Infinitives are usually thought to refer to future events relative to the time denoted by the matrix verb they depend on. But with some verbs this temporal interpretation turns out to be false. “Cease” is one of these verbs which raise questions, as the process expressed by the non-finite form has n...
Contemporary English syntax does not allow redundant constructions like double superlatives, repeated negatives, or combinations of modals. There is, however, an example of verbal construction in the form of a “double perfect" (i.e. had have + V-en) which appears in informal speech instead of a regu...
This paper investigates the meaning of aller ('go') and venir (de) ('come' ('to')) + infinitive in qu'est-ce que questions in French. In this paper, it is contended that the aspecto-temporal meaning of these periphrases is associated with information-seeking questions, self-addressed questions and r...
Dans cette thèse, j'étudie la distribution des formes pronominales faibles du français sous une perspective nouvelle. En partant des travaux sur le statut d'affixes lexicaux de ces formes (Miller, 1992 ; Auger, 1993, 1994, 1995), je propose que la conclusion logique de ce résultat est de traiter la...
Space is fundamental to human cognition and is part of our daily life. Although it is supposed to be a universal cognitive domain, crosslinguistic research has shown that there is a lot of diversity in the way it is expressed. Talmy (1985, 2000) distinguished between verb-framed languages (V-languag...
Un texte de Porphyrios témoigne d’un emploi très rare du verbe μοιχευω ( je commets un adultère, je trompe mon conjoint), au passif, où des épouses ( des pigeonnes dans le texte ) sont victimes (μοιχευθεῖσαι, part. aoriste passif féminin ) d’un adultère.Cet emploi doit être rapproché d’un passage de...
The languages of the world present great variability in form-to-meaning mappings. Such diversity comes out clearly when one examines how constructions are used. For instance, evaluative constructions involving Tough predicates (e.g., This road is difficult to cross) present atypical mappings and var...
Evaluative constructions involving Tough predicates (e.g., This hill is difficult to climb) present atypical structure-to-meaning mappings and vary across languages: in some languages (e.g., English/French), speakers typically use so- called tough constructions (TCs) in which the syntactic subject o...
Complex predicates: a first overview of the issues. Presence vs. absence of the verbal linker, the morphosyntactic nature of it (stray adjunction) and its problematic typological status. Discussion about the infinitive in Wolof. Identification of a few other constructions, such as the "yo-yo constru...
This article gives insight into the world of 3rd century BCE Alexandrian Judaism by analysing one aspect of the Greek translation of Exodus and provides a detailed evaluation of the way the translator managed to express the essence of the Hebrew text of Exodus while reflecting to some degree the for...
This article analyzes the behavior of tones in the drawers of the indicative in Mbomba, a Bantu language C40, identified in the north of Congo Brazzaville, more precisely in the Department of Likouala. It aims to study, in a specific way, the behavior of the tones of both verbal stems and vowel endi...
Bashkardi, a group of varieties spoken inland of the Strait of Hormuz, is said to be a language of the Persian sub-branch of Western Iranian. However, the differences among the Bashkardi varieties, and the features they share with Balochi raise the questions whether Bashkardi is one language, and wh...
As advances in digital media render new forms of knowledge dissemination, new genres in the Internet are attracting increasing scholarly attention. Yet, although these genres have been investigated extensively from the perspectives of rhetoric and discourse, research on their linguistic features is...
The study subject are Polish translations of the French structure NP1 + "voir" + NP2 + infinitive; we reject cases where the NP1 is represented by the pronoun "on", and concentrate on translations in which the infinitive is not rendered. The analysis is based on the corpus of texts embracing 58 pair...
The first chapter consists of a theorical description of the Ward & Paradigm analysis model, which is used here to describe the morphological structures of the conditional. The model is b'ased on the idea that lexemes have not only semantic or phonological features, but also purely morphological one...
1) How to translate avant Avant is translated by ‘before’ and is used with time. It can be followed by a noun or a verb. If you use a verb, it will be in a past or present tense, not future. The opposite is ‘after’. before five o’clock, before the end of term, before Christmas I must finish this wor...
It is a well-known fact that infinitives of purpose are mostly used in the perfective, in particular after the conjunction ctoby. But when we examine the choice of the aspect of infinitives of purpose coming immediately after a verb of motion (without a conjunction), we notice the completely opposit...
Cette thèse en linguistique contrastive se propose d’étudier les spécificités syntactico-sémantiques des verbes inchoatifs en arabe et les comparer avec celles de commencer (à/par/de) et de se mettre à. Nous nous sommes appuyé sur un corpus de textes littéraires francophones et arabophones (Mahfouz,...
Lindemann, F., ed. (1820), Pompeii Commentum Artis Donati. Eiusdem in librum Donati De barbarismis et metaplasmis Commentariolum. Accessit Ars grammatica Servii, Leipzig, xvi & 576 p. Zago, A., ed. (2017), Pompeii Commentum in Artis Donati partem tertiam. 1: introduzione, testo critico e traduzione,...
In Herodotus’ Histories, at 1.66, one reads the passive aorist indicative εὐθηνήθησαν (Ionic), or εὐθενήθησαν (Attic), depending on the spelling preferred by the editors. And in Dem. 19.231, one reads the now obelised middle or passive present infinitive †εὐθενεῖσθαι†. Because the verb εὐθηνέω/εὐθεν...
In Herodotus’ Histories, at 1.66, one reads the passive aorist indicative εὐθηνήθησαν (Ionic), or εὐθενήθησαν (Attic), depending on the spelling preferred by the editors. And in Dem. 19.231, one reads the now obelised middle or passive present infinitive †εὐθενεῖσθαι†. Because the verb εὐθηνέω/εὐθεν...
In Herodotus’ Histories, at 1.66, one reads the passive aorist indicative εὐθηνήθησαν (Ionic), or εὐθενήθησαν (Attic), depending on the spelling preferred by the editors. And in Dem. 19.231, one reads the now obelised middle or passive present infinitive †εὐθενεῖσθαι†. Because the verb εὐθηνέω/εὐθεν...
Bambara (Manding < West Mande < Mande < Niger-Congo) has a specialized clause chaining (cosubordinative) construction where the fi rst clause has a verb full-fl edged for TAM and polarity, and verbs of subsequent clauses are in infi nitive; non-initial clauses are not embedded into the initial one a...
In a previous post, I showcased the development of the split infinitive (( This was, in fact, my very first post on this blog. )) I wanted to check whether the split infinitive had spiked after the airing of the original Star Trek series in the late 1960s (to find out whether that was indeed the cas...
This paper deals with stress shift in verb-clitic structures in Eivissan Catalan. an understudied Romance variety. Within Balearic Catalan, this is the only subdialect in which stress shift is restricted to apply only in second conjugation pre-clitic infinitives, those that, as opposed to other conj...