Fr. se voir

[Claude Hagege]

Objet: Fr. se voir
Date: mardi 23 décembre 2003 20:17

Dear all,
  The following is a message that might be outdated, since it refers to a
debate that took place one month ago. But I was not able to send this message
then, because, due to a change in my electronic address, it was rejected. So I
am trying to send it again, hoping that it will not be rejected once more:

The French reflexive construction "se voir", on which F. Meinberg and P.
Hopper wrote various interesting observations in their 4 Dec 2003 emails, is
studied in detail in Claude Hagège, The Language Builder, an Essay on the
Human Signature in Linguistic Morphogenesis, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, J.
Benjamins, 1993, pp. 228-229. In this book, such sentences as il s'est vu
mettre en prison, or l'aveugle, hésitant à traverser la rue, s'est vu soudain
prendre par la main, or il s'est vu dire la vérité, and others, are examined,
as well as the semantic and structural reasons why informants accept them,
hesitate to accept them, or reject them.

With warmest regards,
Claude (Collège de France, Paris).