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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2022

Exploring directional deixis through parallel corpora: On the French verb arriver and its counterparts in Chinese, English, German, Italian, Hungarian and Russian

Résumé

The French verb arriver ‘arrive’ does not explicitly encode deixis, although it can imply a deictic orientation of motion (Sikora 2009, Bourdin, 1999). Arriver can thus be used both where the speaker is at the place of arrival (venitive use) or elsewhere (andative use). This paper aims to examine the deictic interpretation (Wilkins & Hill 1995) of arriver through descriptions of the same event in other languages. Drawing on a parallel corpus built from Harry Potter novels , we extracted 100 occurrences of the spatial uses of the verb arriver in the French version and their situational counterparts in six other languages: Chinese, English, German, Italian, Russian, and Hungarian . Following Wälchli and Cysouw (2012: 673), this dataset is thus comprised of comparable “contextually embedded situations”. We first identify the lexical as well as grammatical means available for encoding deixis across the languages sampled, e.g. lexically deictic verbs (e.g. English come, Hungarian jön), deictic particles or prefixes (e.g. German her-) or verbal complements (e.g. the Chinese morpheme -lai ‘hither’). Even if deixis is not overtly marked in Russian, (i.e. there is no verbal go vs. come opposition), the semantics of some perfectivizing prefixes (e.g. pri-) indicate a strong venitive bias. We then draw on several additional parameters that may favor a deictic interpretation, including the animacy and person number of the subject, the aspectual construal of the motion event, and the presence vs. absence of a locative expression. In Chinese, for instance, the presence of verb lái ‘come’ is systematically correlated to the absence of a locative expression, while this is not the case in English, which displays greater variation. This analysis allows us to describe the variation observed across languages for depicting scenes encoded by the verb arriver (cf. Wälchli & Cysouw 2012). While arriver is frequently aligned with COME verbs, and with other directed motion verbs (e.g. ENTER, GO UP) involving, in Aurnague’s (2011) terms, a change of placement and a change of locative relation, it can also be aligned with APPEAR verbs (e.g. turn up, emerge), depicting only a change of locative relation. We further explore the pragmatic and contextual features that may trigger the use of directional deixis. Our hypothesis is that directional deixis is more likely to be overtly expressed when the motion event is presented as extended in time and space (i.e. when the phase prior to the change of relation is salient) rather than when there is a focus only on the change of relation. Example (1) below depicts a situation which implies the journey has been difficult. Although the deictic anchor (HERE) is present in almost all versions, a ventive marker is explicitely used in (c), in hergekommen, in (d) dao + lai, and in (g) jön (come) + ide (to.here). Given the absence of a venitive verb in Russian (f), the prefix do- and the verb brat’sja ‘take oneself’ are used to focus on the difficulty of the journey. In conclusion, our interest is both typological, (i.e. we study the variation between the languages in order to determine whether directional deixis is an integrated component of Path or not (cf. Matsumoto et al. 2017, Matsumoto et al. 2022, Morita 2011, 2022), and cognitive: we investigate the extent to which different scenes constrain the use of certain forms. (1) a. FR : “Comment avez -vous fait pour arriver jusqu’ ici ?” how have.PST.2PL you make.PTC to arrive until here b. EN : “How did you get here ?” c. DE: “Wie bist du hergekommen ? ” how be you prox.dir-come d. ZH : “您是怎么到这里来的?” Nín shì zěnme dào zhèli lái de? you be how arrive here come NOM e. IT: “Come hai fatto ad arrivare fin qui ?” how have.PRES.2S made to arrive until here f. RU: “Kak ty sjuda do-bral-sja? how you to.here PR-take-PST.REFL? g. HU: “Mivel jöt-t-él ide ? ” what.with come-PST.2SSG to.here References Aurnague, M. (2011) How motion verbs are spatial: the spatial foundations of intransitive motion verbs in French. Lingvisticae Investigationes, 34(1), 1-34. Bourdin P. (1999) : « Deixis directionnelle et “acquis cinétique” : de ‘venir’ à ‘arriver’, à travers quelques langues », Travaux linguistiques du CerLiCO, 12 (La référence - 2 - Statut et processus), 183-203. Matsumoto, Y., Akita, K. & Takahashi, K. (2017) The functional nature of deictic verbs and the coding patterns of Deixis. In Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano (ed.) Motion and Space across Languages: Theory and applications, John Benjamins, 95-122. Matsumoto, Y., Akita, K., Bordilovskaya, A., Eguchi, K., Koga, H., Mano, M., Matsuse, I., Morita, T., Nagaya, N., Takahashi, K., Takahashi R. & Yoshinari, Y. (2022) Linguistic representations of visual motion: A crosslinguistic experimental study. In L. Sarda and B. Fagard (eds.) Neglected Aspects of Motion Event Description. John Benjamins, 43-67. Morita, T. (2011). Intratypological variations in motion events in Japanese and French: Manner and deixis expressions as parameters for crosslinguistic comparison. Cognitextes, 6. http://journals.openedition.org/cognitextes/498; https://doi.org/10.4000/cognitextes.498 Morita, T. (2022) What does deixis tell us about motion typology? In L. Sarda and B. Fagard (eds.) Neglected Aspects of Motion Event Description. John Benjamins, 25-41. Wälchli B. & Cysouw, M. (2012) Lexical typology through similarity semantics: Towards a semantic map of motion verbs. Linguistics, 50-3, 671-710. Wilkins, D. & Hill, D. (1995). When ‘go’ means ‘come’: Questioning the basicness of basic motion verbs, 6(2-3), 209-260. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogl.1995.6.2-3.209.
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halshs-03952843, version 1 (30-03-2023)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-03952843 , version 1

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Ludovica Lena, Eric Corre, Lise Fontaine, Laure Sarda. Exploring directional deixis through parallel corpora: On the French verb arriver and its counterparts in Chinese, English, German, Italian, Hungarian and Russian. NAMED (Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description) 2022, Yo Matsumoto & Takahiro Morita, Nov 2022, Kyoto, Japan. ⟨halshs-03952843⟩
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