Meaning and Effects of Meaning. The French gérondif in the Context of the Romance Languages
In Romance languages, a central function of gerunds is the creation of links or junctions (Raible 1992) between actions. The idea of junction implies that two actions – the action expressed by the gerund and the action of the matrix sentence – are combined in a structured unit. The starting point of...
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| Formato: | Artículo revista |
| Lenguaje: | Español |
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Anales de Lingüística
2021
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| Acceso en línea: | https://revistas.uncu.edu.ar/ojs3/index.php/analeslinguistica/article/view/5161 |
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| Sumario: | In Romance languages, a central function of gerunds is the creation of links or junctions (Raible 1992) between actions. The idea of junction implies that two actions – the action expressed by the gerund and the action of the matrix sentence
– are combined in a structured unit. The starting point of our study is the analysis of the gérondif in French, whose semantic-pragmatic profile will be analysed and described first. This profile forms the basis of a contrastive study of the Spanish and Italian gerund, based on a trilingual corpus, comparative translation being used as a method. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the corpus show that gerunds can be described as forms of junction in French, Spanish, and Italian, by using two models: the frame-forming junction (junción-encuadre), which provides a contextualizing framework, and the specifying junction (junción especificadora), which verbalizes a specification. The contrastive study shows that the French gérondif and the Italian gerund can do justice to both concepts of the junction, while the Spanish gerund is subject to strong limitations in the case of the frame-forming junction. One of the main approaches to the study is on the effects of meaning that the gerund achieves when interacting with its environments of speech. The fundamental methodological question of the semantic interaction between meaning and its environments arises with particular urgency in the case of gerunds, since they are semantically open and under- determined forms that generate a particularly broad spectrum of meaningful effects, which in turn provides particularly rich and complex material for the study of these interactions. The theoretical basis and the differentiations necessary for the analysis are provided by the system of linguistic competence according to Eugenio Coseriu (1992) with its distinction of three levels and three contents of speech as well as three judgments on speech. |
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