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Thesis

French

ID: <

10670/1.p89jo7

>

Where these data come from
Support verbs in French, English and Ewe : a comparative study

Abstract

Support verbs have been studied to a great extent in the Lexicon-Grammar framework. This thesis aims at filling the gap of studies of support verb constructions in African languages, as well as that of comparative studies among languages of different families in order to validate the notion of the universality of support verbs. Indeed our research has demonstrated that support verbs do exist in Ewe, a Kwa language of the Niger-Congo family for which there had been no prior study of this notion. Moreover, a comparative study also revealed to us that support verb constructions in English, French and Ewe share certain syntax-semantic properties such as the reduction of the support verbe and its reconstruction through a relative clause. The three languages also shared the property of support verbs being agents of nominalization. However, there are also differences in these constructions. One of the differences is the fact that determination plays an important role in support verb constructions in English and French. However, determination is not an important factor in support verb constructions in Ewe. Other differences that were reflected in our thesis include the differences in number and frequency of support verb constructions (SVCs) in the tree languages, as well as differences in the interdependency links among the various elements of SVCs in the three languages. On the whole, English and French seem linguistically close and there were few syntax-semantic differences. On the other hand, Ewe displayed more differences – which supports the concept of different language-specific local grammars suggested by the Lexical-Grammar framework.

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