2004 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Research on the relations between modern french tens-aspect system and ways of subjective cognition of events
| Project/Area Number |
14510570
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
仏語・仏文学
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| Research Institution | Osaka University |
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Principal Investigator |
YOSHITAKA Haruki Univ.of Osaka, Faculty of Language and Culture, Professor, 言語文化部, 教授 (00144535)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2002 – 2004
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| Keywords | Cognition of Event / Imparfait / Passe compose / Passe simple / Subjective Foregrounding |
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| Research Abstract |
In order to pursue the above project, I made detailed analyses on some novels written in contemporary French. As for "passe compse", we examined its functions especially from the point of view of its relations with the time of utterance. Then, we took as a corpus a novel in which both "passe compse" and simple past were used frequently, and examined these two tenses firm the point of view of the subjective cognition of events ; having got the distribution of these two pasts in this novel, I then classified the uses of "passe compse" in several semantical groups. Through this analysis, I concluded that simple past is used to tell development of the story as a background and that "passe compse" is used to foreground subjective speech of the narrator (=the hero of the novel). This result constitutes the base of the further study.
Concerning "imparfait", I focused on so-called "imparfait pittoresuque" and "imparfait de rupture" where the form of imparfait seems to be used to denote aoristic event. My conclusion is that the imparfait is used to attribute a property to an entity or to describe a property of a given situation. In other words, the imparfait is used as a means of subjective cognition of events.
Finally, I made a contrastive research, with Taiwanese linguist Ms Liu Ch'i-wen, on the modal function of an aspect marker "le" in the Chinese.
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