Metonymy and lexical aspect in English and French
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metonymy and lexical aspect in English and FrenchIn this paper we provide evidence that conceptual metonymies are cross-linguistically significant in the coding of verbal aspect.Guillemin-Flescher (1981: Ch. 2), in an important contrastive study of narrative texts, notices that English and French differ quite often as to which phase of an aspectual situation is coded in an utterance.To illustrate, compare sentence (1), taken from François Mauriac's well-known novel Thérèse Desqueyroux, with its English translation in (2):(1) Le train ralentit, siffle longuement, repart.(2) The train came to a halt, uttered a long whistle, and started to move again.In the French original (1) the process of moving again is coded.In contrast, it is quite striking that the English translator of (1) prefers to verbalize only the incipient phase of this process by means of an 'inceptive verb construction'-thereby metonymically evoking the process as a whole.We explore the hypothesis that in English, in contrast to French, there is a fairly systematic exploitation of the high-level metonymy SUB-EVENT FOR WHOLE EVENT with the two sub-metonymies INCIPIENT PHASE OF EVENT FOR WHOLE EVENT and ONSET OF EVENT FOR WHOLE EVENT.A corpus search of two different text genres, bilingual transcripts of Canadian parliamentary debates and narrative fiction, reveals that in about 20% of the cases where English has a metonymically interpreted inceptive verb construction, French expresses the equivalent idea directly by means of a single verb form.We relate the findings for the incipient verb construction to the observation that English makes more extended use of the POTENTIALITY FOR ACTUALITY metonymy with perception and mental processing verbs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".