Proceeding from the revival of linguistic interest in the rhetorical figures metaphor and metonymy and their underlying association types similarity and contiguity, the study demonstrates that metonymy is a powerful explanatory principle for many semantic phenomena in French sentence structures. First, the author shows how metonymic relations generate patterns of polysemy and are hence lexicalized in the valency of the respective verb. There follows a discussion of verb-valency restraints on the use of metonymic expressions. Here reflexive constructions etc. offer a new approach. Both perspectives reveal the primacy of the direct object for metonymic processes.

The continental Germanic languages are well known to possess a wealth of modal particles (such as eigentlich, auch, and denn in German), whereas this is not the case in the Romance languages. The argument advanced here is that in Romance languages their functions are expressed by other means. To supply a tertium comparationis the study elaborates a communicative definition of modality, enabling us to identify forms of modal shading independently of translation comparisons. The investigation also demonstrates that in diachronic terms forms of modal shading (whether particles or not) are recruited from a specific type of language change.