Search

Passive sentences have been traditionally analyzed in French by descriptive studies in the aim of elucidating the use of the auxiliary verbs être and se faire (Tesnière 1988; Le Goffic 1993; Riegel et coll. 1994; Le Bellec 2014). In Spanish, the formally equivalent auxiliary verbs are ser and hacerse but their use is not concurrent since hacerse is semantically restricted to express beneficial actions (e.g., Se hizo masajear la espalda, He had his back massaged). The goal of our paper is to compare –in spoken French and Spanish– the grammatical and lexical means used in the topicalization of non-volitional patients involved in unpleasant actions. Our results showed that French speakers produced 59.3% of passive sentences, whereas Spanish speakers showed a preference to conceptualize the Patient-victim as an accusative within active voice sentences (37.5%). Concerning the passive sentences produced by each group, French speakers showed an overt preference for the auxiliary se faire (78.9%), whereas in Spanish the Patient-victim's topicalization was most frequently marked by a Latin-derived prepositional object complement (58.8%). Our paper indicates that the topicalization of a Patient-victim is a distinctive typological feature between French and Spanish, and suggests the salience of passive-perspective conceptualizations in French for the semantic domain of unpleasant actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study the discourse marker in "dire" dis voir and its Spanish correspondent oye tú. We will look at the distributional and semantic-pragmatic values of dis voir in contemporary French, in order to verify its function in discourse. We will also provide a diachronic analysis that explains the traces of the old verbal locution. Contrary to what we might think, the Spanish equivalent does not start with a verb of saying but with the verb oír 'hear' – which also involves the interlocutor through the imperative and the second person singular – oye tú. We will see how, through a process of pragmaticalisation, the markers dis voir and oye tú cannot be considered strictly speaking as markers of speech or perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This article examines the different approaches to the theory of sounds which were adopted by the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929) during his academic career. His Polish nationality made it difficult for him to find a lecturer job in a Russian university, which was one of the reasons why he changed post rather frequently: Saint Petersburg, Kazan, Dorpat (now Tartu in Estonia), Cracow and Warsaw. To each assignment corresponded a change in his scientific outlook, especially in phonetics and phonology. Today, Baudouin de Courtenay is remembered chiefly for his functional phonology elaborated in Kazan with his follower Mikołaj Kruszewski (who was also a Pole) from 1875 to 1883. This perspective, however, was not the only one entertained by Baudouin during his career. In this paper, three periods are highlighted: an initial phonetic phase (more or less in line with Neogrammarian doctrine), the "Kazan phonology", and his final psychological conception. These periods are not neatly demarcated, so that views predominant in a period may linger on in a successive one. Each of these periods was, for a distinct batch of disciples, formative. They resulted in the creation of the Saint Petersburg phonological school, of which Ščerba was an important figure, and the Warsaw school led by Baudouin's former Polish students in Cracow. The Moscow Phonological School and the Prague School also reveal Baudouin's influence on their phonological conceptions. It is shown that the prominent role played by Baudouin in the field of sound theory is best understood in the context of his changing views, which, to some extent, were at variance with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some pioneering lexicographic research, notably that published in Volume IV of the Dictionnaire Explicatif et combinatoire (Mel'čuk et al. 1999), proposed a formalized treatment of some prefabricated polylexical units frequently mobilized in informal exchanges. In the same way, our paper focuses on expressive formulae commonly used in conversation and aims in particular to examine their illocutionary functions and their interactional roles, by specifying the type of clues (lexical co-occurrents, syntactic structures) allowing disambiguation. The formulae have been selected based on a frequency criterion, in the ORFEO oral database, with the addition of examples found on social media. We first look at the problems posed by pragmatic disambiguation, and then present – through the examples of bon courage and tu m'étonnes – a methodological approach, based on the notion of pragmatic framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will analyse the most frequent French and Italian proverbs in speeches at plenary sessions of the European Parliament (EP) from 2014 to 2022. After illustrating the methodology used in corpus-driven extraction of proverbs in French and Italian reference corpora (frWaC and itWaC) and in plenary sessions of the EP, some examples of proverbs in speeches at plenary sessions will be analysed in order to see how the EP staff interpreters deal with them in simultaneous interpreting (SI) from Italian into French. Furthermore, the multimodal dimension of proverbs and its management in SI will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyponymy is an essential semantic relation in terminology, as it represents the hierarchical organization of concepts. Much has been written about hyponymy extraction. However, terminologists working with French do not currently have user-friendly and freely available tools to automatically extract hyper-hyponymic pairs from their own corpora. This paper presents the most recent version of the ESSG (EcoLexicon Semantic Sketch Grammar) methodology, a knowledge-pattern-based approach that enables Sketch Engine to extract semantic relations. This methodology is applied to the development and evaluation of the ESSG-fr, a semantic sketch grammar for hyponymy extraction in French. The evaluation results show that the ESSG-fr is a reliable domain-independent tool for terminologists wishing to extract simple hyper-hyponymic pairs and the corresponding concordances from specialized corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conditional and the auxiliary devoir, in some of their uses, express inferential and reportive evidentiality. Several studies on evidentiality have investigated one or the other unit in one use or the other. This paper compares the conditional and devoir in their inferential and reportive uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is traditionally considered that in French the use of interrogatives is made according to their sociolinguistic values. In this paper we discuss an alternative approach in terms of 'interactive potential', a concept defined as the capacity of grammatical structures to facilitate verbal exchanges between interactants. After the analysis of 1659 yes/no interrogative structures found in the Swiss SMS Corpus (Stark, Ueberwasser & Ruef 2009–2015), we argue that it is possible to distinguish two types of structures: (i) 'strong' variants with a 'high interactive potential': their use is better adapted to general needs of interactants in informal communication; (ii) 'weak' variants with a 'low' or 'moderate interactive potential': their use is restricted to specific types of discourse contexts and syntactic constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]