Chapter 17
Verbless sentences in L’Étranger
A French – Russian – English contrastive study
What is aspectual meaning without a verb?
Focusing on sentences in which the typical marker of aspectual
meaning – the verb constellation – is absent, we use translations to
explore the aspectual meaning pragmatically implicated by verbless
sentences. Retrieved automatically, they were analyzed from a
monolingual, parallel-text and third-language perspective. Semantic
annotation for situation and viewpoint aspect showed that while
states are an important correlate, verbless sentences are also found
in contexts that call for the use of dynamic situations. English
verbless sentences tend to implicate the French present simple and
require an indexical relation to the situation of utterance. In
spite of its high frequency in the novel, the French passé composé
is excluded from the conversational implicature of Russian and
English verbless sentences.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Semantically undetermined aspect
- 3.Corpus from three perspectives
- 3.1Non-elliptical verbless sentences
- 4.Automatic retrieval and manual annotation
- 4.1Verbless sentence extraction
- 4.2Annotation definitions
- 5.Results
- 6.Discussion
- 6.1Stative and dynamic situations
- 6.2English verbless sentences: Indexical relation to the utterance situation
- 6.3Viewpoint type
- 6.4Verbless sentences in Russian exclude the Passé Composé as
translational equivalent
- 7.Conclusion
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Notes
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References