A basic property of human language is that it unfolds in time; the left and right margin of discourse units do not behave in a symmetrical fashion. The working hypothesis of this volume is that discourse elements at the left periphery have mainly subjective and discourse-structuring functions, whereas at the right periphery, such elements play an intersubjective or modalising role. However, the picture that emerges from the different contributions to this volume is far more complex. While it seems clear that the working hypothesis cannot be upheld in a "strong" way, most of the chapters - especially those based on corpus data - show that an asymmetry between left and right periphery does exist and that it is a matter of frequency.

The valency concept provides a model capable of dealing with the semantic and syntactic aspects of the relationship between typically verbal predicates and their typically nominal actants in sentences. By contrast, the corresponding relations obtaining within complex predicates have remained largely unexplored. What - from a valency point of view - are the relations, in complex predicates such as faire faillite, between the formally verbal formative faire and the formally non-verbal predicate nucleus faillite? This is the central issue that the present study sets out to resolve in connection with French mulit-word verb structures such as Aatres en mouvement.