Les verbes français à préfixe "co-"
French Verbs with Prefix “co-“

Summary/Abstract: The present paper deals with morphological, semantic and syntagmatic properties of French verbs with prefix “co-“. The methodological frame deemed most adequate for their description is "lexical decomposition". Among these verbs, there is a considerable number of those which designate symmetric relations (they follow the pattern x R y –> y R x). It is further argued that another common feature of these predicates is a compulsory presence of comitative phrase in their syntactic neighbourhood. After a short glimpse over word-formation problems arising within this class of verbs, the historical mechanisms responsible for the formal discrepancy between “co-“ and the corresponding preposition “avec” (other Romance languages are more conservative; cf. it. “La data del tuo arrivo coincide con quella della mia partenza”) are carefully scrutinized. Another step is a semantic description of French verbs with prefixe “co-“. The solution reached at suggests that the meaning of almost all of them incorporates a semantic constant WITH.

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