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. 325–351

Chapter 17
Verbless sentences in L’Étranger

A French – Russian – English contrastive study

| Université de Paris, CLILLAC-ARP UR 3967
| Université de Paris, CLILLAC-ARP UR 3967

What is aspectual meaning without a verb? Focusing on sentences in which the typical marker of aspectual meaning – the verb constellation – is absent, we use translations to explore the aspectual meaning pragmatically implicated by verbless sentences. Retrieved automatically, they were analyzed from a monolingual, parallel-text and third-language perspective. Semantic annotation for situation and viewpoint aspect showed that while states are an important correlate, verbless sentences are also found in contexts that call for the use of dynamic situations. English verbless sentences tend to implicate the French present simple and require an indexical relation to the situation of utterance. In spite of its high frequency in the novel, the French passé composé is excluded from the conversational implicature of Russian and English verbless sentences.

Keywords: verbless sentences, aspect, translation corpora, quantitative contrastive analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Semantically undetermined aspect
  • 3.Corpus from three perspectives
    • 3.1Non-elliptical verbless sentences
  • 4.Automatic retrieval and manual annotation
    • 4.1Verbless sentence extraction
    • 4.2Annotation definitions
      • Precisions
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Stative and dynamic situations
    • 6.2English verbless sentences: Indexical relation to the utterance situation
    • 6.3Viewpoint type
    • 6.4Verbless sentences in Russian exclude the Passé Composé as translational equivalent
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 August 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/lis.35.17bon
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