Abstract
This paper looks at the cross-linguistic complexity of two fiction-specific English-language constructions involving descriptive key words, viz. (a) depictive constructions and (b) reaction object constructions (ROCs). The English constructions in question were subjected to a detailed, corpus-based analysis in terms of their lexical realizations and complementation patterns. A comparison was then made (a) with French constructional equivalents in literary texts written by French authors and (b) with translations of literary texts from English into French and vice versa. The results show that, compared to English, French literary style has limited options for expressing descriptivity. However, whilst there is an almost total absence of full equivalents of depictives in French novels, the situation is more varied in the case of ROCs, with some types being fairly productive in French (e.g. hurler, murmurer) but others non-existent.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Space in the present article precludes a discussion of the transitive variant (e.g. unpleasant glimpses jerked him into life).
References
Aït-Mokhtar, S., Chanod, J., Roux, C.: Robustness beyond shallowness: incremental deep parsing. J. Nat. Lang. Eng. 8(2/3), 121–144 (2002)
Beaver, J.: Resultative constructions. In: Binnick, R. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2012)
Bouso, T.: Muttering contempt and smiling appreciation: disentangling the history of the reaction object construction in English. Engl. Stud. 98(2), 194–215 (2017)
Bozzeto, R.: La Science-fiction. Armand Colin, Paris (2007)
Goldberg, A., Jackendoff, R.: The English resultative as a family of constructions. Language 80(3), 532–568 (2004). https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/jackendoff/papers/EnglishResultative.pdf. Accessed 28 May 2017
Hanks, P.: Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploiatations. MIT Press, Cambridge (2013)
Himmelmann, N., Schulze-Berndt, E. (eds.): Secondary Predication and Adverbial Modification: The Typology of Depictives. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2005)
Levin, B.: English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London (1993)
Levin, B., Rappaport Hovav, M.: Unaccusativity: At the Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface. MIT Press, Cambridge (1995)
Martínez Vázquez, M.: Expressive object constructions in English: a corpus based analysis. Revista Canara De Estudios Ingleses 69, 175–190 (2014a). https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Montserrat_Martinez_Vazquez/publication/303523978_EXPRESSIVE_OBJECT_CONSTRUCTIONS_IN_ENGLISH_A_CORPUS_BASED_ANALYSIS/links/5746cadd08aea45ee856d00a.pdf. Accessed 28 May 2017
Martínez Vázquez, M.: Reaction object constructions in English and Spanish. E.S. Revista de Filología Inglesa 35, 193–217 (2014b). https://revistas.uva.es/index.php/esreview/article/view/732/714. Accessed 29 Aug 2017
Real Puigdollers, C.: The nature of cognate objects: a syntactic approach. In: Proceedings ConSOLE XVI, pp. 157–178 (2008). http://media.leidenuniv.nl/legacy/console16-real-puigdollers.pdf. Accessed 28 May 2017
Riegel, M., Pellat, J.-C., Rioul, R.: Grammaire méthodique du français. Presse Universitaires de France, Paris (1993)
Siepmann, D.: Lexicologie et phraséologie du roman contemporain: Quelques pistes pour le français et l’anglais. Cahiers de lexicologie, No. 108 (2016)
Snell-Hornby, M.: Verb-Descriptivity in German and English: A Contrastive Study in Semantic Fields. Carl Winter, Heidelberg (1983)
Talmy, L.: Towards a Cognitive Semantics, vol. 2. MIT Press, Cambridge (2000)
Tapanainen, P., Järvinen, T.: A non-projective dependency parser. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, pp. 64–71. Association for Computational Linguistics, Washington D.C. (1997). http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/980000/974568/p64-tapanainen.pdf. Accessed 28 May 2017
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dyka, S., Novakova, I., Siepmann, D. (2017). A Web of Analogies: Depictive and Reaction Object Constructions in Modern English and French Fiction. In: Mitkov, R. (eds) Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology. EUROPHRAS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10596. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69805-2_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69805-2_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69804-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69805-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)