Du ‘déponent’ guillaumien à l’‘hypothèse inaccusative’ Étapes d’une notion métalinguistique
From Guillaume’s ‘Deponent Verb’ to the Unaccusative Hypothesis Stages of a Metalinguistic Notion

Summary/Abstract: In January 1943, Gustave Guillaume published an article entitled: “Is there a deponent in French?”. By using the binomial “analytical voice – synthetic voice”, the author sheds new light on the transformation of the Latin verbal system in French: he isolates a small group of intransitive verbs (such as ‘mourir’, ‘naître’, ‘entrer’, ‘sortir’ etc.) pertaining to the category of Latin deponents, which have formed in French a new synthetic mixed voice, and are a direct legacy of Latin. Since then, the behaviour of intransitive verbs has been an area of some interest for other linguists (cf. split intransitivity). Within the framework of relational grammar, Perlmutter (1978) introduced the Unaccusative Hypothesis, showing that the subject of these verbs has the typical characteristics of an object. On the other hand, semantic approaches have put forward a set of criteria like agentivity and telicity in order to stress the semantic basis of the syntax of unaccusative verbs.

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