Locatif spatial initial et position du sujet nominal

Abstract

This contribution is devoted to the study of French « locative inversion » structures X V S (Sur la cheminée trônent deux chandeliers). It is argued that such structures are specific, and cannot be derived from X S V structures (Sur la cheminée, deux chandeliers trônent), since the syntactic relation between X and V is different — X being in the scope of the predicate in the former case, but not in the latter. Furthermore, the two structures cannot be considered, on the semantic level, as paraphrases deriving from a unique underlying representation, since the semantic values and interpretations attributed to the verbal item differ ; whereas on the pragmatic level, each construction enters a different type of discourse setting. Thus a formal theory is outsketched, based on a topological approach of word ordering in the process of utterance construction, which accounts for the specificity of the above mentioned structures.