Abstract EN:

Our study evolves around the so called "operative noun", a restricted category of the french lexicon and grammar. This category includes all those nouns which have the distinctive feature of being followed by an object clause and or by an infintive clause. With a corpus of six hundred and seventy-eight operative nouns, we managed to bring out fifty-four definite properties which enabled us to distinguish twelve different classes of construction. Within each class, the rest of the clause is introduced by an operative noun that can be a subject, a direct object or a complement introduced by a preposition. The syntactic properties are identified in two successive stages : - a distributional stage where all modifications of the position of the operative noun are noted, - and a transformational stage which corresponds to the applilication of eleven tests to the original clauses, without their acceptability being affected.