Langue française - Année 1998 - Volume 118 - Numéro 1 - Pages 61-83С. MARTINOT, The development of the argument structure of three essential verbs: mettre ('to put'), prendre ('to take'), donner ('to give') The verbs mettre ('to puť), prendre ('to take'), and donner ('to give'), which are very frequent and used very early with various semantic values, present different types of structural variations: they vary just as well according to the presence vs omission of their arguments in the target language as according to the nature of these arguments (pronominal, adverbial, or nominal). Nonetheless, with all three verbs the same relation was found between two otherwise independent phenomena, namely the lexical diversity of the nominal arguments increases as a function of verbal morphology in the following order: uninflected infinitival form, inflected form, complex form. These results are based on a thousand utterances produced by two-to four -year-old children. 23 pages Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.