PT Journal
AU Chovancova - Simona Krafcikova, K
TI The functional parallelism of transformed verbal constructions in Slovak and in French
SO Romanica Olomucensia
PY 2020
BP 231
EP 242
VL 32
IS 2
DI 10.5507/ro.2020.012
DE grammar; verb; valency; agent; Slovak; French
AB The paper deals with selected types of syntactic constructions of verbs in Slovak and in French. The focus is on the impersonal reflexive use of the Slovak third-person singular (A) and its correspondence with first-person generic plural constructions (B) of the same Slovak verbs. The third type of verbal construction under focus is the French "on"-subject construction (C). The corpus-based study is conducted using the Slovak National Corpus and the French corpus Frantext on a narrowed sample of 12 Slovak verbs of sight and their French semantic counterparts. Occurrences of A and B constructions were excerpted from the corpus. Once their frequencies had been assessed, five core Slovak verbs of sight were treated further to verify the hypothesis of the interchangeability of A and B. The verification took the form of a substitutional test in authentic contexts. In the final step, the interchangeability of A/B and C was checked. The interchangeability of A and B was confirmed in two-thirds of the sample. Differences were shown between different hyponymic groups established in the sample set. Functional parallels between A and B proved to be linked to specific pragmatic values of the verbs that were studied. In relation to the functional parallelism between A/B and C, exemplification demonstrated that C remains, together with the passive, one of the two main French functional equivalents of Slovak agentless constructions. The paper is a contribution to a larger contrastive research study on verbal transformations aimed at the conception of a valency transformation grammar of Slovak and French with potential impacts on translation and language teaching.
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