This study explores the issue of Associated Motion (hereafter AM) in five languages spoken in Africa and Asia. We investigate grammatical morphemes whose function is to add a motion process to the event encoded in the verb expressing the main (non-motion) event, and to specify the temporal… read more
This paper compares the expression of Source and Goal in German and Polish, on the basis of descriptions elicited with a series of video clips. As satellite-framed languages (Talmy 1985, 2000), both German and Polish mainly rely on grammatical morphemes to encode Path of motion with respect to… read more
In this chapter, we investigate color naming in French and Occitan. It is well known that French, compared to other Romance languages, has a tendency to be very analytic. This raises the following question: do speakers of French and other Romance languages (here, Occitan) differ in morphological… read more
In this chapter, I describe the evolution from Latin to French, focusing on a specific typological change: that from a Satellite-framed to a Verb-framed language, in the (much debated) dichotomy established by Talmy (1985). The goal of the paper is to describe in detail the loss, between Medieval… read more
In this paper, we investigate complex adpositions in Romanian, on the basis of a corpus study. Our goal is to provide an extensive list of complex adpositions and analyze the productivity of various patterns. In order to do so, we selected a number of candidate sequences, applied semantic and… read more
In this paper, we develop a new method of identification of complex prepositions, in French. We include well-known semantic and morpho-syntactic tests, and introduce a few others – together, these tests make up a multi-variable grid which we believe can help identify complex prepositions. We run… read more
In this paper, we investigate the evolution from imperatives to discourse markers in Romance, with a corpus-based approach. We focus on the case of items coming from verbs meaning ‘to look’, in a semasiological perspective: Spanish and Catalan mira, Portuguese olha, Italian guarda, French regarde,… read more
This paper presents an in-depth study of the semantics of the French discourse marker alors ‘at that time, then, so’. Its evolution from temporal adverbial with local anaphoric meaning to polysemous marker including conversation management uses in spoken French is traced through a systematic… read more
In this paper, we investigate the evolution from imperatives to discourse markers in Romance, with a corpus-based approach. We focus on the case of items coming from verbs meaning ‘to look’, in a semasiological perspective: Spanish and Catalan mira, Portuguese olha, Italian guarda, French regarde,… read more
In this paper, we propose a contrastive corpus study of French car and parce que and Italian ché and perché, meaning “because”. Our goal is to assess the importance of subjectivity in grammaticalization in general, and in the renewal of causal conjunctions in particular. The evolution of these two… read more
Summary The aim of this paper is to investigate a particular aspect of semantic change. Many theories have tried to capture the regularity in semantic change. In this respect, some linguists have claimed that space is the necessary starting point of any semantic development, and others have stated… read more