Jacques Amyot's translation of Plutarch's whole corpus could be considered a unicum in the Renaissance. Amyot seems to aim on the one hand to contribute to spreading the `submerged' texts coming from Antiquity; on the other, to aspire to partaking in the renaissance of the French language and thus adorning the national idiom through his prose. By means of the key notion of adumbratio, which Amyot uses as a paradigm for his writing process, I underline the contradictory nature of this utopic project, i.e. the attempt to generate a continuum that cannot fully take shape due to the difference of historical and political milieus as well as to the linguistic specificities that underlie it. Amyot's work represents an attempt to trace a new path to `uncover' the original: specifically, by shying away from a cornucopian dynamic and rather performing a synthesis of the two poles of the equation. By remaining faithful to the original with regard to meaning, and by searching at the same time for an expressiveness that could make the translation communicable in its own time, Amyot's language strives for a precarious and almost unachievable balance, which goes far beyond the search for a picturesque impressionism.
After a brief overview of the state of research in a widely neglected aspect of the history of the French lexicon, this article shows which adjectives were or are used for `stupid' and `crazy' from the period of Old French to the present day. Focussing on the etymology of the adjectives and the semantic areas from which they originate, the article particularly shows that the need to express the concepts of `stupidity' and `madness' through euphemisms or to articulate them expressively led to ever new variants of adjectives and to the disappearance of older words. Finally, an analysis is presented of the lexical fields under consideration with regard to the diasystematic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the respective lexemes that are commonly used in contemporary French.
This article presents some theoretical and applied details of psychomechanics, according to Olivier Soutet's latest book, Le sens sous tension, and discusses some aspects of this theory. Soutet addresses three points: the anthropological orientation, the fundamental concepts of psychomechanics, and the analysis of some grammatical subsystems. He begins by demonstrating how Gustave Guillaume, the founder of psychomechanics, considers the emergence of language as part of the evolution of the human species, thanks to which humans managed to internalize the external world by means of representation. At the heart of this process figure the `operative time' and its spatialized representation, the tenseur binaire radical (TBR). After explaining in detail the characteristics of these two concepts, which explain the dynamic nature of language processes, the author criticizes several emblematic language subsystems within the scope of this theory and resolves the problems addressed by solutions that he considers being in compliance with the principles of Guillaume's theory.
To express opinions, intentions and moods, a speaker uses not only words but also their voice. The description of the prosodic voice modifications used for this purpose was extremely difficult at a time when today’s technical recording and analysis possibilities were not yet available. For a long time, the only research medium was the ear, although experimental methods slowly gained acceptance starting in the 18th century. Voice and voice modulation became an important topic for researchers such as Joseph Fourier, Hermann von Helmholtz and Rudolph Koenig. Nevertheless, their work did not lead to a complete break with tradition, but rather the change was gradual. Comparing linguistics (grammar and phonetics) and musicology, this article shows the development of research on vocal expressiveness from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, when new technological advances provided a new approach to describing vocal expressiveness.
Deontic modality expresses an obligation, permission or possibility. Prototypical and frequent markers of deontic modality are modal verbs such as must and have to . Previous work on deontic modality in French has focused heavily on verbs as markers of deontic modality, such as French devoir , falloir , etc. However, deontic modality can also be expressed by infinitive constructions that do not show any overt modal verb, as in French Quoi faire ? (`What should we do?'). In this contribution, I analyse various types of French infinitive constructions with deontic interpretation from the corpus C -ORAL -ROM as constructions containing a modal operator that has the same semantics as certain modal verbs. I also show that the context and a scalar implicature play an important role in the evaluation of the deontic modal interpretation of the infinitive constructions under examination.
The morpheme prou , attested since ca. u00, survives in Modern French only in the adverbial phrase peu ou prou , 'more or less' (lit. 'little or much') and marginally in its antonymic version ni peu ni prou . In medieval French, prou was used in a variety of ways: as a noun, an adjective (Mod. Fr. preux ), an adverbial, and an indefinite pronoun. The purpose of this study is to elucidate, with the help of a selection of corpora extracted from the FRANTEXT database, each of which covering one century starting with the 12th, the dating of the gradual reduction of the transcategoriality of prou to the status of a simple constituent of a fixed adverbial locution.
