FFF CONFERENCE CTF07

Brigitte Schwarze - Dimensional Verbs in French: Synchronic Variation and Historical Change

Functional concepts which are supposed to represent the attributes in frames may not only be lexicalized by functional nouns like poids ‘weight’ and prix ‘price’ but also by dimensional verbs such as peser ‘weigh’ and coûter ‘cost’. Both functional nouns and dimensional verbs encode one dimension or attribute of a certain object – realized as a possessor argument (poids de x ‘weight of x’) or subject NP (x pèse ‘x weighs’) – without specifying the value it acquires along this dimension. In this respect they diverge significantly from dimensional adjectives like lourd ‘heavy’ and cher ‘expensive’, which are usually value specific and only imply the dimension. In that they generally allow various kinds of value specifications, functional nouns and dimensional verbs prove to be more flexible than dimensional adjectives.
   Even if in French, as well as in other Indo-European languages, functional nouns generally seem to outweigh dimensional verbs in number and frequency, in many cases dimensional verbs constitute the basis for the derivation of functional nouns. For example poids goes back to vlat. pensum which derives from lat. pensare ‘weigh’ < pendere ‘hang (up)’; at the same time coûter ‘cost’ gives rise to coût which is synonymous with the derivationally unrelated functional noun prix ‘price’.
   The dimensional reading of the verbs themselves can often be traced back to non-dimensional usage involving movement or posture (cf. fr. peser ‘weigh’ < lat. pendere ‘hang (up)’; fr. coûter ‘cost’ < lat. constare ‘stand together’). In some cases concrete functional nouns such as bouche ‘mouth’ and bout ‘limit’/’endpoint’ constitute the basis for the derivation of verbs which develop dimensional meanings (cf. aboutir (à) ‘lead to an end’ and déboucher (dans/sur) ‘disembogue’). The evolution of dimensional readings is generally characterised by different semantic processes involving metonymy and/or metaphor and syntactic changes, above all alternation and reduction of the argument structure.
   In the present paper we will focus on the historical development of dimensional verbs in French. By means of analysing various semantic groups of verbs we will shed light on the possible origins as well as on the semantic and syntactic processes at work. This diachronic analysis will be completed by synchronic considerations. In this respect, special attention will be paid to intra- and interlinguistic variation in the field of dimensional verbs. We will show, for example, how specific uses – e.g. the absolute, value-specific use of certain dimensional verbs – could give rise to further more idiosyncratic readings.