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- Volume 45, Issue, 2010
Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Volume 45, Issue 1, 2010
Volume 45, Issue 1, 2010
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Déterminants et noms de pays en français contemporain: Morphophonologie ou sémantique ?
Author(s): Jean-Claude Anscombre and Danièle Flamentpp.: 1–15 (15)More LessThis article deals with the particular function of feminine proper nouns as names of countries. Unlike masculine nouns, these often do not need the definite article: le président (de l’Italie/du Chili) vs la reine (du Danemark/de Suède), habiter (en France/au Danemark). Many explanations have been suggested: morphological ones (nouns ending in -e or beginning with a vowel), lexical ones (archaisms) or semantics ones (the presence/absence of a definite article conveying different sorts of locative meanings). None of these are completely satisfactory, however. In fact, proper nouns as names of countries may be considered as a sub-class of a locative noun-class which includes common nouns. These exhibit the same linguistic properties when their referent is unique: au ciel/en enfer, au printemps/en automne. Our assumption is that the en/dans opposition between activities and locations (être en prison/dans la prison) pervaded the en/à opposition. We shall establish that these constructions are phrases with a zero article and have semantic and syntactic properties associated with the meaning of specific activity. The consequence is that locative proper nouns cannot be considered as rigid designators. They have the same status as common nouns and can convey the persistent symbolic power of myths. This explains why the French say en juillet faucille au poignet, July being the harvest month, and why they speak of pêcheurs d’Islande not to refer to Islandic fishers but to the legend of cod-fishing in ancient times.
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Analyse multicomponentielle de la combinaison Voilà pour en français moderne
Author(s): Sylvie Porhielpp.: 16–44 (29)More LessThe aim of this paper is to analyse the combination Voilà pour in modern French. In order to deal with this linguistic item our analysis combines four components: a morphosyntactic component, a lexical component, an enunciative and pragmatic component and a textual component. By doing so, we established that voilà pour X can be interpreted on a deictic or on a textual level. In the first case pour introduces an addressee and in the second, pour is a thematic introducer. Voilà pour is then used at the end of a thematic development and is semantically dependent from a previous textual portion.
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Intensité et délocutivité dans les adverbes en -ment
Author(s): Laurence Rouannepp.: 45–69 (25)More LessThe diachronic study of a series of adverbs derived from what seems to be a noun — diablement, bigrement, fichtrement, among others — provides the basis for positing the delocutive origin of these adverbs. The study illustrates how their high degree value is developed from a specific enunciative strategy, used by the speaker of the corresponding interjections: Diable !, Bigre !, Fichtre !, etc. The article highlights various syntactical, relational criteria which characterise this type of adverb, contrasting them with others such as drôlement or prodigieusement, which also denote intensity. Finally, the adverbs in question are included in the category of “markers of enunciative attitude”.
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Approche procédurale et référence temporelle du futur de l’indicatif en français
Author(s): Camino Álvarez Castropp.: 70–89 (20)More LessThis essay analyses the future tense in the French verbal system in order to explore its semantic content, as well as its contribution to the fixation of temporal reference. Our study adopts a procedural perspective: we argue that the future tense has an instructional content that leads the hearer to a temporal — or other- interpretation of a given occurrence. We also contend that the semantics of the future tense is underdetermined and, thus, it must be filled by the hearer with co(n)textual information during the pragmatic process of interpretation. The analysis of the procedural meaning coded in the future tense — around three temporal coordinates — and its function in various linguistic environments prompts us to deal with temporality and aspectuality. Besides, it leads us to distinguish, among other things, a default instruction that we perceive as the trigger of a deictic calculation of the future temporal reference.
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L’un dans l’autre: Enigme et métaphore filée dans un jeu surréaliste
Author(s): Philippe Gréapp.: 91–116 (26)More LessL’un dans l’autre (“The one in the other”) is the name of a surrealist collective game created in the fifties by André Breton. Less famous than the exquisite cadavers, it is based on a particular use of the threaded metaphor and consists in an enigma that has to be cracked by the players. On the basis of Rastier 1987’s interpretive semantics, this study describes the semantic foundations of the game and the mechanisms that lead to the discovery of the solution. It shows how l’un dans l’autre forms what can be called a semic complex and how a rule of optimality eventually paves the way towards the answer.
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Épistémologie et esthétique de la déception chez Proust et Cioran
Author(s): Joseph Acquistopp.: 117–130 (14)More LessE.M. Cioran’s ideas about disappointment illuminate the role of deception in the aesthetics of Marcel Proust. With reference to the narrator’s experience watching the actress la Berma, I show that the desire to know is at the heart of deception in both writers, and that disappointment is not a failure but rather a necessary step on the way to lucidity. This initial despair-laden lucidity then yields, in both writers, to a second kind of lucidity that, in the pessimist tradition, seeks passion in life within a fiction that can modify our expectations so that a non-deceptive and undespairing lucidity arises within the domain of the aesthetic.
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L’adverbe alias en français
Author(s): Mathilde Sallespp.: 149–167 (19)More LessAccording to dictionary definitions, the adverb alias in French seems to be a metalinguistic adverb and a kind of marker of paraphrastic reformulation. However, its semantic value is not reduced to these two characteristics: not only does it have non-metalinguistic uses, but its strictly metalinguistic and paraphrastic uses appear, in fact, rather marginal. Its principal uses are betwixt and between, since they blend information about the referent and its names.
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New thoughts on an old puzzle
Author(s): Martin Maiden
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