Houston, Texas october 2, 2008

Helsinki, October 18, 2013
Weak verbs revisited.
A constructional corpus-based approach to ‘weak’ verbs in modern French
Dominique Willems
Ghent University (Belgium)
Abstract
‘Weak’ verbs, also known as ‘parenthetical’, ‘evidential’ or ‘epistemic’ verbs, have interested
linguists and philosophers for many years (cf. Urmson 1952, E. Benveniste 1958) and for
many (syntactic and semantic) reasons. In recent linguistic literature, they are treated mainly
from a pragmatic point of view and, through a process of advanced grammaticalization, often
assimilated with adverbs (cf. Thompson & Mulac 1991, Apothéloz 2003, Thompson 2002).
But fine-grained linguistic analyses are still lacking.
In this contribution, we will present the main results of a usage-based syntactic, semantic and
pragmatic analysis of the three most frequent ‘weak’ verbs used in the first person singular in
modern French: je crois ‘I believe’, je pense ‘I think’, je trouve ‘I find’ (cf. BlancheBenveniste & Willems 2007). The study is based on some 2000 examples taken from a
corpus of spoken French. We will argue that those verbs do not undergo a change of category
but simply remain verbs and that they can be fruitfully described in a constructional
framework. In French, ‘weak’ verbs, particularly frequent in spoken discourse, occur in a
cluster of three related structures, revealing the same semantic meaning of ‘mitigation’.
(1)
(2)
(3)
je trouve que c’est dommage
[I think that this is a pity]
c’est dommage je trouve
[this is a pity, I think]
- c’est dommage
[it’s a pity]
- oui je trouve
[yes I think so]
The three related structures present interesting differences in word order and scope. They are
often used by speakers of French in an alternative way:
(4)
Sp1
Sp2
– elle y est toujours je crois l’école
– je crois qu’elle y est toujours cette école
[it is still there I believe the school]
[I believe that the school is still there]
Other verbs can enter one of those syntactic patterns, but only the ‘weak’ verbs can partake in
all three of them. Each of the three verbs also enters other constructions, with different
meanings.
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