The substantivation of the infinitive in Old French

In the first part of the article the infinitive is characterized in the whole verbal system and the general theoretical parameters of this substantivation are brought out. After this restatement the study is devoted to the substantivation of this mood and his fundamental characteristics in Old French, that is the possibility to have a complementation. A distinction is made between essential and accidental substantivated infinitives. The first are characterized by morphological, syntactical and semantical criteria and seem restricted to fundamental zones of the human activities, The second, facultative, can have the characterization and complementation of the substantive and of the verb at one and the same time. They often are favoured by some conditions (use of the preposition de, verbal constructions, use of sanz point de) and express all the functions of a noun. They often occurs as a synthetical form of thematization (condensed anaphoric recapitulation or cataphoric thematization) and as a preferential process of abstraction in the courtly and allegoric style of the 13th century. These possibilities and the range of these uses are more and more limited in the evolution, where French diverges in his typology of the other romance languages, and specially on and after the classical period, but the substantivation of the infinitive rises again actually - without complementation - in using the resources always available of the mood.