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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

See and Voir in ‘setting-subject constructions’: from perception to ‘ception’? A cognitive, subjectivity-based approach

Résumé

Perception verbs prototypically occur with a grammatical subject NP referring to a person e.g. After that war we saw the rise of communism and fascism and of Hitler). However, see in English and voir in French also license an inanimate grammatical subject, more precisely a spatial or temporal setting (e.g. in the late 1980s Europe saw the emergence of the “Eurocities” movement; Le dernier semestre de l’année 1997 a vu le départ de plusieurs de ses hauts responsables), in a “setting-subject construction” (Langacker 1991, 2008). The present study addresses this kind of variation and sets out to accomplish three main goals: -first, to identify the differences and similarities of the setting-subject construction with see and voir; -second, to highlight the semantic and syntactic characteristics of the setting-subject construction and explain how an inanimate subject NP can be favored over a human subject NP; -third, to determine what can motivate speakers’ choices between the two alternate constructions licensed by see and voir. Comparing the two different structures helps to bring to light the motivation and the conceptualization underlying the choice of a setting as subject. To achieve these goals, a qualitative, corpus-based analysis is conducted, which helps to understand to what extent different grammatical codings embody specific ways of viewing the scene. The cognitive schemas, models, and concepts (e.g., the Extended Animacy Hierarchy (Croft 2003); Langacker’s (2006) subjectification) prove particularly relevant in showing how the two different structures function and in explaining why an inanimate subject NP denoting a temporal or spatial expanse can be favored over a human subject NP, given that it is usually put forward that high animacy correlates with high topicality. My claim is that while prototypical constructions express immediate experience, setting-subject constructions, which can be seen as grammaticized constructions, convey the conceptualizer’s assessment of a situation, as the viewing relationship is construed subjectively. Setting-subject constructions thus construe a ‘ceiving’ experience embracing all potential experiencers and reveal a perspective that indirectly turns out to be more anthropocentric than ‘setting-centric’, as the inanimate locative subject, ranking at the bottom of the Animacy hierarchy, winds up alluding to any possible human being, including the speaker, the addressee and the Other.
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Dates et versions

hal-03808745 , version 1 (10-10-2022)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03808745 , version 1

Citer

Christelle Lacassain. See and Voir in ‘setting-subject constructions’: from perception to ‘ception’? A cognitive, subjectivity-based approach. KFLC, The Languages, Literatures and Culture Conferences, 75th ed., Apr 2022, Lexington, United States. ⟨hal-03808745⟩
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