Linguistics, Vol. 4 No. 1, 2003.
Original scientific paper
Metonymy and lexical aspect in English and French
Klaus-Uwe Panther
; Department of English and American Studies, Hamburg University
Linda L. Thornburg
; Department of English and American Studies, Hamburg University
Abstract
In 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.
Keywords
predicational metonymy; lexical aspect
Hrčak ID:
31339
URI
Publication date:
30.9.2003.
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