The noun-verb continuum : a closer look at congruence and construal in English and French

Résumé En

Nouns and verbs are generally viewed as discrete categories, yet many instances defycategorization. Deverbal nominalizations straddle the middle, simultaneously construingobject/event-oriented meanings. Such nominalizations are strongly associated with grammaticalmetaphor (GM) in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) but this relationship remains elusive. Thispaper evaluates congruence and construal, which underlie GM. It aims to develop an empiricalapproach to these concepts that goes beyond our intuitions. We analyse the 10 most frequentnoun-verb pairs in French and English (e.g. work-work/travail-travailler) from SketchEngine’sfrTenTen12 and enTenTen13 corpora (Kilgariff et al 2014). The analysis includes frequencydistribution and noun/verb typology (e.g. lexical aspect) to determine whether there any evidencefor a lexical semantic base that seems to operate beyond word class (cf. Halliday’s (1961:277)insight that “the ‘lexical item,’ is unrestricted grammatically”). Huyghe et al (2017:132) haveshown that lexical aspect also applies to nouns, concluding that aspect “is a matter of semanticrather than grammatical categories”. The implications of this are significant. Our methodologyestablishes a comparative framework for determining the nature and distribution of nominals,providing a frame of reference for critically examining the assumptions surrounding the notions ofconstrual and congruence within SFL at word rank.