Savoirs, Textes, Langage

The goal of this book is twofold. On the one hand we want to offer a discussion of some of the more important properties of the nominal projection, on the other hand we want to provide the reader with tools for syntactic analysis which apply to the structure of DP but which are also relevant for other domains of syntax. In order to achieve this dual goal we will discuss phenomena which are related to the nominal projection in relation to other syntactic phenomena (e.g. pro drop will be related to N-ellipsis, the classification of pronouns will be applied to the syntax of possessive pronouns, N-movement will be compared to V-movement, the syntax of the genitive construction will be related to that of predicate inversion etc.). In the various chapters we will show how recent theoretical proposals (distributed morphology, anti-symmetry, checking theory) can cast light on aspects of the syntax of the NP. When necessary, we will provide a brief introduction of these theoretical proposals. We will also indicate problems with these analyses, whether they be inherent to the theories as such (e.g. what is the trigger for movement in antisymmetric approaches) or to the particular instantiations. The book cannot and will not provide the definitive analysis of the syntax of noun phrases. We consider that this would not be possible, given the current flux in generative syntax, with many new theoretical proposals being developed and explored, but the book aims at giving the reader the tools with which to conduct research and to evaluate proposals in the literature. In the discussion of various issues, we will apply the framework that is most adequate to deal with problems at hand. We will therefore not necessarily use the same approach throughout the discussion. Though proposals in the literature will be referred to when relevant, we cannot attempt to provide a critical survey of the literature. We feel that such a survey would be guided too strongly by theoretical choices, which would not be compatible with the pedagogical purposes this book has. The book is comparative in its approach, and data from different languages will be examined, including English, German, Dutch (West-Flemish), Greek, Romance, Semitic, Slavic, Albanian, Hungarian, Gungbe.

This is a study of ekphrasis, the art of making listeners and readers 'see' in their imagination through words alone, as taught in ancient rhetorical schools and as used by Greek writers of the Imperial period (2nd-6th centuries CE). The author places the practice of ekphrasis within its cultural context, emphasizing the importance of the visual imagination in ancient responses to rhetoric, poetry and historiography. By linking the theoretical writings on ekphrasis with ancient theories of imagination, emotion and language, she brings out the persuasive and emotive function of vivid language in the literature of the period. This study also addresses the contrast between the ancient and the modern definitions of the term ekphrasis, underlining the different concepts of language, literature and reader response that distinguish the ancient from the modern approach. In order to explain the ancient understanding of ekphrasis and its place within the larger system of rhetorical training, the study includes a full analysis of the ancient technical sources (rhetorical handbooks, commentaries) which aims to make these accessible to non-specialists. The concluding chapter moves away from rhetorical theory to consider the problems and challenges involved in 'turning listeners into spectators' with a particular focus on the role of ekphrasis within ancient fiction. Attention is also paid to texts that lie at the intersection of the modern and ancient definitions of ekphrasis, such as Philostratos' Imagines and the many ekphraseis of buildings and monuments to be found in Late Antique literature.

I Some Elementary Concepts 1. Criticism and Judgement 2. Domain and Object 3. Questions and Answers 4. Rule and Law 5. Positive and Negative Judgement 6. Front and Back 7. Improvisation, Structure and Necessity 8. Autonomy and Independence 9. Image and Concept: Beautiful Language and True Language 10. Illusion and Fiction 11. Creation and Production 12. Pact and Contract 13. Explanation and Interpretation 14. Implicit and Explicit 15. The Spoken and The Unspoken 16. The Two Questions 17. Interior and Exterior 18. Depth and Complexity II Some Critics 19. Lenin, Critic of Tolstoy The Image in the Mirror 20. Literary Analysis: The Tomb of Structures III Some Works 21. Jules Verne: The Faulty Narrative I. The Problem posed by the work II. Analysis of the work III. The function of the novel Appendix: The Thematic Ancestor a Robinson Crusoe 22. Borges and the Fictive Narrative 23. Balzaca -- s Les Paysans: A Disparate Text

In contemporary critical terminology ‘ekphrasis’ has come to be firmly associated with the subject of this journal: word and image. Mention ‘ekphrasis’ to an art historian, literary critic or classicist, and the examples that spring to mind are likely to include the Homeric Shield of Achilles and its many literary imitations, the rhetorical and allegorical descriptions of paintings written by later Greek prose authors, like Lucian and the Elder and Younger Philostratos or, from more recent periods of Western literary history, John Keats' meditation on his tantalisingly still and silent Grecian Urn. This ‘genre’, or ‘trope’, of ekphrasis evokes a network of interlocking questions and interests, from the positivist pursuit of lost monuments described in ancient and medieval ekphrasis to the poststructuralist fascination with a textual fragment which declares itself to be pure artifice, the representation of representation.

As a reaction against derivational frameworks, Construction Grammar accords no place to regular alternations between two surface patterns. This paper argues for a more tolerant position towards alternations. With respect to the well-known placement variability of verbal particles (pick up the book / pick the book up), the author grants that there is little reason for analysing one ordering as underlying the other but goes on to show that it is equally problematic to claim that the two orderings code two different meanings (or serve two different functions) and therefore cannot be linked in the grammar as variants of a single category. The alternative offered here is to consider the two orderings as two “allostructions” of a more general transitive verb-particle construction underspecified for word order.

Ecphrasis', defined by James Heffernan [1993, 3--4] as a 'verbal representation of a visual representation', established itself as the buzzword of comparative literature and visual culture departments at the end of the 20th century.Championed by the likes of James Heffernan [1993], John Hollander [1995], and W. J. T. Mitchell [1994] in particular, ecphrasis has constituted the dominant model for theorizing the paragonal relationship between what can be seen and what can be said-the ways in which visual and textual media work at once collaboratively and competitively with each other. 1 Ever keen to associate the cutting-edge with ancient precedent, classicists have very much followed suit, tying modern thinking about ecphrasis to its supposed archaeology in the Graeco-Roman world. 2 An unsuspecting Greek word, barely known or used before the 1960s, has subsequently been thrust to the fore of the humanities: it has generated a whole industry of 'intermedial' or 'iconotextual' criticism, among a broad range of different disciplinary specializations.3 In addition to the work of Leo Spitzer (discussed on pages 33--35 of 1 the book under review), earlier foundational studies include Krieger 1967, Bergmann-Loizeaux 1979, and Dubois 1982.For my own overview of this scholarly history, see Squire 2009, 138--146.For two surveys of scholarship, see Elsner 2002, Bartsch and Elsner 2007. 2 For a more detailed (but by no means exhaustive) bibliography, see Squire 2009, 141--142 and n197.On 'iconotexts', see Wagner 1995; on the 'intermediality' of ecphrasis, see 3 the excellent discussion in Klarer 1999 [esp.p. 2].For one of many recent championings of ecphrasis as a transhistorical concept-as a 'literarische Tradition der Grossdichtung in Antike, Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit'-see Ratkowitsch 2006.

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Discourse markers and modal particles are fuzzy linguistic categories that are difficult to describe. The contributions in this volume go beyond this statement. They discuss the intersection between modal particles and discourse markers and examine whether or not it is possible to draw a line between these two types of linguistic expressions. On the basis of new synchronic and diachronic data, from speech and writing, from European and Asian languages or cross-linguistically, the authors answer the question whether discourse markers and modal particles are distinct categories, whether they form a cline, or whether modal particles are a subcategory of discourse markers. This common question shows up throughout all chapters, which makes the book to a coherent whole. By disentangling the complexity of categorizing multifunctional expressions, this book also sheds new light on the processes of meaning extension. The traditional discourse and modal functions are complemented by interactional and textual ones. A must read for functional linguists.

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International audience

Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.

This paper analyzes the discourse conditions governing the choice between extraposition and nonextraposition of that clause and infinitival VP subjects. On the basis of a large corpus of naturally occurring data, it is shown that nonextraposition requires that the content of the subject be discourse-old or directly inferrable. If the content is discourse-new, then extraposition is necessary. The choice between extraposition and nonextraposition for discourse-old and inferrable subjects is examined and is shown to depend on the discourse status of the predicate and on whether it is the predicate or the subject which links to the following discourse. The paper ends with a discussion of the syntactic position of nonextraposed sentential subjects and concludes that it cannot be the same as that of fronted sentential complements. This means that the common discourse properties of fronting and nonextraposition must be linked to their common linear ordering properties, rather than to a common syntactic position.

This 2005 book examines the significance of the mathematician Archytas of Tarentum in fourth-century Greece.

“There is a thought in me which is not mine.” This is, roughly, the complaint of patients suffering from thought insertion. This first-rank symptom of schizophrenia is particularly puzzling for it seems to challenge a very well entrenched principle to the effect that our conscious thoughts are necessarily subjective, that we necessarily have a sense of ownership for them (Cartesian principle). Despite their wide disagreement, classical accounts of the symptom save the Cartesian principle by interpreting thought insertion as a problem of the sense of agency for thought rather than as a problem of subjectivity. I argue that those accounts fail and that thought insertion really is a problem of subjectivity. We can nevertheless save the Cartesian principle if we realize that the presupposition, shared by classical accounts, to the effect that inserted thoughts are unequivocally conscious, is ill-grounded. Distinguishing between reflexive awareness and phenomenal consciousness, and relying on a careful comparison between thought insertion and other pathologies of agency, I propose a novel account of the symptom which is compatible with the Cartesian principle and which allows to take the patient's reports seriously. This account, I conclude, opens up novel perspectives on the comprehension of schizophrenia, and reveals a common confusion between two different dimensions of the mind.

Starting from a discussion of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper will show that the fairly widespread assumption that fronted topics in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that fronted topics in English occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares a number of views on the lower topic position in Romance.

Abstract One of the longstanding problems in linguistic analysis is to identify, describe, and analyze the lexical aspect classes allowed in natural language. Recent developments on this issue have raised two interrelated questions: how many event classes there are and how they are derived from a minimum of primitives. In this article, we identify a class of predicates denoting the maintenance of a situation through which 13 tests can be shown to display mixed properties between states and activities, challenging the existing taxonomies of aspectual classes. We furthermore argue that the existence of this class is expected by any theory that treats aspectual classes as epiphenomena of the combination of a restricted set of primitives, and propose an analysis where they contain a central coincidence preposition selected by an eventive layer.

Abstract Approaches to aspectual composition (most notably Krifka 1989, 1992; Verkuyl 1993) have generally focused on how to account for contrasts such as those in (1) and (2), where compatibility with a temporal m-adverbial is taken to indicate a telic interpretation, and compatibility with a temporal for-adverbial to signal an atelic interpretation, of the phrase that the adverbial attaches to. Nothing hinges on the use of the terms telic and atelic here, and for present purposes, bounded and unbounded would do equally well.

L’utilisation des corpus électroniques (ou banques de données linguistiques) en traduction et en traductologie est de plus en plus répandue. Les différents corpus existants (monolingues, bilingues, comparables, parallèles…) peuvent en effet servir d’outils d’aide à la traduction en apportant des informations complémentaires à celles fournies par d’autres outils. Car si les corpus se « cachent » au sein des logiciels de TAO sous forme de mémoires de traduction ou encore au sein des outils de traduction automatique, d’autres utilisations sont possibles, avec pour objectifs notamment une compréhension plus fine du texte à traduire et une optimisation du caractère naturel du texte traduit, et donc de l’invisibilité du traducteur. En traductologie, l’approche de la langue traduite par le biais de corpus électroniques permet une analyse de la traduction comme processus et comme produit en lien avec des questions théoriques importantes, dont celle de la qualité en traduction.

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The Editors’ vision for this volume is that it should be a selection of essays, contributed by the academics who have worked, studied, collaborated and disagreed with Göran Sundholm; engaging in debated issues and exploring untouched areas maybe only suggested or hinted at in Sundholm’s own work. "Acts of Knowledge" characterizes the papers contained in this volume as bringing something scientifically valuable in their respective fields: all the papers present cutting-edge research in their own style, contributing to very lively debates occurring in the literature in logic, philosophical logic and history of logic. But it also hints at Göran’s constructivist background, which has been an influence or a challenge for many of the contributors. "History, Philosophy and Logic" refers directly to Göran's broad interests into the various aspects of the Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics, and Language, their origins and development, especially with the focus on the Modern History of Logic and the philosophical implications thereof. The readers will find scattered all along this volume pieces of -- and reflections on -- all these themes.