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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]

This paper examines the collocations corresponding to fulfillment verbs and their nominal bases in Anglo-Norman French through an exhaustive scrutiny of the chanson de geste Beuve de Hamptone (end of the 12th century). The analysis concerning the fulfillment verbs is formalized through the three simple standard lexical functions Reali, Facti et Labrealij, as well as through complex functions and configurations of lexical functions that contain these three mentioned simple functions. The bases of the collocations are described in terms of semantic labels that, as the lexical functions, are part of the Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology. The paper includes a large number of examples and makes numerous remarks about the translation from Anglo-Norman to Modern French. [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]

The paper provides a quantitative study (on the syntax) of the placement alternation for the adjective within the noun phrase in French. Taking the hypothesis that position constraints are mostly preferential as a starting point, we develop a methodology based on statistical inférence in order to provide a formai account of the relative importance of three différent groups of constraints: combinatorial, frequency and length, and lexical constraints. The study highlights the clear importance of lexical constraints for deciding the effective position of the adjective within the noun phrase. We conclude the paper by bringing some éléments of discussion for two issues: the interaction between lexicon and grammar (or storage versus computation) and the underlying methodology for a probability-based study of syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assuming that each dialect variety reflects the idiosyncrasies of the different cultures, we address the variation of the specialized phraseological units of Peninsular Spanish and Venezuelan Spanish in judgments of appeals in civil matters. This paper summarizes the legal systems, compares the superstructures of the sentences by using corpus linguistics, extracts and compares the specialized phraseological units to identify similarities and differences. The analysis results show that: (1) there are lexical variants both within a single variety of Spanish and between different varieties; (2) Venezuelan Spanish has more synonymic formulations to refer to the part that starts a process and (3) there are no points of convergence in the use of specialized phraseological units to refer to the lawyers who assist the parties and act during the procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on verbal idioms. On the one hand, drawing on data from a small corpus study dedicated to French idioms and their Dutch translations, we argue that contrastive linguistics may function as a discovery procedure of certain typological features. Thus we show that syntactic structures with several prepositional phrases as argument are common in Dutch idioms, whereas they are rare in French. On the other, we adopt a variationnist approach with respect to French by studying verbal idioms in Belgian French, showing that although the overwhelming majority of idioms are common to the francophonie, Belgium, like all the other regions, has its stock of unique fixed expressions with lexical and syntactic features of its own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at describing the specific contribution of Franco Belgian bande dessinée (BD) to the modern redefinition of the heroic imaginary by reshaping adventure and its subject, the hero. It focuses on the articulation of two major features of the new paradigm Hergé has created: the unprecedented disjonction between adventure and ordinary life (time, family) and the organization of the hero into two characters (the main character and the sidekick). We examine the variations of the tintinesque paradigm in the historical Spirou as well as in the contemporary Spirou, in order to grasp how the autonomy of the adventure and of the main character has been shaken by the intrusion of time and domestic life brought about by the elucidation of the indetermined regions of Spirou's fictionnal world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at reading Hergé's major work in the light of Sloterdijk' s theory of spheres and Agamben' s reflexions on adventure in order to examine the place and function of the island in the adventures of Tintin, a hero without insulation. Much attention is given to the boundery topology of adventure in our discussion of the ontological transitions (human, animal) taking place on the threshold between in and out and of their anthropogenetic significance. We defend that every adventure story is a variation on the anthropogenetic one, and that Hergé and Sloterdijk diverge on the matter of island and insulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The morphemes such as the French au or the Italien nel are designed by different terms in grammars of Romance languages, which shows that it is difficult to identify the lexical category of this type of fusional morpheme. The aim of this paper is to propose a detailed analysis of these contracted forms. I suggest that the fusion occurs during a secondary grammaticalization. This process involves, on the one hand, the definite article, i.e. a grammatical element, and, on the other hand, some prepositions which, semantically, can be functional or lexical but which function syntactically as grammatical elements. The analysis shows that case inflection of nominals has been transferred to the preposition while the other categories appear in the article which merged with prepositions. Therefore, the fusional forms can be considered as prepositions marked by the grammatical categories of gender, number and definiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Résumé: This paper offers a diachronic analysis of a pair of subject complement constructions (répondre présent/absent: litt. 'to answer "present"/"absent") originating from quotative expressions. It shows how they lexicalized into fixed expressions denoting a routinized "delocutive" (Benveniste) procedure and how they finally got reanalyzed into a subject complement construction with an internalized projective and proactive meaning ("to act as expected"). The latter appears to be the result of the pragmatic strengthening of conversational implicatures related to the speech act. Further, it is argued that the remarkably similar evolution of répondre absent is due to analogization. Finally, the discussion of potential further host class expansion leads to a provisional answer to the question of whether or not these developments could be the symptoms of the constructionalization of a new copular verb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to account for single and double plurals of Arabic under Borer's nominal theory of division (2005). In particular, we study these plurals in constructions where the agreement between the verb and the plural is deflected and make four proposals : 1) broken plurals are feminine (and singular) at an underlying level in contexts where the agreement is deflected, thus not representing failure of agreement, contrary to appearances; 2) when the broken plurals agree with the verb, distributive or collective interpretations arise, and when the broken plurals do not agree with the verb, only the collective interpretation can be generated as a result of the atomizing function of the feminine gender that is independently found in the context of the singulative ; 3) the feminine broken plural constitutes the basis of the double plurals, so that the later surface at a higher level in the nominal structure, thus providing a second type of plural, with a counting function, while the plural generated under Div has an atomizing function; 4) the rules that we describe are quite predictable and productive, suggesting that the plurals studied in our paper are not lexical plurals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In 1672, an Italian grammar written in Dutch was printed by Abraham Wolfgang (1634–1694) in Amsterdam. The author of the grammar, published anonymously, can be identified as Lodewijk Meijer (1629–1681). His work, the Italiaansche Spraakkonst, displays a particularly explicit methodical organisation, which is reflected in the rigid and systematic presentation of the grammatical material, a consistent use of bilingual (Latin–Dutch) terminology, a highly parallel description of the word classes, and a rigorous application of the principle of structural conformity (analogia in Latin, gelijkvormigheidt in Dutch). Written in the framework of general and philosophical grammar, the Italiaansche Spraakkonst is conceived as a particular grammar of the Italian language which, though based on bookish sources, provides a very complete and didactically adequate description. The word classes form the core of the grammar: they are defined and described according to their nature, their (formal and semantic) subcategorisation and their possible combinations. The theory of the parts of speech is organised around two word classes, the noun and the verb, in relation to which all the other classes are defined. This paper sketches the historiographical context of L. Meijer's Italiaansche Spraakkonst, followed by an analysis of the methodology and terminology used in this work. Next, we investigate the organisation of the grammar by giving a global overview of the word classes, before proceeding to a more detailed analysis of two particular classes, the article and the adnomen (Dutch: bynaam), the latter referring to all types of adjectival forms. The positing of the adnomina as an autonomous word class is one of the most remarkable contributions of Lodewijk Meijer, a philosopher and friend of Spinoza (1632–1677), and a figure representative of post-Cartesian rationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate complex adpositions in Romanian, on the basis of a corpus study. Our goal is to provide an extensive list of complex adpositions and analyze the productivity of various patterns. In order to do so, we selected a number of candidate sequences, applied semantic and morpho-syntactic tests, and evaluated their frequency. Our results confirm the importance of two patterns: [Preposition + Noun + Determiner] followed by a genitive, and [Preposition + Noun + Preposition]. Though there are a few other patterns (such as [(Preposition +) Adverb (+ Preposition)]), these two are the most productive, making up a core of relatively frequent sequences with low variability, which pattern with simple prepositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop a new method of identification of complex prepositions, in French. We include well-known semantic and morpho-syntactic tests, and introduce a few others – together, these tests make up a multi-variable grid which we believe can help identify complex prepositions. We run these tests on a list of 75 sequences, most of which are considered to be complex adpositions. We also include sequences which share the same patterns of word formation but do not have prepositional uses, in order to check the validity of our grid. Our results show that the semantic and morpho-syntactic clues used to identify complex adpositions, combined with corpus data exploration, are on the whole quite effective, but to varying degrees depending on the pattern of formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two zero prepositions are postulated for French : the lexemes (On s' est vu rue de Rivoli 'We met on Rue de Rivoli'.) et (On s' est vu jeudi 'We met Thursday'.) The paper proposes a short discussion of zero signs in world languages and a justification for the French zero prepositional lexemes, as well as the lexicographic entries for these prepositions. At the same time, special surface-syntactic relations are introduced for the description of the phrases that denote durations and distances covered: duration-circumstantial and distance-circumstantial (On a travaillé deux semaines 'We worked two weeks' or On a marché trois kilomètres 'We walked three kilometers'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Édouard Pichon (1890–1940), a pioneer of psychoanalysis in France, is renowned for the seven volumes of his grammar Des mots à la pensée [From words to thought] (1930–1950), written with his uncle Jacques Damourette (1873–1943). It is less well known that this medical practitioner also sought to reconcile what he conceived as the mental representation of sounds (the psychological reality of phonemes, i.e. the perception of their differences) with the structural proposals of Troubetzkoy's phonology. His hypotheses, presented before a congress of psychology in 1939, have never been subject to the critical appraisal of linguists. In an eight-page handwritten note first published in this paper, Pichon attempted to make a novel distinction in the vocalic phonology of French by combining the features of aperture and length. He distinguished four cases: (i) an opposition based on both aperture and quantity, (ii) an opposition based only on aperture, (iii) an opposition based on quantity in an open syllable, (iv) an opposition based on quantity in a closed syllable. The examples given relate exclusively to the vowels /o/ and /ɔ/, without taking into account the other mid vowels. The postulate of an opposition of length that had disappeared since the 17th century is supposed in itself to justify the last two types. This distinction, which is not attested in any register of standard French in the 20th century, is exemplified by four pairs: pot/peau [pot/skin], cheminot/chemineau [railway worker/vagabond], tripot/depôt [bingo parlour/warehouse] and tricot/dispos [knitting/relaxed] in which the first element is considered brief). After having tested these words with some of the people around him, Pichon concludes that this opposition is specific to the upper classes in Paris without realizing that he was transforming the orthographic image of words into an artefact of perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, new food trends have been observed that show an increased interest in people for a healthy and balanced diet; that is to say, functional nutrition. This has contributed to the emergence of a new line of research in the field of food and nutrition: functional foods and nutraceuticals. It seems that this research is capable of increasing market share in the translation field. For this reason, it is becoming a well established subject for the training of both students and professionals in translation. The study of the above mentioned field has given rise to the creation of a systematic and descriptive terminological work. In this paper we present a few results obtained from our research. The paper is divided into the following sections: first we present the theoretical framework of our study. We then present our objectives (both main and specific), then the methodology we have followed throughout our investigation. Finally, we discuss the results and we show the glossary we have created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, research papers on fixed expressions emphasize the fact that those sequences are fixed compared to constructions with free components. After one study which was carried out in 2010 through which we were able to prove that a considerable number of verbal fixed expressions in common Peninsular Spanish allow changes in some of their components without causing a change in the meaning and maintaining their fixed state, in this paper we analyze verbal fixed expressions in the Latin American Spanish variety. This analysis allows us to observe the modes of variation in the Latin American Spanish verbal fixed expressions (paradigm, lexic, morphology, grammar) by following the same patterns and syntactic structures as in common Penninsular Spanish which we find in the case of diatopic expressions formed in the verbal fixed expressions of common Penninsular Spanish as well as in new diatopic verbal fixed expressions. The fact that there are so many verbal fixed expressions in the Latin American Spanish variety and also that this number will only increase in the near future reinforces the idea that we should create very complete data bases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to compare variation and change at the level of grammar and discourse, based on the data from the project "Multicultural London English - Multicultural Paris French". It examines the differences in the use of innovative features and their correlation with the main social categories. We focus on the use of in situ indirect questions (e.g. je sais pas c'est qui, je sais ça veut dire quoi) at the level of grammar and general extenders (e.g. et tout, et tout ça) at the level of discourse. The study reveals that the discourse-pragmatic and grammatical innovations pattern differently, with the latter being more socially divided. The paper seeks to contribute theoretical insights into the processes of grammaticalisation and change while questioning the existence of a typically "youth", "Parisian" multicultural French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A few thousand individuals can have the same first name but in a sentence, and without articles, a first name can refer to one person only and this person must be known to both the locutor and interlocutor. Moreover, the referential value is the same for both. Disambiguation is strongly dependent on contextual knowledge. In this paper we propose a functional model of the process by which individuals disambiguate the referential value of proper nouns, in particular first names. We focus on the interplay between grammar, general knowledge and the theory of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study the grounds for John Rupert Firth's (1890-1960) assumption that the 1923 paper, 'The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages' by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), would be a source of inspiration that would lead Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) to develop a new conception of meaning in terms of 'use'. Based on certain excerpts of Philosophical Investigations (1953), Firth established a filiation between ­Malinowski's two key ideas, namely the importance of the notion of 'context of situation' and the idea that language is a 'mode of action') and the main theses that Wittgenstein promoted (meaning as use, language acquisition, language as a set of games). Assessing the force of that claim will lead to clarifying the synergy of ideas that took place in the matter of pragmatics in Great Britain of the first half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the problem of the choice of the mood, indicative or subjunctive, in complement clauses in French. It focuses on the role of verbs, negation, interrogation, imperative, hypothetical subordination #8230; We show that current hypotheses on significations of moods lead to false prediction, and must be rejected. In the framework of the Modular Theory of Modalities (Gosselin 2010), we propose a new explanation in terms of convergence / divergence between constraints on modality, triggered by moods, verbs, negation, interrogation, etc. This explanation is grounded on the assumption that moods do not express modality, but only constraints on modality (taken in a wide sense). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to study past participle agreement of measure verbs in French. An attempt will be made to clear up the ambiguous status of the segment that agrees with the past participle of these verbs to determine whether this segment functions as a direct object (DO) or as any other complement. Based on the data obtained from a linguistic survey conducted at the Faculty of Philology and addressed to French and Spanish students, we will try to clarify the reasons why our students meet or violate the grammatical rules of the agreement of the past participle of these measure verbs with the auxiliary avoir. Our results will confirm the need to simplify these matching rules both for being artificial and opaque and, in many cases, and for lacking a solid grammatical base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semantic analysis of complex noun phrases (NP) is usually determined by the nominal nucleus. Adjectives and determiners complement the noun by adding pieces of information or changing the size of the expanded NP. This paper emphasizes nominal constructions in French where the semantic nucleus must be reassigned to units which do not operate as a syntactic nucleus of NPs. It first discusses what has historically motivated the progressive autonomy of the adjective from the noun. The study then reviews multiple aspects of quantifying and qualifying constructions in NPs, with particular consideration of metaphors. It analyses how some boundary sub-categories, participate in the semantic governance of NP: N2 in expressive binominal noun phrases (N1N2 or N1deN2), relational adjectives in (N1AdjR) groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we aim to reveal the distinctive features of the French synonymous lexies rage, fureur, rageur and furieux in the collocations in which each of them appears. Our study is corpusbased. We describe, in the functional perspective, how each of them preferred to be combined with some specific elements in the nearby context and, more generally, in a particular textual environment. Thus, we show that the what we have called 'discursive profile' of each lexie give relevant information to distinguish between these couples of synonyms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a lexicographic description of the polysemous word keuz e. regretf, from the Vannetais dialect of Breton. Our description is based both on written and oral usage, the latter being mostly that of the Pontivy region, in the North of the Department of Morbihan. Some of the wordsenses, not represented in the existing dictionaries of Breton, are described here for the first time. The theoretical frame of reference adopted is the Explanatory-Combinatorial Lexicology (ECL) of the Meaning-Text theory, a cutting-edge lexicological theory applied here for the very first time to a description of Breton data. An ECL-style lexicographic description, which, on the one hand, strives to make available to speakers all linguistic means necessary for an idomatic use of lexical units and, on the other hand, obeys formal descriptive principles, is not readily accessible to a non-initiated user. Therefore, the first part of the paper is dedicated to an explanation of the notions necessary for the comprehension of the lexicographic description proper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After his years of exile in France, Strindberg displayed a renewed interest in theatre and demonstrated a genuine sympathy towards the Catholic religion which he had come to know through fin de siècle French literature. In adopting an Catholicising writing, Strindberg assimilated these cultural borrowings, resemanticizing them in accordance with his personal past and social context. This paper takes as its starting point a hermeneutic reflection upon the value of cultural transfers, drawing on concepts provided by imagology and the notion of cultural transfers developed by Bourdieu and Espagne. Through his practice of rewriting, Strindberg displays his adherence to several national cultural spaces. In this paper, I will shed light on Strindberg's writing's hybrid nature and its innovative strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Chinese history of translation, the era of the late Ming Dynasty and the early Qing Dynasty is considered one of the four great periods of history during which translation activities abounded. This period witnessed in particular the arrival of large numbers of Jesuits and the emergence of quantities of scientific and technological translations covering a wide field of disciplines, thus distinguishing it from the other three periods. These translations resulted from the combination of several factors including economic, socio-cultural, psychological, and linguistic factors, and have in turn deeply influenced modern Chinese society. Given the importance of the translation activities of this period to the whole of Chinese history, this paper attempts to reflect on these activities and to give a brief presentation of them in order to identify their specificities, the superficial and underlying reasons for this translation boom, and their influence on modern Chinese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to identify the texts and domains that business translators usually translate from French into Spanish and vice versa. First, we briefly review the literature on business translation (surveys conducted among professional translators and studies written by scholars in the context of French and Spanish). Although this review gives us an indication of, for example, the kind of documents or domains to which some translator trainers expose their students, or the position of business translation among other types of translation such as legal, technical or literary translation, it does not give us an in-depth understanding of the Spanish market. For this reason we conducted a survey to find out more about business texts and domains. We present our survey-based study, describe the participants and identify the texts and domains that are most often translated. The results point to differences not only in the texts and domains, but also as far as the language combinations are concerned. The results are thus useful in helping translator trainers both to design specialised business translation courses or course modules and as the basis for further research on contrastive analysis of business genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with lexical plurals in French. It shows that lexical plurals are still within the scope of derivations that restore a [+ count] status, as witnessed by the presence of strongly individuating indefinite determiners. These shifts appear to line up with two canonical mass>count transfers, viz. the universal sorter and the universal packager. The latter comes in various subtypes according to the nature of the input-noun: packaging in three-dimensional space, temporal bounding, spatio-temporal bounding of complex activities and objects and, finally, "qualitative" packaging. In some cases, even a novel singular count form shows up (Une rillette, s'il vous plaît!), restoring the canonical grammatical opposition. These operations beyond "plural mass" confirm both the structural relevance of mass plurals as a lexical class and their genuine 'mass' status (mass being conceived both as 'dense' and 'compact'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to provide a corpus-based analysis of right dislocation constructions in spontaneous spoken French. Previous researches describe these constructions mainly as a possibility to signal continuation or maintenance of an already established topic relation, contrary to left dislocations that signal announcement or establishment of a new topic relation between a referent and a predication. We will show that if topic continuation or maintenance remains a frequent function of right dislocation of noun phrases, it can nevertheless encode new topic relations of referentially active or accessible entities, particularly in interrogative constructions. We will also provide some elements of analysis of right dislocation of pronouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to show that light verb constructions (LVC) are formed not only with predicative nouns, but also frequently with result nouns and some concrete nouns. We propose a quantitative verification of the hypothesis that in Czech, result nouns are at least as frequent in LVC as event nominalisations (“verbální substantiva”). The paper tries to explain reasons of this phenomenon and it shows the mechanism that allows concrete nouns to appear in LVC, not only in Czech, but also in French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tout has many different adverbial uses. This paper deals with one of them, which is hardly ever taken into account, or even mentioned, in grammar books: tout can be used as a premodifier of the subordinator comme in comparative constructions. Comme is the only qu-word that can be premodified by tout. However, there are heavy constraints on the premodification of comme by tout and the presence of tout, very often, prevents the actualization of meanings (time or cause for instance) which would be possible otherwise. The paper aims to show that, in comparative constructions, it is sometimes compulsory, sometimes optional or sometimes impossible to insert tout. These variations are a consequence of the basic meaning of tout, which is defined, after Franckel 1989, as a sign marking the absence of any form of otherness. The article ends with a few remarks on tout comme (with no constituent after comme). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the gradual abandonment of a functionalist perspective in labovian sociolinguistics. In an introductory point, the influence of French functionalism on William Labov, via Uriel Weinreich, is discussed. In the central part of the paper, Labov’s changing attitude towards functionalism is analysed, by distinguishing between different meanings of ‘functionalism’ and ‘functional’. It is shown how Labov gradually rejects the functionalist inspiration that was important in the beginning of his career. The reasons for this change in perspective, and its consequences, are examined. It is concluded that the rejection of the functionalist hypothesis does not affect the core of Labov’s work, which focuses on the correlation of social and linguistic structures. However, it leads to a very different conception of the nature of language variation and change.ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first part of the paper we give an overwiew of a natural syntactic class of constituents defined by means of a specific set of criteria : the “non régis” (NR) (non integrated in the grammatical structure of the utterance). This class, gathers, various kinds of grammatical units of non canonical syntactic status in traditional descriptions : sentence adverbials, appositions, interjections, non canonical subordinate clauses, discourse particles… In the second part of the paper we show that, contrary to current assumptions, these linguistic units are not randomly combined with the core elements of the sentence. They are inserted in the utterance according to specific ordering rules and distributional constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we aim to reveal the distinctive features of the French synonymous lexies rage, fureur, rageur and furieux in the collocations in which each of them appears. Our study is corpus-based. We describe, in the functional perspective, how each of them preferred to be combined with some specific elements in the nearby context and, more generally, in a particular textual environment. Thus, we show that the what we have called 'discursive profile' of each lexie give relevant information to distinguish between these couples of synonyms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the problem of the choice of the mood, indicative or subjunctive, in complement clauses in French. It focuses on the role of verbs, negation, interrogation, imperative, hypothetical subordination ... We show that current hypotheses on significations of moods lead to false prediction, and must be rejected. In the framework of the Modular Theory of Modalities (Gosselin 2010), we propose a new explanation in terms of convergence / divergence between constraints on modality, triggered by moods, verbs, negation, interrogation, etc. This explanation is grounded on the assumption that moods do not express modality, but only constraints on modality (taken in a wide sense). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semantic analysis of complex noun phrases (NP) is usually determined by the nominal nucleus. Adjectives and determiners complement the noun by adding pieces of information or changing the size of the expanded NP. This paper emphasizes nominal constructions in French where the semantic nucleus must be reassigned to units which do not operate as a syntactic nucleus of NPs. It first discusses what has historically motivated the progressive autonomy of the adjective from the noun. The study then reviews multiple aspects of quantifying and qualifying constructions in NPs, with particular consideration of metaphors. It analyses how some boundary sub-categories, participate in the semantic governance of NP: N2 in expressive binominal noun phrases (N1N2 or N1deN2), relational adjectives in (N1AdjR) groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to study past participle agreement of measure verbs in French. An attempt will be made to clear up the ambiguous status of the segment that agrees with the past participle of these verbs to determine whether this segment functions as a direct object (DO) or as any other complement. Based on the data obtained from a linguistic survey conducted at the Faculty of Philology and addressed to French and Spanish students, we will try to clarify the reasons why our students meet or violate the grammatical rules of the agreement of the past participle of these measure verbs with the auxiliary avoir. Our results will confirm the need to simplify these matching rules both for being artificial and opaque and, in many cases, and for lacking a solid grammatical base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to establish practical ways of comparing complex structures of two different Spanish dialects, in this case the Peruvian and Peninsular dialects. Fixed locutions may have either common elements in the extension and / or the support element or be totally different. In this last case, the researcher resorts to content similarities as total or partial synonyms of their elements, etc. Finally, we would stress the general lexicographical difficulties arising from intralinguistic false friends or exclusive words of both dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to consider syntactic and semantic properties of frozen predicates Prep N in Polish, which may express either a state or a property of the subject. Some of them correspond to adjectival interrogative pronouns, while others correspond rather to an adverbial interrogation. We discuss to what extent these and other syntactic features reflect the notional features, defined as a property or as a state and if they justify the division between the adjectival Prep N and the adverbial Prep N. Our analysis is based on Polish data but it also contains references to other languages: French, Korean, English. More general issues are also discussed in this paper: identification of the categories called parts of speech and transfer between categories (noun vs. adjective vs. adverbe). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focus on the 'scénario-type' of Amélie Nothomb's novels, which consists in a dialectic confrontation between the Protagonist and the Neighbor. This confrontation dramatizes what Slavoj Zizek calls overproximity which is the effect and the sign of the inconsistency of the symbolic order in contemporary societies. In Nothomb's novels, the Protagonist has to handle the massive and unbearable presence of the Neighbor threatening its subjective structure. With Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek and René Girard, we propose an interpretation of the ontological and ethical meanings of the necessary border between the Protagonist and the Neighbor in the novels of the most popular Belgian writer. The suppression and the resurgence of the border are understood in the larger framework of the antinomic tension between desire and enjoyment (jouisance), which affects the stability of the subjective and social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present the results of a corpus-based synchronic study of the formal and semantic functioning of the French speech-act related referential adjectives actuel and présent. By analyzing different parameters, such as semantic use, position, gradability, coordination and lexicalization, we are able to distinguish between different polysemy and homonymy phenomena related to actuel and présent, to study more in detail their interchangeability capacities for their temporal uses and to show that, with respect to a prototype-based delineation, présent, and in a lesser way actuel, deviate on certain criteria and can be considered as less representative of the speech-act related referential adjective class in French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]