Sylvie a Les Yeux Bleus

Sylvie a les yeux bleus: bi-thematic construction The purpose of this paper is to describe the syntactic and semantic structures of the construction Sylvie a les yeux bleus. Traditionally, the verb avoir as taken in this construction is said to relate, syntactically, the NP les yeux with the adjective bleus, and that it comes under the category of verbs which take or can take a direct object NP and its complement: e.g. rendre, trouver, élire, appeler, etc. By using the ne... que test, we show that the role of avoir is to bring Sylvie and les yeux (but not les yeux and bleus!) into syntactic relation, and that, therefore, the sentence elle a les cheveux longs is syntactically different from the sentence elle porte les cheveux longs, the former being composed of two clauses, the latter of one clause. On the other hand, our semantic analysis shows that the construction Sylvie a les yeux bleus is a bi-thematic construction, the primary theme being Sylvie, the secondary theme les yeux, and that, from this point of view, the constructions j'ai la tête qui tourne and il a sa fille mariée can also be considered as bi-thematic constructions.