postpositions; meilleure définition de la catégorie des idéophones sur le plan morphophonologique, syntaxique et sémantique ; mise en lumière des procédés de topicalisation. En apportant un nouvel éclairage sur l’afar, à l’intérieur du couchitique et de la famille afro-asiatique, cette thèse se veut aussi une contribution à la typologie des langues. / This grammatical description of Afar is mostly based on fieldwork data collected from a great number of Afar speakers living in Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The wealth of data has allowed us to embrace dialectal variations in the description. This description has been built around several components: the phonological and phonetic system, the nominal system, the verbal system, and the syntax.This study leads us to better assess the originality of some features that are already known, and also to bring out other features that were not well known or unknown until now: redefinition of the status of retroflex consonants ; enhanced understanding of semantic and syntactic values of different processes of nominal and verbal derivation ; illustration of the crucial role of the relative clause in a language without adjectives ; detailed study of gender polarity and verb agreement in gender – and not in number – (agreement in the singular with a name marked in the plural) ; differentiation between adverbial names and adverbs on the basis of syntactic criteria ; highlight of the syntactic and semantic significance of four postpositions ; better definition of ideophones from the morphophonological, syntactic and semantic aspects ; highlight of topicalization processes. By shedding new light on Afar within the Cushitic and Afro-Asian family, this thesis aims also to contribute to language typolog*y.

The question of how to integrate idioms into standard theories of grammar has been a matter of investigation since at least the beginning of generative grammar. Idioms are uniquely positioned at the interface between the lexicon and the syntax, demonstrating properties of both words and phrases. On the one hand, idioms behave like stored units, arbitrary correspondences between sound and meaning that must simply be memorized by speakers of the language. In this way, they are similar to words, which have long been recognized as arbitrary sound-meaning pairs (cf. Saussure (1986)'s arbitrariness of the sign). On the other hand, idioms in the traditional sense are multiword units, often with some degree of syntactic flexibility, ranging from tense inflection (e.g. Eli kicked the bucket yesterday vs. I'm pretty sure Eli's going to kick the bucket tomorrow) to passivizability (e.g. Lisa spilled the beans vs. The beans were spilled (by Lisa)), and beyond. This places idioms in the purview of the syntax, where the combination and manipulation of multiword units is typically assumed to take place. Idioms, then, bridge the gap between the lexicon and the syntax, challenging traditional assumptions about grammar. This dissertation provides a proposal for dealing with just such issues. I provide an account of idiomatic representations that is consistent with theoretical and empirical research in the field. I explore what kinds of structures are licensed to have special idiomatic interpretations, and I present novel experimental and corpus results that bear on the issue of how idioms are represented. Ultimately, I argue that the structural requirement model alone is able to sufficiently account for the data.

Cette description grammaticale de l’afar s’appuie essentiellement sur des données recueillies sur le terrain auprès de très nombreux locuteurs afarophones, vivant à Djibouti, en Erythrée et en Ethiopie. La richesse des données a permis de prendre en compte les variantes dialectales tout au long de la description. Celle-ci s’organise autour de plusieurs parties : système phonologique et phonétique, système nominal, système verbal, et syntaxe de l’énoncé. Cette étude a permis de mieux évaluer l’originalité de certains traits connus mais aussi de mettre en valeur des traits peu connus voire ignorés jusqu’à présent. Citons entre autres : redéfinition du statut de la rétroflexe ; approfondissement des valeurs sémantiques et syntaxiques attachées aux différents procédés de dérivation nominale et verbale ; illustration du rôle primordial de la relative dans une langue où il n’y a pas de catégorie « adjectif » ; étude détaillée de la polarité de genre et de l’accord du verbe en genre non en nombre (accord au singulier avec un nom marqué comme pluriel) ; distinction entre noms adverbiaux et adverbes sur des critères syntaxiques; mise en valeur de la portée syntaxique et sémantique des quatre postpositions; meilleure définition de la catégorie des idéophones sur le plan morphophonologique, syntaxique et sémantique ; mise en lumière des procédés de topicalisation. En apportant un nouvel éclairage sur l’afar, à l’intérieur du couchitique et de la famille afro-asiatique, cette thèse se veut aussi une contribution à la typologie des langues. / This grammatical description of Afar is mostly based on fieldwork data collected from a great number of Afar speakers living in Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The wealth of data has allowed us to embrace dialectal variations in the description. This description has been built around several components: the phonological and phonetic system, the nominal system, the verbal system, and the syntax.This study leads us to better assess the originality of some features that are already known, and also to bring out other features that were not well known or unknown until now: redefinition of the status of retroflex consonants ; enhanced understanding of semantic and syntactic values of different processes of nominal and verbal derivation ; illustration of the crucial role of the relative clause in a language without adjectives ; detailed study of gender polarity and verb agreement in gender – and not in number – (agreement in the singular with a name marked in the plural) ; differentiation between adverbial names and adverbs on the basis of syntactic criteria ; highlight of the syntactic and semantic significance of four postpositions ; better definition of ideophones from the morphophonological, syntactic and semantic aspects ; highlight of topicalization processes. By shedding new light on Afar within the Cushitic and Afro-Asian family, this thesis aims also to contribute to language typolog*y.

The topic of this dissertation is agreement and case assignment, with particular reference to conjoined noun phrases. The initial chapters look at the different possibilities available in such contexts, including agreement with the features of each individual conjunct, agreement with the features of only one conjunct, or agreement with features computed on the basis of those of the individual conjuncts but not necessarily possessed by them. We propose a way of handling all of these patterns with a single formal mechanism, later applying the same intuitions to the assignment (or non-assignment) of case values by a head to its dependents. Attempts are also made to explore in greater depth some of the factors that might influence the choice of alternative agreement configurations, as well as to extend the scope of the model which we elaborate as we go along to non-conjoined environments where variable agreement occurs. Special emphasis is laid throughout on fluctuations in agreement, either because the controller has mismatched attributes or because the syntactic structure and/or the semantic interpretation allow variation. The final conclusion is that a modular approach to grammar is best placed to deal with the empirical facts. The complexities of the data call for bringing together purely morpho-syntactic, declensional information, syntactic hierarchy, order and constituency, coupled with semantics and pragmatics. The successful, appropriately regulated, interaction of these modules is shown to offer a satisfactory explanation which is difficult to obtain by exclusively relying on syntax or semantics alone.

The vast majority of work on question formation examines interrogatives from the perspective of just one single component of grammar, usually the syntax or the prosody. The present dissertation offers a comprehensive account of question formation addressing both the syntax and the prosody of interrogatives and the interaction between these two components of grammar in signalling the question meaning of an utterance. The present work examines question formation on the basis of four genealogically related and geographically closely located Romance varieties spoken in northern Italy: Gherdëina, Badiot, Fascian and Nònes. Given that these varieties differ only with respect to certain microparametric values whereas others remain constant, they constitute an ideal research area to study the interaction between the syntax and the prosody in question formation. The syntactic and prosodic analyses proposed are based on new empirical data. The syntactic analysis is couched within the cartographic approach and the prosodic analysis is based on Autosegmental-Metrical Phonology. This dissertation is motivated by five main research goals: <ol type=i><li>to provide a detailed description of the syntactic variation found in interrogatives in the four varieties Gherdëina, Badiot, Fascian and Nònes based on data collected by the author;</li> <li>to propose a unified syntactic analysis of the interrogatives;</li> <li>to offer a prosodic analysis of statements and questions providing new data from varieties not studied up to now in the literature;</li> <li>to establish the relation between the syntax and the prosody in question formation;</li> <li>to determine how the syntax and the prosody interact in providing clues to interrogative force for the listener as well as the speaker.</li></ol> The main conclusions are as follows: The syntactic structure and the intonational tune are autonomous in question formation. Three aspects matter for interrogative clause typing: (i) syntactic marking, (ii) prosodic marking and (iii) tune-text-alignment.

It has long been observed that, in a double object constructions (DOC), the two objects exhibit different syntactic behaviour. In Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), these two objects are characterized as two distinct grammatical functions. The object that syntactically patterns with the monotransitive object is the unrestricted object OBJ. The one that does not is the restricted object OBJθ. The goals of this dissertation are to investigate the syntax of DOCs, and to explore the two object functions in LFG. When thinking about DOCs, the verb that almost invariably comes to mind is GIVE. This verb, however, may not be as prototypical as is commonly assumed. In Cantonese, it is the only verb whose objects are in an anomalous order, with the object that bears the theme role preceding the object which expresses the recipient role. Cantonese as a language does not uniformly have the direct (theme) object preceding the indirect (recipient) object. Other than the difference in their linear order, the objects in the GIVE-construction pattern with those in all other DOCs in the language. In some languages, there is a possibility of having more objects than is required by the underived form of a verb. An additional object can be licensed by the affixation of an applicative morpheme to the verb root. The syntax of the objects in an applicative construction is directly related to the type of semantic role that is applied. This has posed challenges for previous accounts of applicative constructions, as a change in the morphological structure of a verb is accompanied by a change in its argument structure. A new proposal is offered to account for this. A study of the syntax of DOCs involves much more than merely acknowledging the presence of two object functions in the construction. The morphology of the verb, the semantic roles that are required by the verb and the linear order of the arguments that express these roles are all relevant. Assuming various parallel but inter-related levels of representation, the theory of LFG has the suitable tools to take all these into consideration. Reference can be made straight-forwardly to the information at the different levels of representation, including the a-structure, the c-structure, the f-structure and the m-structure.

In this thesis I investigate the syntax and semantics of tense-aspect stem participles in the Ṛgveda, focusing primarily on the data from the earlier books II–VII and IX, seeking to establish a comprehensive and coherent analysis of this category within the linguistic system of Ṛgvedic Sanskrit. In recent literature tense-aspect stem participles are usually treated as semantically equivalent to finite verbs wherever possible, but contradictorily where they differ from finite verbs their adjectival nature is emphasized. I argue that tense-aspect stem participles are a fundamentally verbal formation and can be treated as inflectional verb forms: they are adjectival verbs rather than verbal adjectives. At the same time, however, they constitute an independent sub-category of verb form which is not necessarily semantically dependent on corresponding finite stems. I examine the syntactic and semantic properties of tense-aspect stem participles both in relation to finite verbal forms and their wider syntactic context, formalizing the evidence in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. Consequently I am able to categorize the syntactic and semantic deviations which many participles exhibit in comparison to finite verbal forms. I contend that many such forms cannot be treated synchronically (and sometimes diachronically) as participles, but form distinct synchronic categories. My analysis permits a considerably more refined definition of the category of tense-aspect stem participles, dependent on clear morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria, as opposed to the usual, purely morphological, definition. From a diachronic perspective I argue that the category of tense-aspect stem participles as found in the Ṛgveda more closely reflects an inherited Proto-Indo-European category of tense-aspect stem participles than is usually assumed. I also reconsider theoretical treatments of participial syntax and semantics, and develop a more precise typology of non-finite verb systems which adequately accounts for Sanskrit participles.

Cette étude linguistique qui porte sur la syntaxe du français et du néerlandais se propose d’analyser en contraste la fonction syntaxique ‘sujet’ dans ces deux langues. Elle s’appuie sur le cadre théorique fourni par le structuralisme fonctionnaliste d’André Martinet, qui considère les fonctions syntaxiques comme des ‘signes linguistiques’ pourvus d’un ‘signifiant’ (leur forme) et d’un ‘signifié’ (leur valeur). Elle prend ainsi comme point de départ les différences dans le marquage de la fonction pour tenter de parvenir à une analyse en contraste du contenu de la fonction elle-même. Cette analyse se fonde sur l’hypothèse d’une « configuration subjectale » (Lazard 1994) propre à chacune des langues dans lesquelles la notion de sujet est pertinente. Elle s’inscrit dans le cadre des études menées ces dernières années pour mettre en contraste le français et le néerlandais, généralement à des fins didactiques. Le rapprochement des structures de ces deux langues, dans lesquelles la construction de la phrase obéit à des règles différentes, parait cependant présenter un intérêt théorique qui dépasse les besoins de l’enseignement de l’une aux locuteurs natifs de l’autre. L’examen de la fonction syntaxique ‘sujet’, qui représente un élément essentiel de la phrase, fournit un angle d’attaque des problèmes que pose la comparaison de la structure d’une phrase germanique avec celle d’une langue romane comme le français, caractérisé par sa préférence pour le placement du sujet avant le verbe qu’il régit. / This linguistic study deals with the syntax of French and Dutch. It aims at analyzing the contrast in the syntactic function ‘subject’ in both languages. It is based on the theoretical framework provided by the French functionalist André Martinet who considers the syntactic functions as ‘linguistic signs’ composed of a ‘signifier’(their aspect) and a ‘signified’(their meaning). It thus starts with assessing the differences in the ‘signifiers’ of the function and goes on with a tentative contrastive analysis of the contents of the function itself, the ‘signified’. This analysis is based on the assumption of a “subjectal configuration” (Lazard 1994) specific to each of the languages in which the notion of subject is relevant.It is an element of the studies conducted in recent years to contrast French and Dutch, usually for teaching purposes. However the theoretical interest of examining the structures of these two languages in which the sentence structure is subject to different rules exceeds the sheer needs of teaching each language to the native speakers of the other. An examination of the syntactic function ‘subject’, which represents an essential element of the sentence, provides a good angle of attack to the tricky comparison between the structures of a Germanic sentence and those of a Roman language such as French, which is characterized by its preference for placing the subject before the verb it governs.

Title: Syntactic specialities of stretched verb s in the german journalism Summary: This work interprets the meaning and use of stretched verb constructions. Every element of this construction is described. The practical part analyses the use of these verbs in newspapers. It shows that their use depends on the newspaper and even on the region. The last Chapter offers some grammatical exercises. Keywords: stretched verb, syntax, newspaper analyse, exercises

Title: Syntactic characteristics (features) of stretched verb constructions in the language of german journalism Summary: This thesis interprets the meaning and the use of stretched verb constructions. The german newspapers "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", "Mannheimer Morgen" and "Bild" were chosen as the research objects. The thesis is devided in three chapters. The first chapter explains the theory in general and describes the newspapers and the research method in detail. The practical part analyses the use of these verbs in newspapers and shows that their use depends not only on the newspaper but on the region. The last chapter offers some grammar exercises for the practical use of this construction. Keywords: stretched verb constructions, syntax, newspaper analyse, exercises