A contrastive collostructional analysis of English and French causative constructions
(2016) 37th International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English Conference (ICAME 37) — Location: The Chinese University of Hong Kong (25.May.2016)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- Collostructional analysis is a method that relies on the theoretical concepts of Construction Grammar and the techniques of corpus linguistics. It makes it possible to identify degrees of association between words and certain slots in a construction, thus providing useful information about the meaning expressed by the construction. Although it has grown in popularity since its introduction over ten years ago (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003, Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004a, 2004b), it has not been very influential in the area of contrastive linguistics, despite some encouraging results from Colleman (2009) and Noël & Colleman (2010). In this presentation, the relevance of collostructional analysis for contrastive linguistics will be demonstrated through a cross-linguistic study of causative constructions. More precisely, the method is used to investigate the non-finite verb slot of English and French periphrastic causative constructions with make/faire, as illustrated by (1) and (2), where laugh and pleurer (‘cry’), respectively, are the non-finite complements of the causative construction. (1) He made her laugh. (Altenberg 2002: 99) (2) Marie a fait pleurer sa soeur. (Achard 2002: 127) ‘Mary made her sister cry’ On the basis of comparable corpus data representing academic writing which was extracted from the British National Corpus (for English) and from Scientext (for French; see Tutin & Grossmann 2014), two types of collostructional analysis are carried out, namely a simple collexeme analysis and a distinctive collexeme analysis. The simple collexeme analysis is performed on each language separately and the results are then compared. They reveal some similarities between the two languages, most notably a preference for non-volitional verbs, including mental processes (e.g. think, realise, comprendre ‘understand’, oublier ‘forget’). English and French causative constructions also present differences, however. Perception verbs, for example, which are common to the two constructions, tend to be used as “stimulus subject perception verbs” (Levin 1993: 187–188) in English, whereas in French they mostly refer to direct perception. Compare: (3) It’s difficult to avoid making his suicide sound too purposeful. (BNC A18 338) (4) L’intérêt de la méthodologie du test d’intuition est qu’elle permet de “faire entendre” des séquences aux locuteurs. (‘The interesting thing about the methodology of the intuition test is that it makes it possible to make the speakers hear sequences’) (Scientext 598) Also, verbs of (dis)appearance (e.g. apparaître ‘appear’, émerger ‘emerge’) and verbs expressing a change of state (e.g. varier ‘vary’, évoluer ‘evolve’) are strongly attracted to the French causative construction, but not so much to the English one. An exploratory distinctive collexeme analysis, comparing the English and French constructions on the basis of the translated French non-finite verbs, provides largely similar results to those obtained through the simple collexeme analysis. This suggests that the method has a certain validity to compare constructions cross-linguistically, but also confirms that English and French causative constructions occupy partly different spaces on the conceptual map of causation.
- Affiliations
Citations
Gilquin, G. (2016). A contrastive collostructional analysis of English and French causative constructions. 37th International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English Conference (ICAME 37), The Chinese University of Hong Kong. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/179571