28.653, Calls: Gen Ling, Ling & Lit, Translation/France

Thu Feb 2 20:59:29 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-653. Thu Feb 02 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.653, Calls: Gen Ling, Ling & Lit, Translation/France

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Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2017 15:59:16
From: Eric Corre [eric.corre at univ-paris3.fr]
Subject: Linguistic Approaches to Tense, Aspect, Modality, Evidentiality, based on the Novel L’Etranger (“The Stranger”) by Albert Camus, and Its Translations

Full Title: Linguistic Approaches to Tense, Aspect, Modality, Evidentiality, based on the Novel L’Etranger (“The Stranger”) by Albert Camus, and Its Translations 
Short Title: Etranger-TAME 

Date: 16-Nov-2017 - 18-Nov-2017
Location: PARIS, France 
Contact Person: Eric Corre
Meeting Email: eric.corre at univ-paris3.fr
Web Site: http://etranger-tame.sciencesconf.org/ 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Ling & Literature; Translation 

Call Deadline: 01-Apr-2017 

Meeting Description:

This conference is aimed primarily at studying the use of verb inflectional
classes (so-called “tiroirs verbaux”, Damourette & Pichon) in the novel The
Stranger (L’Etranger) by Albert Camus, in particular the narrative use of the
French passé composé (“compound past”), but also of the imperfect and
pluperfect, in a monolingual comparative approach, but also from a contrastive
cross-linguistic perspective, comparing the aspectual-temporal forms used by
other languages in the published translations of the novel. The purpose of the
conference will be thus to throw light on the TAME systems of languages as
typologically diverse as possible, and to do so with a single “small” 
authentic literary corpus of mid-twentieth century French. All theoretical
approaches of linguistic investigation are welcome – formal theories
(generative grammar, formal semantics, lexicalist-driven theories) as well as
usage-based theories (cognitive, functionalist, construction,
utterer-centered, approaches). 

Venue:

Maison de la recherche, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 (November 16
and 18)
http://www.univ-paris3.fr/la-maison-de-la-recherche-4-rue-des-irlandais-75005-
paris--3029.kjsp?RH=ACCUEIL 

INALCO (November 17)
http://www.inalco.fr/institut/presentation-politique-institut/implantations-ge
ographiques/pole-langues-civilisations 

Plenary Speakers:

Jacques Brès, Université de Montpellier.
Laurent Gosselin, Université de Rouen.
Alice Kaplan, Université de Yale.
Sandra Smith, Université de Cambridge.  
Henriette de Swart, Université d'Utrecht.

Call for Papers:

With close to seven million copies sold and translated into sixty languages,
The Stranger, Albert Camus’s first novel, is the record best-selling paperback
novel in France, just before another mythical work of French literature, Le
Petit Prince (1943) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. “My mother died today. Or
maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” For Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etranger was “the best
book since the end of WW2”. These past few years, several publications have
put the novel back in the spotlight – in a recent book (University of Chicago
Press/Gallimard, 2016), Alice Kaplan explores the various stages of the
genesis, the writing, publication and circulation of the book, which has kept
its mystery in spite of all the comments and critical reviews it has
undergone.

The Stranger presents a peculiar narrative form: written in the first person
(“je”) and in an apparently simple transparent language that merely reports
facts, it follows the conventions of the diary. As Sartre (Situations I, 1957)
and Robbe-Grillet (1960) pointed out, the book caught the attention of
linguists and literary critics because of its treatment of time. What is at
stake here is the main character Meursault’s relationship to time – he neither
recalls anything from his past nor projects himself into a desired, or simply
imagined, future. “The sentences in The Stranger are islands. We bounce from
sentence to sentence, from void to void. […], Sartre writes (109) , and goes
on to mention the “American narrative technique” that inspired Camus: “ […]
What our author borrows from Hemingway is thus the discontinuity between the
clipped phrases that imitate the discontinuity of time […]”. And of course, “
[…]It was in order to emphasize the isolation of each sentence unit that Camus
chose to tell his story in the compound past  tense. [In contrast,] the simple
past is the tense of continuity […]”. The compound past forms in the
32.400-word novel total 1.754, against only 7 simple pasts.

The expression of time relations – the use of the passé composé (abbreviated
as PC)

Many reference grammars (Riegel et al. 1994, Wilmet 1997, etc.) of French
contain a special subsection about the use of the PC in The Stranger.  While
the simple past in French is the canonical tense that expresses narrative
progression, the PC (Swart and Molendijk 2002:203), is “not authentically
narrative; although it can be coerced into expressing narrative progression,
in and of itself it does not introduce a temporal order between the situations
that are reported […]”. Many linguists have observed that with the PC the
story becomes less fluid, and that the situation fails to open onto the next
but appears as closed in on itself. Weinrich (1973) added that the PC is the
tense used for retrospection, as it does not naturally express narrative
continuity, which then has to be suggested by the use of adverbs like puis
(“then”), alors (“afterwards”), etc. 

The use of the PC is what makes The Stranger striking: it is the tense for
oral communication and retrospection, it denies literature and favors reality.
Combined with a first-person voice, it brings us into the daily life of the
main character, but by isolating and freezing each situation, cutting it off
from the previous or upcoming situations. According to Sartre (ibid., p.6), a
sentence with the PC like “ […] ‘Il s’est promené longtemps’ conceals the
‘verbality’ of the verb. The verb is split and broken in two. On the one hand,
we ﬁnd a past participle which has lost all transcendence and which is as
inert as a thing; and on the other, we ﬁnd only the verb être, which has
merely a copulative sense and which joins the participle to the substantive as
the attribute to the subject. The transitive character of the verb has
vanished; the sentence has frozen. Its present reality becomes the noun.
Instead of acting as a bridge between past and future, it is merely a small,
isolated, self-sufficient substance.”

We invite submission of abstracts in the areas of linguistics and translation
studies, on the following topics:

- The equivalents of “verb inflectional classes” (tense, aspect, modal and
evidential systems) in the translations of the novel, in typologically
unrelated languages
- The study of time relations, the structure of sentences and the lexicon, the
use of temporal –aspectual adverbials, in the source or target language(s)
- From a more literary perspective, the problematic, almost static, time
structure of the novel, that accounts for the peculiarity of its narrative
form

Proposals (20 mns + 10mns for questions) should be submitted via
Sciencesconf.org by April 1, 2017, on https://etranger-tame.sciencesconf.org/
(NB: please note that in order to submit an abstract, you must first go to the
Sciencesconf.org to create your account)

400 word abstracts (plus references) in French or English will state the
research hypothesis, methodology, data, findings and the area(s) of research
as indicated above.

Important Dates

February 01, 2017: Start of abstract submission 
April 01 : Abstract submission deadline
June 01 : Notification of acceptance
July 01-November 15 : Registration

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