ON ONE PARTICULAR FEATURE OF THE SYSTEM OF PREDICATES OF POSITION IN SPACE IN FRENCH

 In the article on the basis of the analysis of French philological sources of the 16th– 17th centuries the hypothesis is offered concerning contextual conditions of appearance and fixation of the predicate être debout in the system of positional verbs of the French language, and also concerning chronology of this process. Position verbs (ʻstand,ʼ ʻsit,ʼ ʻlieʼ), which prototypically indicate a person’s position, are distinguished within a wider group of location predicate. Position verbs are included in the 200-word Swadesh list, which brings together units belonging to the most stable basic vocabulary of the lan- guage. In Romance languages, the meaning of ʻstandingʼ can be conveyed in several ways, for example by the verb stare, which eventually ascends to i.-e. *stᾱ- : stă- (it.stare, romanian sta) as well as a number of word combinations, for example: ʻstand on your feetʼ (it. stare in piedi, spanish estar di pie, port. estar de pié, romanian sta pe picioare), ʻbe on your feetʼ (it. essere in piedi, it. rimanere in piedi, port. ficar de pé), ʻbe straightʼ (it. essere ritto, catalan estar dret). The peculiarity of the French language is to convey the meaning of ʻstandʼ by means of the predicate être debout, which displaced the ancient verb ester. The article suggests a hypothesis according to which the être debout predicate, formed in the 14th century, became particularly popular in the 16th century. When interpreting this process, one cannot ignore the fact of the paronymic attraction between the positional verb ester and the verb of existence estre, which caused great inconveniences. However, the strengthening of the position of the predicate être debout was probably made possible by a grammatical and semantic factor: the imperative Debout, which at that time was probably an innovation, allowed to accumulate the idea of the transition from a horizontal position to a vertical one and at the same time — from a passive state to an active one, which led to the fixation of this very predicate in the system of positional verbs.