Se (re) trouver dans tous ses états … attributifs : sens et constructions

This paper offers a corpus study of two reflexive (semi-) copular verbs, viz. se trouver and se retrouver, which at first sight appear to be mere morphological variants. In a first stage, the study is devoted to the comparison of the reflexive copular construction with the object complement construction of trouver and retrouver. We show the observed differences between both constructions may be explained by a process of grammaticalization, which has attained a further stage in the case of the reflexive constructions which even admit semi- auxiliary uses. Next, we conduct a contrastive analysis of the syntax and the semantics (partially based on a collostructional analysis) of the copular constructions of se trouver and se retrouver. The analysis not only allows to describe the different meaning effects produced by the verbs, it also shows the close links with the locative uses. Moreover, it accounts for the role the morpheme "re-" plays in the reinforcement of the nuance of unexpectedness, and hence, of the detrimental inference.