Emplois verbaux, distributions, métaphores

National audienceThe Lexicon-Grammar, built at LADL, attemps to classify the syntactic structures of French and the set of relations which hold between them by means of the lexical elements which admit or exclude these syntactic structures. Thousands of French simple verbs have been classified, according to the syntactic structures of the sentences in which they may occur. They have been grouped within 60 syntactic tables. Each verbal entry in a table includes the structure of a "defining sentence", characterizing the particular use of the word which the entry relates to and the particular distribution of arguments that are involved. Constructions associated with this defining construction (specific distributions, substructures, metaphors, etc.) are taken into account in the description, and noted as properties of each particular entry. A verb has as many entries as it has uses that are judged to be distinct. In many cases, this distinction is difficult to establish. It depends on the answer to the question: does a variation in the distributional features of the argument create a different use, which deserves another entry, or is it a metaphor which can be noted as a property of the entry in question? This article tries to answer this question... and fails to do so