Verbes supports sans peine

The paper is aimed at defining the concepts needed in the discussion of so-called ‘support (≈ light) verbs’ and presenting a way of describing them in the lexicon in terms of Lexical Functions [= LFs]. It develops the following six points :

1. A genuine support verb is semantically empty (or ‘emptied’ in the context of its keyword).

2. There are just three types of ‘pure’ support verbs — Oper, Func, and Labor — distinguished according to the syntactic role fulfilled by their keyword.

3. Two sorts of meanings are often combined with support verbs : phasic meanings (‘begin,’ ‘stop,’ ‘continue’) and causative meanings (‘cause’) ; such a meaning plus a support verb form a complex LF.

4. There exist other sorts of meanings (especially, intensification) that can bear on the predicative noun but are expressed together with the support verb : they form, with the latter, a configuration of LFs.

5. A family of semantically full collocational verbs show the same syntactic behavior as support verbs : these are called realization verbs.

6. Using support verbs and their encoding in terms of LFs, it is possible to construct a universal Deep-Syntactic paraphrasing system. Several examples of DSynt-paraphrasing rules are given.

The discussion is carried out based on French.