Maître de Conférences en Linguistique Anglaise, Université de Caen (CRISCO)

antonina.bondarenko@unicaen.fr

Résumé

Central to any theory of language is the question of what precisely constitutes a sentence. This seminar explores the theoretically controversial and often marginalized phenomenon of the verbless sentence, i.e. structures in which the typical syntactic marker of sentential status – the verbal predicate – is absent. Although such structures exist in many languages (e.g. Bertinetto et al., forthcoming; Goldberg & Perek, 2019; Bîlbîie, 2017; Landolfi et al., 2010; Merle, 2009; Elugardo & Stainton, 2005; Behr et al., 2005; Guillemin-Flescher, 2005; Fernández & Ginzburg, 2002; Lefeuvre, 2001; Benveniste, 1971), their study has been limited by challenges in automatic retrieval. We develop their processing and take a contrastive corpus approach to the phenomenon. Persuaded that linguistic constraints hidden from a monolingual perspective can emerge in cross-linguistic comparison, we examine the structures in two languages that have profoundly different typological characteristics regarding the verb: English and Russian (e.g. Stassen, 2013; Weiss, 2013; Kopotev, 2007; McShane, 2000). We develop a multidimensional methodological framework that combines contrastive linguistics with corpus-driven methods and enunciative analysis, with the goal of (a) providing a corpus-based description of the semantico-pragmatic features associated with the absence of the verb in English and Russian and (b) exploring the theoretical implications of the results for linguistic models of the ‘sentence’.