Le sens grammatical

Abstract

Most grammatical units present various related meanings depending on the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which they are used. This polysemy has often been dealt with by assuming a first concrete meaning, from which the other meanings are derived. For instance, many prepositions are supposed to be primarily spatial, their non-spatial uses being metaphorical. Here we contest such a point of view and we propose a theoretical framework in which grammatical units are tools specialised in constructing what we call verbal scenes, which are evoked by utterances. In this approach, one can associate every grammatical unit with a unique schematic form, which indicates how the unit interact with the linguistic and extralinguistic context. The schematic form is directly formulated in terms of the properties of the verbal scene. In particular, verbal scenes possess and abstract topological structure and the meaning of the so-called spatial prepositions can be described in abstract topological terms accounting for all their different meanings .