Valence des verbes de perception en français et italien : perspective diachronique
The valency of perception verbs in French and Italian: A diachronic perspective

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores perception verbs (like ‘hear’ and ‘see’) from a construction grammar perspective, with a focus on both contrastive and diachronic aspects. Surprisingly, our corpus analysis suggests that different verbs from this semantic groups do not display a homogeneous syntactic behaviour. For example the verb ‘observer’ stands out from other verbs in this group. We attempt to account for the special status of ‘observer’ and discuss the extent to which the acceptability of sentences featuring ‘observer’ can be improved by acting on certain parameters in the sentence. Our research highlights the role of a factor referred to as evidentia in classical rhetoric.

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