Les constructions en adverbe que p en français Essai de caractérisation sémantique d’une matrice lexicale productive

This study aims at accounting for a very common construction in Modern French, namely adverbe que p, heureusement que p being the most famous example, given the impossibility of the “symmetric” combination malheureusement que p. In fact, a thorough examination of the various linguistic properties that can be shown up reveals that beyond the same surface structure three different constructions can be identified. One of them, corresponding to heureusement que p, rests upon a lexical pattern, that is a combination of both a syntactic and a semantic invariant. Several examples—in diachrony as well as in synchrony—are discussed.