La détermination du prédicat dans l’inversion locative

Lucie Gournay’s goal in this paper is to explain the verbal constraints common to French and English in Locative Inversion (LI) constructions. Previous hypotheses have failed in this way, because they focussed on a taxinomy of verbs, instead of including in their analysis other crucial constraints of LI concerning polarity, aspect, and modality. She argues that LI encodes a marginal type of predication (different from SVO predication) that is clearly non-speaker-based and in which the locative element plays the role of a subject, (i. e. of the main determiner of the predicate) imposing its stative properties to the rest of the relation