Lise FONTAINE

Durant les mois de mai et juin 2018, le labex TransferS et Shirley Carter-Thomas (Lattice) accueillent Lise FONTAINE, de la Cardiff School of English Communication and Philosophy (Royaume-Uni).

Text information management and the role of nominal constructions in English and French

This research focuses on the study of information management in text with specific attention to linguistic encoding of information through nominal constructions. This is an area of expertise of both Shirley Carter‐Thomas (cohesion, thematic patterns in text, etc.) and Lise Fontaine (noun phrase and referring expressions). Nominal constructions include a wide range of linguistic phenomena, for example, reference, cohesion, information chains and information structure. While various theoretical frameworks have focused on these types of expressions, the considerable body of work undertaken from a Systemic Functional Perspective (SFL) is comparatively unknown in France (e.g. Halliday & Hasan, 1976, Hasan & Fries, 1995, Fontaine, Bartlett & O’Grady, 2013). There has also been relatively little empirical work underlying how useful these approaches are in the study of information flow to compare or translate languages (cf. Steiner, 2004).

In this project, we therefore ask how information management in text can be mapped onto knowledge structuring, with particular reference to SFL theories. In addition to this, we examine to what extent nominalizations work in a similar way in English and French in terms of structuring information, especially given the status of nominalizations in both languages (e.g. Umbreit, 2014, Fontaine, 2017). This will provide a useful basis for us to then make fruitful comparisons with other languages such as German (e.g. Kunz & Steiner, 2010, Niemietz, Neumann & Freiwald, 2017) and Welsh (Fontaine, in preparation) as we develop this collaboration.

Series of talks

The proposed series of talks concentrate on nominal or content-oriented meanings in language. Each talk raises important theoretical questions related to representational meanings and their (non-)expression, language description and meaning construal, translation and language comparisons.

Jeudi 17 mai 2018, 10h30-12h30, ENS rue Lhomond – salle E314
Lecture 1 : The Place of Subject in Welsh, English and French
This talk examines the role of Subject in Welsh and compares this to the mood structures and functions in English and French.

Jeudi 24 mai 2018, 10h30-12h30, ENS rue Lhomond – salle E314
Lecture 2 : The status of nominal expressions
In this paper, I evaluate what it means for a language to be said to be ‘nominal’ or to prefer nominal expressions. Halliday (1966) has made this claim for English and others (Steiner, Neumann, see references) have considered the same question for German.

Jeudi 31 mai 2018, 10h30-12h30, ENS rue Lhomond – salle Serre
Lecture 3 : Meeting in the middle, a functional approach to lexis
In this talk, I discuss the reasons why textually-oriented approaches to lexis (e.g. systemic functional linguistics, SFL) and more lexically-driven approaches typically found within corpus linguistics (e.g. Hunston and Francis, 2000) struggle to find common ground. Drawing from Halliday (1961, 1991), Hanks (2013), I propose some developments within SFL theory which offer a middle ground approach to lexico-grammar.

vendredi 1^er juin 2018, 9h-13h, ENS rue Lhomond – salle Serre
Lecture 4 : Onion tears, on the role of inference in nominalizations and grammatical metaphor
In this paper, I renegotiate and redefine the terms ’nominalization’ and ’grammatical metaphor’ (e.g. event meanings expressed by nominal structures) as they are used within SFL theory by exploring to what extent inference plays a role (e.g. the causative meaning in ‘onion tears’ cannot be attributed to de-verbal nominalization).

• Entrée libre dans la limite des places disponibles

  Jeudis 17, 24 et 31 mai 2018 – 10h30-12h30 Vendredi 1er juin 2018 – 9h-13h ENS, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 salle E314 salle Serre (5e étage, département de géosciences)