The Decline of the French Passé Simple

The Decline of the French Passé Simple PDF Author: Emmanuelle Labeau
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004463348
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Get Book

Book Description
The disappearance of the French simple past has been hotly debated since the early 20th century. This volume offers an overview of its fortunes since French emerged as a language, provides a description of its distinctive features, and discusses the potential impact of its supposed demise on the whole French verb system. These assumptions are tested against a large corpus of contemporary texts. The study concludes that, despite the erosion of its meaning and its increasingly infrequent use, the simple past tense is still used by native speakers in various contexts, and no single substitute has yet emerged. Nevertheless, the simple past may be evolving into a stylistic marker, making it fertile ground for future cross-linguistic studies.

The Decline of the French Passé Simple

The Decline of the French Passé Simple PDF Author: Emmanuelle Labeau
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004463348
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Get Book

Book Description
The disappearance of the French simple past has been hotly debated since the early 20th century. This volume offers an overview of its fortunes since French emerged as a language, provides a description of its distinctive features, and discusses the potential impact of its supposed demise on the whole French verb system. These assumptions are tested against a large corpus of contemporary texts. The study concludes that, despite the erosion of its meaning and its increasingly infrequent use, the simple past tense is still used by native speakers in various contexts, and no single substitute has yet emerged. Nevertheless, the simple past may be evolving into a stylistic marker, making it fertile ground for future cross-linguistic studies.

Linguistic Change in French

Linguistic Change in French PDF Author: Rebecca Posner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198240365
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 540

Get Book

Book Description
Rebecca Posner explores the history of the French language in all its manifestations. Within the framework of modern linguistic theory, she concentrates on how French acquired its distinctive identity and how different varieties of French relate to each other. This book richly illustrates the more technical aspects of linguistic change, and sets evidence of social history against the way the language has changed over time.

Death and Tenses

Death and Tenses PDF Author: Neil Kenny
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198754035
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book

Book Description
In what tense should we refer to the dead? The question has long been asked, from Cicero to Julian Barnes, and answering it is partly a matter of grammar and stylistic convention. But the hesitation, annoyance, even distress that can be caused by the "wrong" tense suggests that more may be at stake--our very relation to the dead. This book, the first to test that hypothesis, investigates how tenses were used in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France (especially in French but also in Latin) to refer to dead friends, lovers, family members, enemies, colleagues, writers, officials, kings and queens of recent times, but also to those who had died long before, whether Christ, the saints, or the ancient Greeks and Romans who posthumously filled the minds of Renaissance humanists. Did tenses refer to the dead in ways that granted them differing degrees of presence (and absence)? Did tenses communicate dimensions of posthumous presence (and absence) that partly eluded more concept-based affirmations? The investigation ranges from funerary and devotional writing to Eucharistic theology, from poetry to humanist paratexts, from Rabelais's prose fiction to Montaigne's Essais. Primarily a work of literary and cultural history, it also draws on early modern grammatical thought and on modern linguistics (with its concept of aspect and its questioning of "tense"), while arguing that neither can fully explain the phenomena studied. The book briefly compares early modern usage with tendencies in modern French and English in the West, asking whether changes in belief about posthumous survival have been accompanied by changes in tense-use.

Sociolinguistics / Soziolinguistik. Volume 3

Sociolinguistics / Soziolinguistik. Volume 3 PDF Author: Ulrich Ammon
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110199874
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 892

Get Book

Book Description
No detailed description available for "SOCIOLINGUISTICS (AMMON) 3.TLBD HSK 3.3 2A E-BOOK".

Time in Languages, Languages in Time

Time in Languages, Languages in Time PDF Author: Anna Čermáková
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027258961
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book

Book Description
This volume comprises a collection of contrastive studies on language and time. Languages represented include Czech, French, German, Mandarin, Norwegian and Swedish, all of which are contrasted with English. While the amount of published research on temporal relations in general is considerable, less work has been carried out on comparing how we talk about time in various languages and how languages change over time. Several methodological challenges are addressed and solutions proposed, such as how to deal with poor quality historical data and how to identify n-grams in typologically different languages for purposes of comparison. The results of the various studies show how multilingual corpora can increase our knowledge of language-specific features as well as linguistic, typological and cultural differences and similarities across languages.

Sociolinguistic Variation in Seventeenth-Century France

Sociolinguistic Variation in Seventeenth-Century France PDF Author: Wendy Ayres-Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139453572
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book

Book Description
This book provides a systematic study of sociolinguistic variation in seventeenth-century France. Drawing on a range of case studies, Wendy Ayres-Bennett makes available data about linguistic variation in this period, showing the wealth and variety of language usage at a time that is considered to be the most 'standardising' in the history of French. Variation is analysed in terms of the speaker's 'pre-verbal constitution' - such as gender, age and socio-economic status - or by the medium, register or genre used. As well as examining linguistic variation itself, the book also considers the fundamental methodological issues that are central to all socio-historical linguistic accounts and, more importantly, addresses the question of what the appropriate sources are for linguists taking a socio-historical approach. In each chapter, the case studies present a range of phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical issues, which pose different methodological questions for sociolinguists and historical linguists alike.

Capitalism and the Alternatives

Capitalism and the Alternatives PDF Author: Julius H. Grey
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773557164
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description
Thirty years after its global triumph, neo-liberalism is an abject failure. While its advocates have succeeded in convincing citizens that no other way is possible, that no left turn can be made without an economic collapse, they have not fulfilled their promises of a better world and the result has been more inequality, insecurity, and speculation. Many have sought solace in collective goals – nationalism, narrow religion, and gender politics – while notions of universal solidarity, idealism, and humanism have all but disappeared. In Capitalism and the Alternatives Julius H. Grey seeks to rehabilitate economic equality as a fundamental social goal built on universal values such as individualism, liberty, and even romanticism. To achieve this, he argues, it is necessary to move away from national, ethnic, religious, and even gender loyalties. The importance in each society of common culture and widely accepted moral values, Grey suggests, cannot be overstated. With its rampant political correctness, the modern left seems to have lost sight of morality and individual freedom. While most commentators stake out a partisan position in their criticism, Grey's notion of individual romanticism as the basis of a socially progressive society and his stress on free will, culture, classical education, and the right to dissent demand an overhaul of both the right and the left. A fundamental rethinking of the social, political, and economic foundations of modern industrial society, Capitalism and the Alternatives proposes freedom from identity, instead of communitarianism and tradition, as a condition for liberty and justice.

Translingual Francophonie and the Limits of Translation

Translingual Francophonie and the Limits of Translation PDF Author: Ioanna Chatzidimitriou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100017929X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book

Book Description
Translingual Francophonie and the Limits of Translation proposes a novel theoretical lens for the study of translation as theme and practice in works by four translingual, francophone authors: Vassilis Alexakis, Chahdortt Djavann, Nancy Huston, and Andreï Makine. In particular, it argues that translation allows for the most productive encounter with otherness when it is practiced in its "estuarine" dimension. When two foreign bodies of water come into contact in an estuary, often a new environment is created at their shared border that does not, however, invalidate the distinctiveness (chemical, biological, geological etc.) of either fresh or sea water. Similarly, texts translated from one language to another, should ideally not transform into but rather relate to their new host’s linguistic and cultural codes in ways that account both for their undiluted strangeness and the missteps, gaps, and discontinuities, the challenging yet novel and productive articulations of relationality that proliferate at the border of the encounter.

Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on Verbs

Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on Verbs PDF Author: Folke Josephson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902727181X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 453

Get Book

Book Description
This volume applies a diachronic perspective to the verb and mainly deals with typological change affecting tense, aspect, mood and modality in a variety of Indo-European languages (Latin, Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Hittite, and Semitic) and the non-Indo-European Turkic, Amerindian and some Australian languages. The analyses of the structural changes and the interchange between the different grammatical categories that cause them which are presented in the chapters of this volume yield astonishing results. The diachronic perspective combined with a comparative approach provides profound knowledge of the typology of the verb and other typological issues and will serve researchers, as well as advanced and beginning of linguistics students in a way that has rarely been encountered before.

Problems and Perspectives

Problems and Perspectives PDF Author: Wendy Ayres-Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317886526
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book

Book Description
Problems and Perspectives- Studies in the Modern French Language looks at a number of interesting or problematic areas in the phonology, morphology, syntax and lexis of the French language and encourages the reader to think critically about different ways of approaching, describing and explaining these issues or data. The book is divided into two parts- the first section is a preliminary to, and contextualises, the discussion of the more specialised topics of the second part. Part two presents problematic and controversial areas in the description and analysis of the contemporary language. Where appropriate historical and sociolinguistic issues are also integrated into the discussion of modern French. Aimed primarily at advanced students and researchers in French linguistics, the introductory sections of part one also make this book accessible to undergraduates beginning their study of French linguistics, and to less specialised readers.