English tough constructions and their analogues in French and Russian: a parallel corpus investigation - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Languages in Contrast Année : 2023

English tough constructions and their analogues in French and Russian: a parallel corpus investigation

Résumé

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 of the matrix sentence is logically the missing object of the infinitive; in others (e.g., Russian), speakers opt for a variety of functional analogues (e.g., passive, impersonal constructions). The aim of this paper is to explore English TCs involving difficult and easy adjectives, compare them to French and Russian analogues based on a parallel-corpus, and investigate how specific semantic properties (animacy, transitivity, adjective scope) relate to specific (more or less compact) configurations. The results show that French and Russian have similar functional analogues and only partially share the structural properties of English TCs. The findings support a multidimensional account based on the inherent semantic properties of evaluative constructions and their degree of compactness.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-04270818 , version 1 (05-11-2023)

Licence

Paternité - Pas d'utilisation commerciale - Partage selon les Conditions Initiales

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04270818 , version 1

Citer

Alina Tsikulina, Fayssal Tayalati, Efstathia Soroli. English tough constructions and their analogues in French and Russian: a parallel corpus investigation. Languages in Contrast, In press, 27 p. ⟨hal-04270818⟩
37 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More