Le parallélisme fonctionnel des constructions verbales transformées en slovaque et en français
The functional parallelism of transformed verbal constructions in Slovak and in French
Author(s): Katarína Chovancová, Simona KrafčíkováSubject(s): Syntax, Comparative Linguistics, Western Slavic Languages
Published by: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci
Keywords: grammar; verb; valency; agent; Slovak; French;
Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with selected types of syntactic constructions of verbs in Slovak and in French. The focus is on the impersonal reflexive use of the Slovak third-person singular (A) and its correspondence with first-person generic plural constructions (B) of the same Slovak verbs. The third type of verbal construction under focus is the French “on”-subject construction (C). The corpus-based study is conducted using the Slovak National Corpus and the French corpus Frantext on a narrowed sample of 12 Slovak verbs of sight and their French semantic counterparts. Occurrences of A and B constructions were excerpted from the corpus. Once their frequencies had been assessed, five core Slovak verbs of sight were treated further to verify the hypothesis of the interchangeability of A and B. The verification took the form of a substitutional test in authentic contexts. In the final step, the interchangeability of A/B and C was checked. The interchangeability of A and B was confirmed in two-thirds of the sample. Differences were shown between different hyponymic groups established in the sample set. Functional parallels between A and B proved to be linked to specific pragmatic values of the verbs that were studied. In relation to the functional parallelism between A/B and C, exemplification demonstrated that C remains, together with the passive, one of the two main French functional equivalents of Slovak agentless constructions. The paper is a contribution to a larger contrastive research study on verbal transformations aimed at the conception of a valency transformation grammar of Slovak and French with potential impacts on translation and language teaching.
Journal: Romanica Olomucensia
- Issue Year: 32/2020
- Issue No: 2
- Page Range: 231-242
- Page Count: 12
- Language: French