Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 36, Issue 1, 2013

This paper focuses on a set of utterances that all contain a prepositional phrase (PP) in intrapredicative position, in the form en + NP, and mainly denoting a behaviour, a disguise or a fictitious role. The study first proposes a brief overview of previous studies of these uses of en since G. Guillaume (1919), before going on to examine the PPs from a syntactic and semantic point of view. Lastly, it is argued that in all the utterances examined, the PPs denote the result of a more or less abstract transformation process.

The article proposes a unified analysis of Behavior Evaluation Adjectives (BEA), like gentil ‘kind’ or prudent ‘wise’, whether the quality expressed is attributed to a human subject (Tu es vraiment gentil de nous aider ‘You are really kind to help us’) or to his/her behavior (Nous aider est vraiment gentil de ta part ‘To help us is really kind of you’). We argue that these two structures should be viewed as diathetic variants of one another, the structure with the clausal subject being the passive equivalent of the active construction with a human subject. BEAs function as part of an active complex predicate être ‘be’+A, which takes an external “agent” argument expressed by an NP+human and a direct internal argument, infinitive clause. Thus, BEAs function in all their usages as secondary predicates of “Individual level” type, providing the evaluation of a human subject as an agent.

The very existence of achievements (defined as instantaneous eventualities) is often questioned in the literature, which is why our first objective is to maintain that this aspectual class does exist, in the verbal as in the nominal domains. Thanks to a series of tests, we distinguish three subclasses of achievements : pure achievements (mere boundaries), right-boundary achievements (boundaries that are preceded by preparatory activity), and left-boundary achievements (boundaries that are followed by a stative interval). We use this aspectual classification as a basis to study aspectual inheritance from verbs to morphologically related (derived) nouns.

The paper proposes a lexicographic description of the polysemous word keuz ‘≈ regret’, 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.

This paper tackles the question of automated meaning acquisition. In several cases, meaning change can be considered as a process spreading both in time and through domains. In addition, this phenomenon relies on interactions between word meaning in discourse and dictionary definitions. We outline the main steps of a procedure to highlight the spread of a new word meaning in corpus, to extract semantic content represented by domain labels and to match corpus and dictionary information. The methodology is illustrated by experiments on several lexical units observed in a press corpus ranging from 2004 to 2010 and divided into several domains.