International audienceThe article proposes a unified analysis of Behavior Evaluation Adjectives (BEA), like gentil ‘kind’ or prudent ‘wise’, whether the quality expressed is attributed to a human subject (Tu es vraiment gentil de nous aider ‘You are really kind to help us’) or to his/her behavior (Nous aider est vraiment gentil de ta part ‘To help us is really kind of you’). We argue that these two structures should be viewed as diathetic variants of one another, the structure with the clausal subject being the passive equivalent of the active construction with a human subject. BEAs function as part of an active complex predicate être ‘be’+A, which takes an external “agent” argument expressed by an NP+human and a direct internal argument, infinitive clause. Thus, BEAs function in all their usages as secondary predicates of “Individual level” type, providing the evaluation of a human subject as an agent

International audienceThis article reassesses N. Ruwet’s (1988) attribution of the label “unaccusative” to weather verbs across the board. Through a cross-linguistic analysis of NP expansions (in French, English and Russian), we argue that only metaphorically used French weather verbs and English weather verbs in personal constructions, followed by a directional particle or a PP, behave as genuine unaccusatives and can have their NP expansions qualify as internal arguments. All other NPs of weather verbs function rather as adverbial adjuncts, modifying the meteorological predicate. Moreover, our study shows that unlike a widely accepted belief, the class of weather verbs is far from being homogeneous

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This contribution examines the co-existence in French of two impersonal constructions with a light verb and a weather noun, as in il y a / il fait du vent ‘it’s windy’ (lit. there is / it makes wind). Our starting point stems from Bauer’s (2000) observations on Vulgar Latin postulating that facere ‘do, make’ with weather nouns appears to compensate for the diminishing use of intransitive weather verbs. Based on a diachronic and synchronic corpus study of weather sentences extracted from Frantext, we argue that Bauer’s hypothesis can apply at best to Middle French. For Modern and Contemporary French, our analysis reveals that both constructions are existential with il fait+N specializing in expressing ambient states and the il y a-construction in expressing atmospheric events or substances.

Our study compares the expression of additive relations in oral native (French, Italian, Russian) and non-native discourse (French L2), elicited with the same visual stimulus. On the basis of a comparative analysis of native productions, we argue that, in additive contexts, Russian clearly shares the discourse perspective attested in the two Romance languages. Our French L2 data have shown that both Russian and Italian groups seem to proceed by looking for similarities with respect to their L1, but learners of a closer typological language (Italian L1) rely longer on structures that are formally (or functionally) similar and assume more similarities than there actually are, in comparison to learners of typologically unrelated language (Russian L1), thus confirming the psycho-typology effects.