The combinatory profile of defective verbs seoir and messeoir: the stability and fixedness

Vol.38,No.2(2017)

Abstract
The French verb seoir and its equivalent prefix-based antonym messeoir are from a synchronic perspective to the contemporary French word-stock treated as defective verbs, whose frequency of occurrence is rather rare and whose limited range of verb forms results in a paradigmatically incomplete conjugation. The data analysis of 61 verb phrases of seoir in 152 various texts from the Frantext corpus comprising 11,176,247 running words shows the occurrence of 10 non-finite forms, out of which 37.7 % have the form of the third person singular/plural. The outcomes clearly demonstrate that some verb forms are still popular in the language and keep their combining power or valence. In contrast, the lexeme messeoir does not occur at all in the corpus data after the year 2000. Based on the zero occurrence it may be argued that the verb has been gradually moving to the periphery of the contemporary word-stock.

Keywords:
defective verbs; combinatory profile; collocation; stability; combinability; valence; Frantext corpus

Pages:
213–225
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