73

If we admit, in agreement with the grammarian Pierre Le Goffic (1993, 277–78), that “the construction using the infinitive is the normal expression of (effective and imaginary) perception,” the fact remains that the current language trend (in French) deviates significantly from the correct usage adopted in French normative grammar. This is particularly the case with the verb voir (“to see”) which, while being “the only verb to present almost the whole range of АОs (attributes of the object)” (Willems and Defrancq 2000, 10), is not supposed, normatively speaking, to accept durative complementation (“en train de”). However, this construction is attested and seems to be in competition with the infinitive one. Our approach is based on corpus data and aims to answer the following question: Could the durative complementation be a (simple) combinatorial variant?