engleski

The metonymic basis of aspectual shift

The interpretation of utterance meaning often demands the resolution of a semantic conflict between two linguistic units, as in: (1) [...]je ne sus que plus tard 1'avantage qu'ils y trouvaient. In (1), the perfective aspect of the verb 'savoir' coerces the mental state meaning 'know' into the meaning 'come to know'. This reading is guided by the productive metonymy RESULT FOR PROCESS. One English translator of (1) uses 'learned', obviously finding a 'literal' translation 'knew' not quite appropriate: (2) [...] I only learned later how much they benefited by this. Conflicts between grammatical-aspectual meaning and lexical-aspectual meaning can be resolved either by selecting the "right verb" as in (2), or by shifting the meaning of the verb metonymically as in (1). Using parallel French-English corpora, we explore how these two languages differ in their coding of aspectual meaning. Our results point to conceptual metonymy as a typologically relevant parameter.

aspect; metonymy; corpora

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