Neophilologica. Vol. 33 (2021): Perspectives pour la linguistique et autres études.

With the analysis of a textbook case, the inflectional category of dual in contemporary French, this article presents the hypothesis of a rise in morphology among the founding disciplines of grammar in written languages. Through a study of morphographies, this trend is considered here as a result of the emergence and development of so-called electronic dictionaries, with their lexicographical words as entries to access form / meaning associations. We know that these dictionaries, piloted by mixed teams of computer scientists and linguists, impose themselves step by step as major classificatory tools for the most general treatments, in theoretical and applied linguistics, now related in our modernity to the exploitation of large corpora that have become digitised.

The text deals with one of the challenges of linguistics, which is to effectively combine description and explanation in linguistics.
It is necessary that linguistic theories are not only capable of adequately describing their object of study within their framework, but they must also have a suitable explanatory power.
Linguistics centred around the explanation of the why of the system is called here ‘explanatory’ or ‘non-autonomous’, in contrast to ‘descriptive’ or ‘autonomous’ linguistics, which is focused on the description of the system, the distinction being based on the difference in the objects of study, the goals and the descriptive and explanatory possibilities of the theories.
From the point of view presented here, a comprehensive study of language has three main components: a general theory of what language is, a resulting theory and description, which is a function of this theory, of how language is organised, functions and has evolved in the human brain, and an explanation of the properties of language found.
The explanatory value of a general linguistic theory is a function of various elements, among others, the quantity of the primitive elements of the theory adopted and the effectiveness of Ockham’s razor principle of simplicity. It is also a function of the quality of those elements which can be drawn not only from within the system, but also from outside the system becoming in this situation logically prior to the object under study.
In science, in linguistics, one naturally needs two types of approach, two types of linguistics, descriptive/autonomous and explanatory/non-autonomous, one must first describe reality in order to explain it. But it is also certain that since the aim of science is to explain in order to reach that higher level of scientificity above pure description, it is necessary that this aim be realized in different linguistic theories within different research programs, uniting descriptivist and explanatory approaches.

In this paper, we will try to show how formal linguistics applied to the study of diachrony can be a fundamental asset for research (and consequently also for teaching at a university level) in the field of French language and literature. We will treat successively the analysis of the support verbs (§2), the realization verbs (§3), the intensity collocations (§4) and the pragmatically restricted clichés (§5). In each section, we will present and discuss numerous examples in medieval French accompanied by their published translations into contemporary French.

The contribution addresses a topic discussed since the 17th century by philosophers, logicians and lexicographers: to what extent does the semantic complexity of certain words convey knowledge of the extralinguistic world? What influence does this knowledge have on the coherence of a text? Conversely, another type of complexity must be taken into account as well, the one starting from things: what linguistic devices are adopted to express this complexity in an efficient way? The relationship between the complexity types and knowledge has been investigated by different strands of research in the humanities and is becoming a focus of multidisciplinary research.

The future of linguistics implies a better definition of concepts, especially in the semantic analysis. The notion of operator plays an important role in several areas of linguistics, for instance categorical grammars and representations of the meanings of grammatical categories. The general topology makes it possible to mathematize the grammatical concepts (time, aspects, modalities, enunciative operations) by means of operators. Curry’s Combinatorial Logic is an adequate formalism for composing and transforming operators at different levels of analysis that connect the semiotic expressions of languages (the observables) with their semantico-cognitive interpretations. The article refers to many studies that develop the points discussed.

A reading of many recent publications shows that theoretical concerns in the field of linguistics have declined, even though the founders of the discipline all emphasised the central importance of its role. This article aims to show how linguistic description has progressed thanks to the different theoretical tools that have been developed in the course of research. From this point of view, this article illustrates the following facts: lexicon, semantics and syntax are not separate instances but together form the units that are sentences. The elements of sentences must be described in terms of the set of properties that characterise them. This is the case for regular sequences. Finally, one of the promising objectives consists in finding a reasoned classification of fixed sequences. Linguistics, like any science, cannot do without theoretical tools.

The present paper retraces some results of my own investigations, among other authors, on such questions as negation, levels of analysis of sentences, and internal structure of NPs, after years of research in the field. It suggests some possible paths of further investigations, among others: thus, negation needs a multi-levels of analysis, including an enunciative component; syntax requires an adequate description of informative value of items, and the internal composition of determiners in French remains an open question.

From the current situation of data in the philological work, a scenario is described of how things could look in the near future. In that scenario, data could go from being indications to becoming arguments in the study of the history of words. In order for that to take place, a good codification of texts (also linguistically speaking) is needed, so as to create models to be applied to the different possibilities of interpreting words.

The distinction between arguments and margins within a simple nuclear sentence is sharp at conceptual level in that it is grounded in explicit relevance criteria: arguments are saturated referential noun phrases that are essential for the integrity of the process; different layers of margins enrich different kinds of processes according to different consistency requirements. If one observes the syntactic structure of linguistic expressions, on the other hand, the same distinction seems to shade into a sort of continuum owing to two orders of factors. First, there is a cleavage between the model sentence, whose main function should be the expression of the process, and the utterances actually documented in texts and corpora, whose structure is shaped by the incommensurate function to adapt the structure of the process to the communicative dynamism of a text. Moreover, within the model sentence itself, the coding regime of arguments and the coding regime of margins shadow into one another: some margins are coded, like arguments, through formal grammatical relations, while some arguments are coded, like margins, directly as conceptual relations through a set of forms of expression motivated by their conceptual content.
In spite of these obstacles, the conceptual distinction between arguments and margins and the hierarchy of margins can be identified at the level of model sentence thanks to adequate and differentiated criteria. These criteria are formal where the difference of coding regime draws a sharp formal distinction between arguments and margins, and conceptual and textual where the structure of the forms of expression neutralises the distinction. Conceptual and textual criteria also make the identification of a clear hierarchy of margins possible.

The aim of the article is to show how Italians express their emotions when changing the code from Italian to dialect on the example of the Talamona’s dialect. At the beginning, it was presented what emotions are and in which categories they should be considered, the specificity of the Talamona’s dialect and what the change of code is. The theory is supported by examples of change of code from Italian to dialect. The result of the work is to show that the respondents from Talamona very often change the code from Italian to dialect due to their emotionality. The article introduces the concept of change of code and shows how emotionality affects it.

The present analysis is devoted to the discursive units that are activated at the moment by the media nomination as categoremes of the referent, Donald Trump, and shape the media narrative. These will be formulas, which appear in the headlines and imply labels, e.g. Donald Trump, agitateur en chef (‘Donald Trump, the troublemaker’; lemonde.fr, 5.10.2017). The research problem will be to determine their narrative and argumentative potential. Theoretical framework is provided by studies of the media information discourse (Arquembourg, 2011; Calabrese, 2009, 2013; Moirand, 2007; Veniard, 2013), as well as the argumentative discourse (Amossy, 2006). The corpus has been compiled on the basis of electronic version of two daily newspapers Le Monde (lemonde.fr) and Gazeta Wyborcza (wyborcza.pl), released between Jan the 1st 2016 and december 2020.

The paper offers an analysis of lexical-syntactic structures based on the verb form viser typical of a scientific text, that is a text that follows quite a stable and rigid structure. A corpus-based analysis, achieved through the use of the Scientext corpora, runs across two dimensions. The first dimension is constituted by the subject matter of the text while the other dimension concerns the relation between the author of the text and the recipient. The analysis presented is a two-stage process. At the first stage, lexical-syntactic structures are singled out. The second stage is to assign those structures to the particular parts of the text, such as Introduction, Main body, Conclusion.

The aim of this paper is to present how the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has changed our language and the way we communicate. The article focuses on the recent Spanish neologisms that have appeared during the pandemic year 2020 and attempts to analyze their word-formation process. The theoretical framework of this study is based on the classification of neologisms proposed by M.T. Cabré Castellví (2006). Firstly, the paper highlights semantic innovations, that is, neologisms which are formed through broadening, narrowing or change of the meaning of the base form. Secondly, different types of word formation mechanisms, such as affixations, compounding, conversion or shortening are discussed. The paper also gives new insights into the most creative ways that vocabulary related to coronavirus (COVID-19) has expanded (lexical borrowing, wordplay). The data were collected from articles, books, dictionaries, social media and various websites.

The article provides a cognitive analysis of phraseological units with the heart component in comparative terms. The purpose of the analysis is to show the similarities and differences in expressing emotions (positive, neutral and negative) between two languages originating from different linguistic groups: the Croatian language (South Slavic group) and the Italian language (from the group of the Romance languages). Phraseological units are analysed on the basis of three criteria: identical in both languages; partially adequate in both languages; idiomatic for one language. The research presents the motivation of phraseologisms and aims to prove that the heart is related to human emotional life and is a container for feelings.

The conceptualization of space is manifested in language through diverse linguistic structures. Space, one of the most significant analytical categories not only in linguistics, introduces a variety of senses and conceptual relations in the construction of communicative meaning. While there are several approaches to linguistic studies, the most obvious choice for this type of analysis seems to be Cognitive Linguistics, with some of its theoretical currents and the Cognitive Grammar of Ronald W. Langacker (1987, 1991a, 1991b, 1995, 2008) in particular. In his works, Langacker often refers to spatial and visual relationships that provide useful illustrations to depict different conceptual structures and relationships. Indeed, the relations between visual perception and conceptualization concerns numerous aspects of the semantics of natural language (E. Tabakowska, 1999: 59). The paper aims to analyse the concept of the Italian verb ‘mettere’ (‘to put’), apparently simple and yet, as it will be shown, rich and varied in meaning.

This paper aims to examine the use of inclusive French in the Internet publications of Paris universities on their social media. Three higher education institutions were selected: Paris Dauphine-PSL University, Gustave Eiffel University, and Sorbonne Paris North University. The publications were obtained from Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Firstly, the groups of people to whom the use of inclusive French referred were considered. The second question was about the practices used to make the French language inclusive. Eight practices were observed and are described in the paper. Also, the frequency of gender-neutral language was a point of interest. The research corpus is available online: https://tiny.pl/9rcdj.

The author examines semantic-syntactic models of predicates according to Stanislaw Karolak’s conception of semantic-based grammar. From the list of first-order bivalent predicates provided by S. Karolak, the author analyses some of them from the point of view of the number and quality of the implied argument positions. During the analysis it often turns out that more than one model refers to one form of predicate (one signifiant). This phenomenon is due to the polysemous nature of words in natural language and, therefore, to the ambiguity of uses of predicates in different contexts (more than one signifié). In order to determine the number and type of arguments semantically implied by a given predicate, the author applies the test of negation, contraposition, and paraphrase leading to a semantic decomposition and emphasises the role of the metaphor and metonymy in their interpretation.

The purpose of this paper is to perform a brief cognitive analysis of speech events containing information about the coronavirus SARS-COV 2 and the disease its causes, COVID-19. As the author acknowledges primacy of cognitive linguistics research tools towards explanation of how language is used and how the extralinguistic reality is perceived, the object of research comprises M Johnson and G. Lakoff’s conceptual metaphors, which are to be extracted among seven chosen articles derived from the digital version of the Italian journal La Stampa. The results of such performed research should deliver a list of structural, ontological and orientative metaphors, which, in this context, are not just pure eristic speech figures but mental constructs which indicate people’s way of reasoning and of conceptualizing the surrounding extralinguistic world, in this case the pandemic situation affecting us all.

The purpose of the present article is the analysis of the Greek terms expressing the concept of love ἔρως (eros), στοργή (storge), φιλία (philia) and ἀγάπη (agape) and the impact of their semantic character on the uses appearing in the Bible. The author is primarily concerned with the study of etymology and determination of historical changes in the meaning of the analyzed terms, their use in secular and religious literature, in classical and late Greek.
The next step is a detailed analysis of the verbs φιλέω (phileo) and ἀγαπάω (agapao), which are the only of the four terms to appear in the Gospels. The text ends by indicating for each form used in the Gospels its semantic scope and checking whether it corresponds to the basic semantic features of each of the verbs.