Marcher comme une reine/ Nager comme une sirène. Les verbes de déplacement et les compléments de manière en comme

The aim of this paper is to explore the relation between lexical and syntactic encoding of manner in French by studying the combinatory potential of a small set of manner of motion verbs with comparative comme ‘as’ clauses (e.g. Maria marche comme une reine. ‘Maria walks like a queen’). Following Stosic (2009), we assume that the manner interpretation of some motion verbs is due to the presence in their lexical meaning of some more basic features such as: speed (courir ‘run’), bearing / posture (marcher ‘walk’, boiter ‘limp’), force (jaillir ‘gush out’), aimlessness (errer ‘wander about’). In accordance with Moline (2008), we hypothesize that the comparative comme clauses combined with such verbs instantiate the semantic feature that activates a manner interpretation of the studied verbs. We also take into account some motion verbs that do not express manner such as monter ‘go up’, tomber ‘fall’ and descendre ‘go down’ in order to bring to the fore the meaning of comparative comme clauses following them. This corpus-based study finally shows that in many cases there is a very strict correlation between manner features encoded by verbs and the meaning of comme clauses. However, this correlation does not always hold, owing to the fact that manner complementation can apply to many other features of the lexical meaning of the verb.