Existential preaching in natural languages

Presentation

The articles gathered in the collection deal with the expression of existential values in different languages of the world. The universal character of the problem and its richness are illustrated by the diversity of the theoretical approaches enabling us to observe similarities and differences in its expression from one language to another.

The originality of the work lies not only in the description of the variety of existential structures, carrying possessive, locative or attributive values, it also consists in their multiple reading.

The structure of the collection has been arbitrarily organized into two parts. In the articles of the first part, existential predication is considered from a typological point of view; in those of the second part, an enunciative and pragmatic approach is applied. This division is somewhat artificial, however, insofar as the authors consider the semantic, syntactic and formal features of existential constructions, but also take into account contextual and, for some articles, enunciative parameters. Existential predication is, in fact, presented by the authors as a specific operation of locating one term in relation to the other, which is reflected in the non-canonical marking of propositional constituents, as well as in the use of specific existence markers.

The typological analysis and the enunciative approach complement each other and open up new perspectives in linguistic research into the expression of existence in the world's languages.

Director

Tatiana Bottineau is Professor of Russian Linguistics at Inalco, and agrégée in Russian. Her work is conducted within the framework of formal and enunciative linguistics, a major part of which is devoted to Russian verbal particles considered as discourse markers. Several of her articles deal with Russian and French suffixes, studied within the framework of the theory of predicative and enunciative operations. The existential problematic has interested Tatiana Bottineau since her doctoral thesis devoted to the Russian existential particle "bylo".

218 pages
16 x 24 cm
Publication: 20/08/2020
ISBN: 9782858313624