Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 47, Issue 1, 2024

A new type of morphological expressive linguistic means and the corresponding linguistic sign are described: 1 — an expressive linguistic means that is an operation on the signified of the target lexeme; and 2 — a sign whose signifier is a metasemy1. Thus, the English metasemy2 painting, when applied to a human proper name, such as, e.g., Turner, produces a derived lexeme, in this case, painting(Turner) = [a] Turner ‘[a] painting by Turner’ (I have seen two excellent Turners). A formal description of the Russian metasemy2 ‘place2’ is presented, based on the analysis of the Russian phrase u otca ‘at father’s’ = ‘at father’s place2’, where the underlying lexeme otec ‘father’ and the derived lexeme (otec) are involved, the meaning ‘place2’ being expressed by the metasemy2 . The English and French translational equivalents of this phrase, Eng. at father’s and Fr. chez le père, are shown to have different organizations: in at father’s, the meaning ‘place2’ is carried by the ’s-form, and in chez le père, by the preposition chez. A tentative list of known Russian metasemies2 is supplied, as well as the similar lists for English and French. A metasemy2 always expresses a metonymic semantic relation between the underlying lexeme and the resulting derived lexeme; it is a derivational morphological means, parallel to derivational affixes. Metasemy2 seems to exist universally.

La Nature (1873–1962) is a French popular science magazine that spanned a large time period and a large range of topics. It is available via ocerized archives so that it forms a corpus that is simultaneously diachronous, heterogeneous, and noisy. Although these characteristics make it complex to analyze, La Nature is of great interest for digital humanities studies on the evolution of thoughts in science, technology, and even politics. The work presented in this article is part of research on the semantic annotation of these archives, which is discovering clues for exploring them. One type of clue that has not been explored in a complex corpus such as La Nature is binomial names, or more specifically, the named entities that refer to the Linnean classification of life, e.g., Escherichia coli. To overcome this complexity, the concept of a Competent Reader, who can detect binomial names even when obsolete, non-standard or defaced by OCR, is introduced. By imitating a Competent Reader, our approach, which we call the Competent Reader Imitator (CRI), involves combining a rule-based approach with a frequency argument. We show that this innovative method is robust to numerous variations and consistently achieves an F-measure of about 70% despite diachronicity, heterogeneity, and noise, which are all known to impede named entity recognition. Our method has many potential applications, such as in the study of chemical names and names of scientific and technical artifacts, which could benefit from the Competent Reader imitation approach. Beyond our work on La Nature, we hope this paper provides a set of tools and methods that are easily understandable, frugal, and usable for a general public interested in exploring similar historical corpus.

This article analyzes the specific temporal uses of the Serbian verb stići, when it denotes the act of overcoming a spatial obstacle, or reaching the end point of a movement at a predetermined time. The study examines the relationship between the spatial (basic) use of this verb and its derived telic sense, and describes the process of its grammaticalization, in which this lexeme loses its semantic and syntactic autonomy and becomes part of a complex predicate. The contrastive section of the study compares the non-spatial uses of stići with the corresponding uses of its French equivalent, the verb arriver.

This study examines the syntactic features of French medical and general texts to clarify their complexity and implications for comprehension. By analysing corpora from both domains, we found significant differences in the use of passive voice, present participles, negation and gerund constructions. In medical texts, the passive voice and present participles are more frequent, reflecting specialized discourse and precision. In contrast, negation and gerunds are more common in general texts, emphasizing the diversity of syntactic structures, and specific stylistic and argumentative effects. Our findings underline the need for clear communication in medical texts and provide empirical evidence for the simplification.

This project proposes an innovative approach to the history of French by replacing the ‘tunnel vision’ (Watts/Trudgill 2002) which characterizes the vast majority of studies of ‘Classical French’ by a wider approach, based on an extraordinarily valuable source, i.e. the ‘Prize Papers’. The Prize Papers are a collection which includes 50,000 undelivered private French letters, confiscated between 1652 and 1815 during the frequent military conflicts between France and England. The documents are held by the National Archives of the United Kingdom in London, and are remnants of the privateering era, a longstanding legitimate activity of capturing enemy ships. These countless captured letters are becoming known to historians, who have recognized them as an invaluable source of information on the period in question, but have so far attracted little attention from linguists, even those focusing on diachrony. The MACINTOSH project is the first French initiative to explore this collection, and aims to show how the alternative data provided by these private documents can broaden the scope and fill the gaps left by traditional historical linguistics. The research focuses on the first French colonial era, shedding new light on the dynamics and mechanisms that led to the French and Creole varieties existing in America and the Indian Ocean.