20.4198, Diss: Typology: Meulleman: 'Les Localisateurs Dans Les...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-20-4198. Tue Dec 08 2009. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 20.4198, Diss: Typology: Meulleman: 'Les Localisateurs Dans Les...'

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1)
Date: 08-Dec-2009
From: Machteld Meulleman < mathilde.meulleman at yahoo.fr >
Subject: Les Localisateurs Dans Les Constructions Existentielles: Approche comparée en espagnol, en français et en italien
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:09:35
From: Machteld Meulleman [mathilde.meulleman at yahoo.fr]
Subject: Les Localisateurs Dans Les Constructions Existentielles: Approche comparée en espagnol, en français et en italien

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Institution: Universiteit Gent 
Program: Taal- en letterkunde: Romaanse talen 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2009 

Author: Machteld Claire Meulleman

Dissertation Title: Les Localisateurs Dans Les Constructions Existentielles:
Approche comparée en espagnol, en français et en italien 

Linguistic Field(s): Typology

Subject Language(s): French (fra)
                     Italian (ita)
                     Spanish (spa)


Dissertation Director(s):
Eugeen Roegiest

Dissertation Abstract:

The dissertation sets out a contrastive study of the most frequent
existential presentational  constructions in Spanish, French and Italian,
respectively hay, il y a and c'è. It is divided into two major parts, both
consisting of four chapters.

The first part presents a status quaestionis of the existing literature on
existential constructions. From this review I conclude that it is mainly
the status of the locative complement (clitic and/or PP) in this
construction which has led to controversy, not only from a morphological
(chapter 1), but also from a discursive (chapter 2), semantic (chapter 3)
and syntactic perspective (chapter 4). 

Therefore the second part offers an empirical analysis of the locatives
which appear in these constructions in the three studied languages. The
investigation is based on a systematic statistical corpus study of
contemporary newspaper articles. Different parameters are taken into
account: the frequency of the locative complement, its position, its
discursive status, its semantic properties and its internal structure. 

It is shown that all three existential verbs behave very similarly as to
the distribution of the locatives? (chapter 5). Moreover, it appears that
in all three languages the position of the locatives is fundamentally
driven by communicative dynamism. In addition, the analysis reveals various
language-specific tendencies. In particular, the studied languages clearly
differ with respect to the preferred position of these locatives. Whereas
Italian c'è and Spanish hay prefer preverbal position for their locatives,
in French the locatives appear systematically after the existential il y a
construction (chapter 6). This language specific tendency is confirmed for
several other kinds of locatives in existential constructions (chapter 7).
It is argued that this divergent (preferential) word order can be explained
in terms of a different degree of grammaticalization (chapter 8). Hence, I
suggest that French il y a functions to a larger extent as a
topic-introducing device. Conversely, Italian c'è and Spanish hay are shown
to rather function as lexical predicates with an existential meaning. 




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