Starting from the basic aspectual distinctions between ‘state’, ‘event’ and ‘(incomplete) process’, an aspectualized predicative relation is actualized on a topological continuous interval of instants: open interval with a state; closed interval with an event; closed interval on the left and open interval on the right with an incomplete process. Some properties are closely linked to events: an event is surrounded by two states, a state before and a state after; it is generally not punctual hence it is compatible with durativity. A predicative relation which is aspectualized as an event is actualized on a closed interval but it is only true at the closed boundary on the right, the last instant of the event. An event can cover different events which are different parts of the global event. When a process is complete, it generates an event and also a resulting state at the last instant of the generated
event; this last instant is a continuous cut (in Dedekind’s sense) between the event and the resulting state. An event can be only complete (as He painted the room for one day, in French : “accompli”) or completed (He painted the room in one day, in French : “achevé”): every completed event is complete but not vice versa.

In the following article we look into the question of the aspectuality — such aspectuality which can be observed at the grammatical, semantic and syntactic-discourse levels. The investigation is set in the Framework of cognitive linguistics, especially in J.-P. Desclés’s conception of the event and R. Langacker’s cognitive grammar. Upon presenting various points of view concerning the notion of the event and the category of the aspect, we propose analysis of the sentences which are the result of the process conceptualization of the events and then those sentences which stem from the event conceptualization of the states and processes. We observe that the aspectuality as an effect of processing situational data already forms at the cognitive level. In other words, the event dimension of the proposition content is not limited to the mere addition of various aspects (these aspects are often mutually exclusive), but it reflects the simultaneous configuration of the aspectual, temporal,
actant and modal data at the conceptualization level.

Definitions of reported speech are neither clear nor unambiguous, even in the case of the most classic forms, i.e. direct and indirect speech forms which have been recognized for a long time by the vulgate. In this contribution, we aim to show that these definifitions come to the fore in three different approaches: the first one would be associated with Charles Bally’s enunciative studies (1912, 1914) and Gérard Genette’s narratological study (1972), the second one appears in the approaches of “enunciative heterogeneity” by Jacqueline Authier-Revuz (1992, 1993), and the third one is presented in the works of Jacques Bres and Bertrand Verine on the dialogical principles in speech (2002). Our hypothesis is that ambiguities linked with the different theories of reported speech come from a heterogeneous (non stabilized) description of the status of the attributive speech in reported speech (also often called quoting speech or introductory syntagm) and may be the cause of divergences in the analyses of speech facts.

Considering all kinds of definitions, the distributional definition seems the most useful when we want to determine the class of event nouns, in particular, there exists a series of dedicated verbs (e.g. avoir lieu, se produire, survenir…) which select event arguments. In this paper we try to see whether the phrase être (le) témoin de may join the series of dedicated predicates, and if so, under what conditions. A corpus study enables us to ascertain that, if a nominal phrase expressing time or place appears as the subject of this verbal construction, it causes a nominal phrase expressing an event to appear as the object. Grammaticalization marks are visible at the syntactic as well as at the semantic level. The exchange of functions makes the noun phrase in the position of a subject acquire the status of an adverbial, the event noun in the object position — that of the main predicate (nominal), and the expression être (le) témoin de becomes the grammatical support thereof. The grammaticalization takes place preferably in propositions in the past or future tenses, and is often based on a personification or a meaning transfer as a metaphor or a metonymy.

The object of our study is French constructions with the perceptive verbs voir, entendre and sentir and their translations into Polish. Those verbs take three types of object: (1) a subordinate clause introduced by que, (2) a noun phrase with a relative clause introduced by qui, and (3) an infinitive clause. Hence, the perception of an event can be moderated by the three different constructions. The differences between these structures are not only syntactic, visible at first glance, but also semantic. The first two structures have an equivalent in Polish, but the third is absent from the target language. Our aim was to verify if the differences between the analyzed structures are visible in their Polish translations and to see what the choices made by the translators could have depend on (the structure, the verb itself or the meaning).

The aim of this study is to observe the importance and specific nature of pauses in speech production, depending on the context. Samples of François Hollande’s speech in two different TV debates are analysed: in the first one he debated with Martine Aubry during the second round of the Primary Socialist elections in France; in the second debate he faced Nicolas Sarkozy during the second round of the presidential elections. The present study is the combination of phonetic and linguistic discourse analyses of speech. The objective was to determine if the type of debate affects the politician’s speech; would speaking strategies differ when the speaker is confronted with a member of his own party, compared with a situation where he is faces a member of a rival party? Indeed, significant differences have been found in François Hollande’s speech, and also in his gestures and postures depending on the context. He speaks slowly and pauses are longer when he debates with Nicolas Sarkozy, presumably a strategy enployed not only to appear calm and confident but also to be better understood by the audience watching the debate, that is potential voters during the presidential elections.

The present study investigates the construction of an event through the coordination of two predicates in English. Syntactic and semantic evidence indicates that the two verbs cannot be simply referred to as separate predicative units, but that they form a single conjoint, and this construction occurs in a variety of uses. Most of the literature on this construction deals with its formal properties and the comparison with the Try to V structure (Jespersen, 1940; Lind, 1983; Stefanowitsch, Gries, 2003; Hommerberg, Gunnel, 2007). Through the presentation and the discussion of the data, the present analysis shows that it is possible to offer a unified account of the different uses of the hendiadic structure, and clarifies the role, function and grammaticalisation of and in the coordinated structure. The use of the V and V structure is said to be mainly restricted to speech and almost absent in the press (Bib e r et al., 1999). Through the study of a journalistic corpus (The Independent (1992—2009) and The Guardian (1996—1999; 2006—2007)), which amounts to 759 million words, the paper discusses the precise nature of the mechanism of the V and V structure and sheds lights upon the schematic properties of the construction of an event.

The linguistic dimension of events is often considered from the point of view of subsequent discourses in the written media. From its first moments however, the event prompts spontaneous aural verbal reactions, which we can access thanks to audiovisual media. These almost concomitant linguistic productions are the target of our study, here using the example of September 11, 2001, which happened live on most channels, including CNN which provided us with our corpus. The core issue is that of meaning construction mechanisms, specifically, the issue of constructing a discourse when a stabilized meaning (of what is happening) is unavailable: how do we talk about something when we are not sure what we are talking about? How do we ground discourse and determine access to information between perception and expression, description and interpretation? These questions raise a number of methodological issues, which this presentation aims to account for. The proposed solutions will try to prove the relevance of cognitive semantics and more specifically that of instructional semantics (Col et al., 2012).

In the semantic analysis of tenses, the term event is frequently used. For example, following Reichenbach (1947: 288), many studies mention three “points”, within which (E) represents the “point of the event”. Besides, after Martin (1985: 25), it is commonly considered —often implicitly— that “the duration of the utterance can […] ideally be reduced to an instant t0 [i.e. a point], […] since within the utterance, truth conditions remain unchanged”. However, events as well as utterances take time (cf. the use of “intervals “ by Gosselin, 1996). Here, I will analyze present tense utterances such as “le ballon franchit la ligne” (the ball crosses / is crossing the line), for which the described event (“achievement” for Vendler, 1957; “instant realisation” for Vetters, 1996) is shorter than the utterance that mentions it. I will show why the telic character (Garey, 1957) of achievements — unlike the other types of processes — makes it difficult to express an event contemporary to speech time since, contra against Martin’s (1985: 25) idealization, truth conditions vary throughout the utterance. Taking encoding as the basis (somewhat following Levelt, 1989), I will argue that truthcondition variation can naturally lead to the over-represented use of past tenses (Passé composé in French) in child language for the expression of telic events during early acquisition (cf. e.g. Wagner, 2009).

This article aims at analyzing the endogenous co-construction of gathering as an event by examining interactional sequences prior to occurring of this event. Meeting is a form of exchange, and also an interactional event recognized as such by the participants. In this perspective, the invitation is not only a form of coordination, but it participates to the co-construction of the meeting as an event. The study is based on a conversation analysis inspired by ethnomethodology. The analysis uses a collection of invitations to meeting (planned or ad hoc, face-to-face or distant), extracted from a larger corpus. By a detailed analysis of sequences of exchanges, I show the in situ production of an ordinary event, a “meeting”. The activity of inviting shapes an activity as taking place in the future. It produces an accountable and autonomous object of discourse. What is at stake is not so much planning what will be said and how, but the co-construction of the exchange as an event. Invitation is a situated action which aims at producing resources (instructed actions) for a local or future coordination. The event is co-constructed by the exchanges and stabilized by the production of an invitation-announcement.

This paper analyses the place of event names in newspaper headlines from a morphosyntactic point of view. We address the hypothesis that titles including event names are structured like phrases. We will describe the titles in terms of topic/comment, topic-area/comment-area and subject/predicate, to show that events are thematized after being synthetized by media discourse. We will also address the question of the role event names play in the title, whether in the thematic area or an enunciation determiner.

This paper deals with the lexical notion of event. We study the well-known event/object nominal polysemy (see Grimshaw, 1990; Pustejovsky, 1995; Godard, Jayez 1996, among others) and give it an exhaustive treatment by gathering many data from existing lexical resources. About 200 nouns are listed, with various morphological properties — simple, converse or derived nominal may be concerned. We identify different types of events (activity, accomplishment, etc.) and objects (artifact, place, etc.), based upon explicit linguistic criteria. Then we study the relations between the different meanings of event/object polysemous nouns and the conditions under which their semantic types can combine.

Articulatory-acoustics events and the relations that tie them together are crucial to understanding proper speech functioning. The features at the phonological level and the cues studied in phonetics are related to specific speech events, visible for example in acoustic signals. Thus, a close analysis of these events allows us to understand which relations underpin the system of contrasts. This article deals with Alsatian stops, taking into account the feature [voice]. A number of questions relating to the nature of the plosives are not solved. These questions are representative of difficulties in analyzing a system of fragile oppositions which nevertheless is operational and fluent. So, we shall thus present a classification of the consonants of Alsatian. We shall begin by evoking problems posed by the classification of plosives, through features and cues. We shall use the results obtained during experimental analyses of the speakers of Colmar, the results of which might demonstrate the importance of understanding the event structure of these consonants, in order to classify them at a convincing phonological level.

The mental representation of a perceived motion event varies according to the spatial location of the observer. Does that imply that a speaker systematically identifies himself as the locator of the event he is describing? In this article, I examined the use of deictic motion verbs (come, go) in each of these languages. The research was based on a survey conducted among French, English and Chinese speakers and on the analysis of two bilingual corpora. The results show that in Chinese the deictic center is generally the speaker, whereas it is the interlocutor in English, and neither the former nor the latter in French.

This study undertakes to examine, following Adler (2012) and on the basis of media examples drawn from Le Monde, referential mechanisms involving general nouns such as tragedy, catastrophe, disaster. These nouns refer to events in previous or subsequent chunks of text while delivering the addresser’s opinion in relation to the encapsulated event. Our goal consists in assessing the role of these lexical labels in the representation and interpretation of the event under consideration as well as in identifying the role of the general label in the construction or the mise-en-scène of a media event.

The article is devoted to the problem of lexical description of words for automatic translation of texts. In particular, the description understood in terms of object classes is focused. The author gives attention to two lexicographical conceptions, namely the conception of electronic dictionary proposed by G. Gross and the object-oriented approach proposed by W. Banyś. The article aims at the comparison of these two conceptions, as well as at presenting how the notion of the object class is used to describe words.

The article discusses the natural polysemy of the lexicon of natural languages, perceived as one of the major problems of automatic translation. It also presents a solution for the problem of disambiguation of ambiguous expressions — it pivots on the object-oriented description, enriched with a transfer of various possible translations in a target language taking into consideration possible ambiguity in a source language. Finally, the authors show differences in the representations of the world
in Polish and Spanish, using the example of some Polish renderings of the Spanish verb ganar.

The article is devoted to the problem of translation from French into Polish from the perspective of the object oriented approach proposed by Wiesław Banyś. The author takes into consideration some of the problems, both of theoretical and practical nature, which appear while working on the formation of contrastive lexical database for automatic translation of texts. While analyzing specific chosen examples which may cause different kinds of problems in the description, the author offers their interpretations in the target language in accordance with the adopted approach.

The presentation of research results concerning applicability of AOO and EWN in machine translation is divided into two parts. In the first part, the author presents the influence of databases design, their theoretical aspects and the categorization of lexical items on the process and result of machine translation. The second part is devoted to the internal hierarchy of databases including the established categorization of lexical items as well as semantic inheritance comprising multiple inheritance and disambiguation accomplished by the above mentioned databases. The presented results coupled with the capability of contemporary computer technology give grounds for claiming that a bilingual approach in lexical description for machine translation is the best choice.

The surrounding space has always interested people and provoked their curiosity. Reflections upon the concept of space are present in almost every philosophical school and approach, and also in other disciplines such as e.g. anthropology, sociology or linguistics. For some researchers space is a social product or historical product, for others — a product of human activities. The same way as space, the city has always intrigued and fascinated as a positive reference structure, a place in which one wants to live, dwell and work. This paper is an attempt at a cognitive analysis of the concept of città (city) in Italian. It endeavors to explain how Italians conceive and perceive città (city) by trying to show one of the ways of organizing its category. It comments on relations among thought, word and physical reality (meaning space) on the basis of the general notions of cognitive linguistics, e.g. categorization and conceptualization with reference to some of the main theories on the matter.

The article deals with an area which has largely escaped the attention of researchers so far, i.e. the strategy of archaisation and modernisation in the translation of older texts. The English and Italian translations of Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk convoluted style serve as an example of how to employ one of these two completely different strategies. The vocabulary, phrasing and structure of the language Gombrowicz used to write his novel have converged in a literary from known as gawęda, an old form of storytelling. The English version employs a type of faux seventeenth century English. The Italian version, on the other hand, uses a modern language and style. The purpose of this paper is also to analyse two Polish translations of Carlo Goldoni’s La Locandiera. The first translation is archaised, the second one — modernised. The discussion will try to illustrate which strategy seems to be a better solution.