French Noun Research Articles

The Body in Translation

The article proposes a translational analysis of the different strategies used in the translation from French into Romanian of the noun corps [body], its lexical family (i.e. the words corporalité, corporel, incorporel, corporellement, etc.) and some expressions containing it (such as prendre corps). The analysis is based on a corpus of several Romanian versions of French texts on theology and Christian spirituality (particularly Orthodox), produced by specialist translators with a recognised reputation and authority in this field in contemporary Romanian culture. The analysis shows that both the masculine noun corps, and its lexical derivatives analysed in the article, are translated into Romanian, in terms of their use in Orthodox theological and spiritual writings, by the canonical equivalent trup and its lexical derivatives, constructed in a similar way in the Romanian language. Indeed, while Romanian can offer two different equivalents for the translation of the French noun corps (trup and corp), there is one that is more specialised for its use in Orthodox Christian religious language: the noun trup. To translate all the words in its lexical family, Romanian uses the derivation that takes this name of Slavonic origin exclusively as its lexical base. One of the most important linguistic features of the texts of Orthodox Christian theology and spirituality written in Romanian is their ancient and even archaic lexicon, which is mostly of Slavonic origin. The operation of a cultural figement („figement culturel” – Dumas 2014: 17) quite often imposes, in translations into Romanian of modern foreign languages, the choice of an equivalent of Slavonic origin, to the detriment of another, of neological and non-Slavonic origin. This 'preference' for Slavonic can be explained by the particular dynamics of the process of forming the Romanian language, through the translation of ecclesiastical books from Slavonic (which was the liturgical language in the Romanian lands) into Romanian culture in the 7th and 18th centuries. The article also shows that in specialist texts on theology and Orthodox Christian spirituality, the noun trup translates not only the French noun corps, but also, in many contexts, the feminine noun chair. We can thus speak of a veritable discursive monopoly of this equivalent, and of a semantic generalisation of its discursive use. The article concludes that the synchronic competition between the two lexical equivalents that Romanian can offer for the translation of the French noun corps, namely corp and trup, is clearly won in this specialised type of translation by the noun trup and its long Slavonic diachrony.

The ambiguous nature of complex semantic types: an experimental investigation

Abstract Words with complex semantic types such as book are characterised by a multiplicity of interpretations that are not mutually exclusive (e.g., as a physical object and/or informational content). Their status with respect to lexical ambiguity is notoriously unclear, and it is debatable whether complex types are a particular form of polysemy (closely related to metonymy) or whether they belong to monosemy. In this study, we investigate the nature of complex types by conducting two experiments on ambiguous nouns in French. The first experiment collects speakers’ judgements about the sameness of meaning between different uses of complex-type, metonymic and monosemous words. The second experiment uses a priming paradigm and a sensicality task to investigate the online processing of complex-type words, as opposed to metonymic and monosemous words. Overall results indicate that, on a continuum of lexical ambiguity, complex types are closer to monosemy than to metonymy. The different interpretations of complex-type words are highly connected and fall under the same meaning, arguably in relation to a unique reference. These results suggest that complex types are associated with single underspecified entries in the mental lexicon. Moreover, they highlight the need for a model of lexical representations of ambiguous words that can account for the difference between complex types and metonymy.

Étude du nom diversité dans un corpus de déclarations de performance extra-financière : usages divers d’un concept « flou »

Cette étude met au jour les propriétés morphologiques, syntaxiques et sémantiques des emplois émergents (à partir des années 2000) de diversité. Elle procède également à une analyse quantitative et qualitative des usages de ce nom dans un corpus constitué par les déclarations de performance extra-financière de BNP Paribas et Hermès entre 2005 et 2020, s’inscrivant dans la communication RSE. Deux conceptions opposées de la diversité en ressortent : l’une offensive et dynamique, l’autre subie et statique.

Background of borrowed words in the english language and their translation

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation. Used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. "Calque" itself is a loan word from a French noun, and derives from the verb "calquer" (to trace, to copy). Loan translation is itself a calque of the German "Lehnubersetzung". Proving a word is a calque sometimes requires more documentation than an untranslated loan word, since in some cases a similar phrase might have arisen in both languages independently. This is less likely to be the case when the grammar of the proposed calque is quite different from that of the language proposed to be borrowing, or the calque contains less obvious imagery.

ТРАДИЦІЯ ВЖИВАННЯ І ТВОРЕННЯ ФЕМІНІТИВІВ В УКРАЇНСЬКІЙ ТА ФРАНЦУЗЬКІЙ МОВАХ

Personal feminine nouns are an active and dynamic category of words that is constantly evolving. The relevance of the study is determined by the need for a comparative analysis of the process of forming feminine nouns in the Ukrainian and French languages. The presence of the category of gender in both languages leads to the active creation of forms of feminitives and allows their comparative analysis. The article traces the main patterns of development of female nouns in Ukrainian and French. It is noted that the development of feminitives in Ukraine was slowed down in Soviet times and has become relevant in recent decades; in France, on the other hand, the process of developing women’s names was continuous. It is emphasized that in French linguistics it is recommended to avoid feminization of positions, as they are temporary. The article identifies ways of word formation of women’s nominations. It was found that the suffix word-formation is the most productive in the Ukrainian language. In French, the rules for creating feminine nouns are clearly unified. Feminitives are produced by changing the article, in a non-suffixal and suffixal way.

Deverbal nominalizations without overt suffixation in French

Recent work on argument taking deverbal zero nouns in English has shown that they are more present in that language than was previously thought. In this paper the presence and productivity of argument taking zero-derived nouns in French is investigated. It is shown that to determine which nouns can count as zero nouns, several decisions have to be made. This concerns their gender (do both masculine and feminine nouns have to be included in the research?), the determination of what counts as an argument, the criteria used to determine if a noun is an argument taking noun, the form and category that the base may have. On the basis of the adopted criteria and a dictionary and database research, a corpus of French zero-derived nouns in French is composed and analyzed. The results show that, as in English, zero-derived nouns in French are more productive than was thought.

ФЕМИНИТИВЫ В РУССКОМ И ФРАНЦУЗСКОМ ЯЗЫКАХ: К ВОПРОСУ ГЕНДЕРНОЙ ОКРАСКИ

This article is devoted to the problem of feminization of masculine nouns in French and Russian, which is important for achieving gender neutrality, i.e. equality of masculine and feminine words. The relevance of this problem lies in the fact that ambiguous ideas are quite often put into practice through words that are not familiar to our ears. Some examples in Russian are such words as «блогерка» (a female blogger), «авторка» (a female author), «профессорка» (a female professor), and others. And in French, la préfète, la magistrate, la députée and others. The authors of the article touch upon the issue of linguistic political correctness in relation to discriminated communities, or those considered discriminated: women, people of non-traditional sexual orientation, national, racial and religious minorities. There is also much discussion nowadays about people with disabilities The best example of how to erase the boundaries between the sexes in the Russian language is the word comrade. The work draws attention to the fact that the feminist community is not unanimous, since not everyone is in favor of feminitives. On the one hand, there is a group of radical feminists, and on the other, their opponents, who are definitely against innovations. In addition, we should not forget the majority of native speakers who speak at their convenience. The results of the study lead to the conclusion that if feminitives are regularly used, especially in the media and social networks, the society can get used to them very quickly. In other words, feminitives can penetrate the language if our life changes.

Cadres, scripts, registres — complexité de traduction des mots polysémiques

The article deals with issues related to the description of polysemic units for supervised automatic translation of texts from French to Polish based on the object-oriented method by W. Banyś (AOO). Applying to the description additional tools allowing for the disambiguation — frames, scripts and register analysis — the author focuses on presenting the complexity of the description of lexical units. It should be stressed that the decision to assign meanings of such words one or another equivalents in the target language is determined by the criterion of preference. Some of the meanings of the word are easy to describe in such a way that the program can make a correct translation into the target language with a high degree of probability. However, there are often such meanings whose description is much more complex. The closer the meanings of the disambiguated words in the original and target language and the more similar the communication situation in which they are used, the more difficult it is to clearly indicate the boundaries between the meanings. In such cases, there is a much greater range of preferential character of the translation, which we have to adopt The French noun conjunction (f), chosen for analysis, reflects this phenomenon very well.

Multilingual Analysis of Macrostructure in Online Lower Court Judgments of England and Wales, Germany, France and Spain: A Comparative Summary and Phraseology

Court judgments are documents in legal proceedings, defined as: “a court’s final determination of the rights and obligations of the parties in a case” (Garner, 2006: 388). The main importance of this legal document lies in the fact that it covers all private and public problems that may arise in society. Owing to this fact, court judgments can be found in most of the legal systems worldwide. The aim of this article is to establish a comparative study of court judgments from four legal systems and written in the following languages: English, German, French and Spanish. This paper is focused on the macrostructural structure of court judgments in four legal systems: England and Wales, Germany, France and Spain. Thanks to this contrastive analysis, we may establish some patterns in court judgments written in four languages and issued in four different legal systems in order to set some patterns that would be appropriate for legal professionals, translators and interpreters, linguistics, and other academic experts. This digital corpus is composed of 60 multilingual court judgments: 15 of England and Wales, 15 of Germany, 15 of France, and 15 of Spain, issued recently (between the years 2019 and 2020) from different lower courts of these four legal systems. This study includes an internal analysis of the structure observed in all the court judgments, main terminology in the four languages with a brief explanation in English and the common phraseology in every court judgment of our multilingual corpus. This paper also includes the masculine and feminine forms in German, French and Spanish nouns, such as the French noun “Demand-eur [masculine] /-euse [feminine]”. Thanks to these findings, we may find some linguistic parameters for experts to understand these essential court documents, how to compare their linguistic similarities and how to overcome the main linguistic differences of court judgments in these languages in order to make this study practical in several disciplines, such as foreign language teaching, specialized translation of comparative law, among many others.

What\u2019s in an agent?

This article investigates the morphological diversity of agent nouns (ANs) in French. It addresses the questions of which nouns form a semantically coherent class of ANs, what their morphological properties are, and whether these properties correlate with agentive subtypes. To deal with these issues, a distributional semantics approach is adopted. The investigation is based on the distributional study of monosemous deverbal ANs ending in -eur, and on the examination of word similarities in the French Wikipedia corpus. It is shown that French ANs as a homogeneous distributional class display a large variety of morphological profiles. ANs can be affixed, converted, compound nouns, as well as opaque and morphologically simple nouns. Agentive affixes are diverse and correlated to the selection of bases from different lexical categories and semantic types. It appears that agent meaning in the nominal domain is not necessarily imported from the verbal domain, but can develop directly in the semantic structure of nouns. In addition, a distinction between functional, occasional and behavioral ANs, depending on whether they denote agents with an occupational status, agents in a particular event, or agents with a tendency to act in a certain way, is proven to be distributionally relevant. This distinction applies to all ANs, possibly in correlation with specificities as regards morphological type, base and affix selection. The study illustrates that with a careful processing of linguistic data, distributional semantics can help answering basic research questions and support fine-grained theoretical distinctions.

Symptomatic Vocabulary with Built-in Emotion

The analysis of symptomatic vocabulary - units denoting a person’s reaction to a certain emotion or the state of a person who is in the grip of emotion is considered in the article. Two classes of symptomatic units are given: (1) units describing the uncontrolled physiological reactions of a person to emotion, for example, blush with embarrassment, pleasure ; (2) units that describe mental signs that indicate a change in a person’s normal behavior under the influence of strong emotion, for example, to go crazy with fear or jealousy . The focus is on a subclass of symptomatic vocabulary - symptomatic units with built-in emotion. The peculiarity of these units is that they reflect the conceptualization of emotion through a symptom that correlates with this emotion in the picture of the world of a particular language. For example, the verb blush in metaphorical use means a sense of shame ( blush for your actions, for your son ); the French noun stupeur stupor, numbness’ acts as a unit with built-in emotion, indicating a strong surprise. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that the analysis of symptomatic expressions, especially symptomatic vocabulary with built-in emotion, allows you to identify differences in the conceptualization of emotions in different languages.

Actual decomposition of the L2 French noun phrase in the predicate construction in the final written examination

The noun phrase (NP), one of the key elements of a sentence, can reveal the characteristics of a learner’s linguistic competence. The present study focuses on actual decomposition of NP in the predicate construction. This is when the attribute elements of a noun phrase are included in the predicate construct as factor-actualized determinants. In this position, the copula verb is merely a grammatical means of allowing the attribute to become a predicate (Gaulmyn, Basset 1991: 177).The aim of the study being a more thorough investigation of the criteria and peculiarities of producing this type of predicate constructs in learner language, the present research is based on the empirical material from the Lithuanian learner corpus. The paper briefly discusses the concept of the predicate construction and describes the process of compiling the learner corpus as well as the principles of data selection. The analysis of the NP in a predicate construction is then presented, and the characteristic cases from the corpus data are examined. The main limitation of the present study is related to the scope of the learner corpus. Having summarized the results of the quantitative and qualitative research, the following conclusions were formulated. The learner language is dominated by NP predicate constructions with an adjective more often than a noun. As to the verb conjunction, the typical attribute verb être ‘to be’ was the only one widely used in the corpus under investigation. The analysis of the corpus data also revealed a number of specific errors that are typical of the learners’ written language. In general, the predictive constructions in the learners’ language are characterized by the omission of redundancy tags in the grammatical categories of gender and number. The analysis of the learner corpus provided a broader look at the NP in a predicate construction, highlighting the simplicity, conciseness and repetition of this construct. The results of the study are important for a more comprehensive description of the learners’ language, for solving problems in foreign language analysis, and for contributing to the quality of teaching and learning the French language.

Language-specific prosodic acquisition: A comparison of phrase boundary perception by French- and German-learning infants

This study compares the development of prosodic processing in French- and German-learning infants. The emergence of language-specific perception of phrase boundaries was directly tested using the same stimuli across these two languages. French-learning (Experiment 1, 2) and German-learning 6- and 8-month-olds (Experiment 3) listened to the same French noun sequences with or without major prosodic boundaries ([Loulou et Manou][et Nina]; [Loulou et Manou et Nina], respectively). The boundaries were either naturally cued (Experiment 1), or cued exclusively by pitch and duration (Experiment 2, 3). French-learning 6- and 8-month-olds both perceived the natural boundary, but neither perceived the boundary when only two cues were present. In contrast, German-learning infants develop from not perceiving the two-cue boundary at 6 months to perceiving it at 8 months, just like German-learning 8-month-olds listening to German (Wellmann, Holzgrefe, Truckenbrodt, Wartenburger, & Höhle, 2012). In a control experiment (Experiment 4), we found little difference between German and French adult listeners, suggesting that later, French listeners catch up with German listeners. Taken together, these cross-linguistic differences in the perception of identical stimuli provide direct evidence for language-specific development of prosodic boundary perception.

Nominalization, verbalization or both? Insights from the directionality of noun-verb conversion in French

Nominalization in French can be done by means of conversion, which is characterized by the identity between the base and the derived lexeme. Since both noun→verb and verb→noun conversions exist, this property raises directionality issues, and sometimes leads to contradictory analyses of the same examples. The paper presents two approaches of conversion: derivational and non-derivational ones. Then it discusses various criteria used in derivational approaches to determine the direction of conversion: diachronic ones, such as dates of first attestation or etymology; and synchronic ones, such as semantic relations, noun gender or verb inflection. All criteria are evaluated on a corpus of 3,241 French noun~verb pairs. It is shown that none of them enables to identify the direction of conversion in French. Finally, the consequences for the theory of morphology are discussed. Dieser Beitrag ist ursprünglich im Peter-Lang-Verlag erschienen (https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/plg/jwf/2020/00000004/00000002/art00010)

Proper name-marking vialiaisonin French

AbstractTheliaisonconsonant [z] in French noun phrases has traditionally been assumed to function as a plural marker. The realization of “plural [z]” in N(oun)-A(djective)-combinations is becoming, however, very rare in naturalistic data – except for contexts which allow a proper-name reading. On the one hand, one might think that we are dealing with a recent phenomenon, the beginning of a potential linguistic change in French in the sense ofexaptation, reuse of former morphophonological material such as plural markers to signal proper-namehood in the sense of ‘frozen morphology’. If this turns out correct, we expect the productivity of the new synchronic function to increase: New NA-combinations which function as proper names should be realized systematically withliaison, and proper name-marking vialiaisonshould also become possible with otherliaisonconsonants. On the other hand, we may be dealing with a (completed) diachronic process, in that only those NA-combinations which allowedliaisonat the relevant point in time may have aliaisonconsonant in their univerbalized form. That is, new NA-combinations, even though they are used as proper names, do not display aliaisonconsonant, becauseliaisonis no longer possible. The purpose of this paper was to investigate, based on empirical studies, whetherliaisonproductively marks NA-combinations which function as proper names and distinguishes them from NA-combinations that count as common nouns, or whether we are dealing with a completed diachronic process. In view of the poor productivity observed, we argue that we are dealing with cases of univerbation.

Un articolo inedito di André Robinet, Le modele cybernétique dans la pensée politico-technique de G. W. Leibniz

An unpublished paper by Andre Robinet, which is dated February 5th, 2005 and focuses on Leibniz’s theory of law and justice, is edited and introduced by some preliminary remarks and clarifications. An explanation is proposed concerning Robinet’s claim according to which Leibniz’s use of the French noun ‘gubernation’ justifies speaking of a cybernetic model in his political and law philosophy. His 1994 book on Leibniz’s political thought, which is presupposed, has been consulted to clarify some aspects of Robinet’s article, which is devoid of footnotes. Some of the main texts by Leibniz on the subject have been identified, which are underlying in Robinet’s article.

(L’)espace de versus (le) temps de

This article focuses on temporal uses of the French noun espace (‘space’), in comparison with temps (’time‘). Our study deals with constructions such as l’espace/le temps d’un matin (’the space/the time of a morning‘—with a time noun) as well as with l’espace/le temps d’un cafe (’the space/the time of a coffee‘—with a non-temporal noun). After sketching the general contours of the comparison, we explore the symmetries/asymmetries of the sequences espace de and temps de according to whether or not they belong within a time complement. We show that time complements are contexts where the sequences in question function in a particularly symmetrical fashion (except in cases where they are preceded by a preposition).

Reduction of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa clusters in Parisian French

AbstractThis corpus study investigated pronunciation variants of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa (OLS) clusters in nouns in casual Parisian French. Results showed that at least one phoneme was absent in 80.7% of the 291 noun tokens in the dataset, and that the whole cluster was absent (e.g., [mis] forministre) in no less than 15.5% of the tokens. We demonstrate that phonemes are not always completely absent, but that they may leave traces on neighbouring phonemes. Further, the clusters display undocumented voice assimilation patterns. Statistical modelling showed that a phoneme is most likely to be absent if the following phoneme is also absent. The durations of the phonemes are conditioned particularly by the position of the word in the prosodic phrase. We argue, on the basis of three different types of evidence, that in French word-final OLS clusters, the absence of obstruents is mainly due to gradient reduction processes, whereas the absence of schwa and liquids may also be due to categorical deletion processes.

French anthroponyms as a heterogeneous category

AbstractIn natural languages, personal nouns (e.g.,madame, ministre) are used very frequently and it is usually not very difficult to identify and interpret them in texts. If one tries to define them more precisely, however, one is confronted with a series of challenges. This contribution gives an overview of several types of difficulties that can be observed when trying to establish distinctions between personal nouns and other words. They are related to lexical differences between (personal) nouns and (personal) names, the referential boundaries of humanness, some morphological and semantic properties of French personal names, their syntactic behavior as personal nouns in French as well as the types of predications that may be used in order to distinguish between personal noun use and other uses.1

LES EMPLOIS METAPHORIQUES DU NOM PLUIE EN FRANÇAIS ET DE SON EQUIVALENT RUSSE : ASPECTS LINGUISTIQUES ET COGNITIFS METAPHORICAL USES OF THE FRENCH NOUN <i>PLUIE</i> AND ITS RUSSIAN EQUIVALENT: LINGUISTIC AND COGNITIVE ASPECTS

Our article examines the metaphorical uses of the noun ‘rain’ in French and Russian. The metaphorical use of the French noun pluie necessarily contains a nominal expansion, while its Russian equivalent dozdj’ can take both nominal and adjectival expansions. Our corpus-based study distinguished three productive conceptual spheres for the metaphorical expansion of the noun ‘rain’, namely the natural, military and economical spheres. In both languages, the weather noun ‘rain’ loses some of its atmospheric meaning and is used in metaphors to insist on abundancy of elements in a given context, often in movement and coming from a not clearly identified source. These elements may be associated to destructive events (such as ‘a rain of bullets’) but they can also be involved in beneficial episodes (such as ‘a rain of money’) or in neutral incidents (such as ‘a rain of flowers’). However, the material nature of the elements is less important in French, where nominal expansions can include abstract nouns. In French, the noun pluie can function both as a semantic head of the NP and as a quantifier comparable with complex modifiers such as un tas de (‘loads of’), while in Russian the noun dožd’ necessarily functions as a semantic head.