Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

113But in order to understand Frame Semantics and the way in which verbs 12 are describedin this theory, it is helpful to retrace Fillmore‘s motivations (1969, 1976, 1977, 1982,1985) as well as some work that preceded his own proposals.Tesnière (1959) was one of the first (if not the first) linguist to theorize about thecentral role that the verb occupies in the sentence as the organizer of syntactic andsemantic information. According to him, a sentence does not consist of a noun phraseplus a verb phrase, or of a subject and a predicate (first tree in Figure 16). Instead, asentence consists of a verb that is usually accompanied by actants (traditionally calledarguments). This is because, for Tesnière, sentences resemble scenes (scène), a sort ofmicro theatre play that includes a main action (verbe), actors (actants) andcircumstances (circonstants) (see second tree in Figure 16).SVNPVPActant Actant CirconstantVNPFigure 16. Chomsky‘s (1957) representation of sentences and Tesnière‘s (1959)representation of sentencesAs a result, Tesnière categorizes verbs according to the number of their valencemembers (or number of actants): avalent (no actants), monovalent (one actant), bivalent(two actants) and trivalent (three actants). Also, according to him, each actant entails asemantic definition. As Pariollaud (2008: 18) puts it:12 Other parts of speech (as long as they are predicative units) are also taken into account in this theorybut verbs play a central role as it will be clear in the following sections.