Adverbes figés en contraste

Summary A comparison of frozen adverbs : PDETC forms in French and in Italian

A contrastive analysis is made of some frozen adverbs in French and Italian having the following structure :

[N₀ V] Prep Det C =:

[Max agit] dans la coulisse

([Max agisce] dietro le quinte)

The syntactically classified samples were taken from three corpora : the lexicon-grammar of French frozen adverbs (M. Gross 1990a), the lexicon-grammar of Italian frozen adverbs (De Gioia 2001), and the comparative lexicon-grammar of French and Italian frozen adverbs (De Gioia 1995).

The analysis focuses on the syntactic functioning of the PDETC adverbs and on their constituent structure in the two languages. Furthermore, since comparative lexicon-grammar enables comparison at a number of levels, the French PDETC adverbs were contrasted with their semantic equivalents in Italian, which are not only PDETC. This allowed a discussion of various types of correspondence.

The results of the analysis constitute a useful basis for further contrastive studies and for translation.