Cet article passe en revue les conséquences que le contact du français avec divers dialectes arabes (maghrébins; levantin) a pu avoir sur la valence de certains verbes. Les modifications de la valence des verbes français au contact de l’arabe apparaissent comme la systématisation de calques syntaxiques favorisés par des situations d’alternance ou de mélange de codes entre le français et quelques dialectes arabes (maghrébins, égyptien et levantin). Sur le plan de l’analyse syntaxique les modifications apportées à la valence du verbe peut être perçue comme une perturbation. Néanmoins il apparaît que le changement de valence implique d’autres dimensions tant sur le plan morphosyntactique (aspect et Aktionsart) qu’au niveau pragmatique et sociolinguistique. Une approche variationiste révèle que le contact avec l’arabe ne provoque pas le remplacement d’une structure par une autre, mais permet l’enrichissement des possibilités expressives de tel ou tel verbe ou de telle ou telle locution verbale. On assiste donc à la coexistence entre une structure non-marquée du point de vue aspectuel ou pragmatique avec des structures fortement marquées (exemple: tu m’as tué au sens de « tu me fais rire » ou tu m’as saoûlé au sens de « tu m’ennuies »). Cet article s’intéresse aussi aux constructions éliptiques consistant à employer un verbe avec une valeur absolutive sur le modèle de constructions similaires en arabe dialectal. Ces considérations amènent à relativiser la pertinence du modèle de la valence promu par Heinz Happ à l’étude des variétés de langue fortement marquées par le contact et l’hybridation.
This article is a survey of the main consequences resulting from the contact between French and several Arabic dialects as far as verbal valence is concerned. The impact exerted by Arabic dialects on the valence of French verbs appears as a systematization of occasional syntactical calques as a result of Arabic-French code-switching or code-mixing. On the level of syntactic analysis the change of valence as a result of linguistic contact may be perceived as a perturbation. However, it appears that the change of valence involves several other dimensions either on a morphosyntactical level (aspect and Aktionsart) or from the view point of pragmatic and sociolinguistic. Interestingly enough, those specific uses of the verbs coexist with more standard uses thereof. The cases of tu m’as tué, literally “you killed me”, in the sense of “you must be kidding”, or tu m’as saoûlé, literally “you fuddled me”, in the sense of “you piss me off” are typical of a two-tiered mechanism within the varieties of French exposed to the interference of an Arabic substrate or adstrate. Here the aspectual and pragmatic values involved in the use of the passé composé (present perfect) prevent from understanding the verbs tuer and saouler in the literary meaning of “killing” or “fuddling”. Thus the coexistence of an unmarked construction with a marked one is not so much a perturbing factor that allegedly affected the very structure of the language but rather an enrichment or a widening of the expressive potential of French thanks to the bestowing of a greater deal of elasticity to the inherited system or to the standard. Similar phenomena are attested in other zones of contact between French and other languages. Let us think for instance of the varieties of French in use in Wallonia or French Switzerland where syntactic inteference from Dutch and German respectively are recognizable in verbal constructions. The bestowing of more elasticity to verbal valence in the varieties of French in contact with other languages can help reassess some theoretical presuppositions regarding morphosyntactic alignment and valence. The traditional model promoted by Heinz Happ should take into account the variationist factor that comes to the foreground in the interface between two languages in contact. The study of the contact between French and Arabic reveals that verbal valence is perhaps more elastic than it appears in Happ’s theory. The great deal of variations that can affect verbal valence according to diatopic, diachronic and diastratic factors is something that Happ did not sufficiently take into consideration, may be because his theory is mainly founded on corpora of Latin literat texts, i.e. on a highly standardized linguistic variety. Lastly, the deviant uses of verbs or verbal constructions studied in this article raise the question of the interface between syntax and semantic. The variation of valence involves syntactical parameters like the skiping of a complement from a given verbal phrase (absolutive use of an otherwise transitive verb), or conversely, the addition of a complement to a verb normally considered as intransitive. It can also involve the transformation of a verbal phrase into a single verb or alternatively, the creation of a verbal periphrase usually centered around the verb avoir. However, the ultimate consequences of those syntactical transformations are clearly pertaining to semantics because they sometimes involve considerable differences on the level of expressivity besides their being the product of calque translation from Arabic. Whatever the distinctions that should be made between the syntactical, the semantic and the pragmatic dimension, the widening of the valence is a way to enrich the gamut of significations of French verbs according to the gamut of significations of their counterparts in Arabic dialects: the Lebanese dialect as far as franbanais, the Lebanese blend of French is concerned; Egyptian as regards Jews born in Pre-Nasserian Egypt; various Maghrebi dialects when it goes on varieties of French in decolonized North Africa or in post-colonial France.
