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Diathesisandvalencychanges-pronominalverbsinFrenchwithabstractrevision.pdf
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Abstract
The aims of this study are twofold: to give an overview of existing classifications for the grammatical class of pronominal verbs in French, and to present a new classification of these verbs based on the concept of diathesis and validated through a corpus analysis. Based on the thorough analysis of 33 prototypical pronominal sentences along with the corpus annotation of 1232 structures, we were able to distinguish eight patterns of diatheses relevant to pronominal verbs. The main tenets of this typology lie in an increased focus on the polysemy of the pronominal verbs, as well as the systematic analysis of syntactic and semantic layers of a large sample. Our findings also confirm that French pronominal verbs induce a valency reduction compared to their neutral diathesis counterpart, which sheds new light on our understanding of an otherwise complex phenomenon.
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Zakhia Doueihi, J., & François, T. (2025). Diathesis and Valency Changes in Pronominal-Verbal Constructions in French. French Studies : a quarterly review, 79(3), 474-502. https://doi.org/10.3828/fs.2025.79.3.8 (Original work published 2025)