Chapter published in:
The Expression of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality in Albert Camus’s L'Étranger and Its Translations / L'Étranger de Camus et ses traductions : questions de temps, d'aspect, de modalité et d'évidentialité (TAME): An empirical study / Etude empirique
Edited by Eric Corre, Danh Thành Do-Hurinville and Huy Linh Dao
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa 35] 2020
► pp. 12–37

Chapter 2. De la sémantique des temps verbaux à la traductologie

Une comparaison multilingue de L’Étranger de Camus

| Utrecht University
| Utrecht University
| Utrecht University

We develop a linguistic analysis of the distribution and meaning of the verb forms used to translate the Passé Composé in Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, English and Greek. To achieve this, we carry out a multilingual comparison of tense use in L’Étranger, based on an exploration of data extracted from the original and its translations. We apply Multidimensional Scaling (Wälchli & Cysouw, 2012) to generate a cartographic visualization of the verb forms in the multilingual dataset. The subset relation emerging from the temporal maps links the decrease of the perfect to an increase of past tenses. The investigation of key examples shows how lexical, compositional and dynamic semantics interact and lead to the observed cross-linguistic variation in perfect and past tense use.

Keywords: multilingual comparison, past, perfect, Multidimensional Scaling, semantics
Published online: 11 August 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/lis.35.02van
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