| Titre | Les centres d'intérêt de l'énoncé et la cohérence textuelle en polonais et russe | |
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| Auteur | Hélène Włodarczyk | |
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Revue | Revue des Etudes Slaves |
| Numéro | Vol. 80, no 1-2, 2009 La cohérence du discours dans les langues slaves | |
| Rubrique / Thématique | La cohérence du discours dans les langues slaves. Linguistique théorique et textuelle Articles |
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| Page | 13-30 | |
| Résumé anglais |
Centres of Attention of Utterances and Discourse Coherence in Slavic Languages
In this paper, we would like to suggest that the Meta-Informative Centering theory (MIC) is relevant for the description of meta-informative markers in the so-called 'free word order' languages such as Slavic languages in contrast to languages with a more rigid word order like French and English. We also briefly sketch out the main properties of the morphemes to and èto in Polish and Russian in the utterances where they are used as meta-informative particles. In the framework of the MIC Theory, the term information refers to the semantic content of linguistic utterances while the term meta-information indicates its sequential ordering. In Associative Semantics (AS), situations are formalised as static or dynamic frames anchored in space and time, i. e. as situations in which participants (animate or non animate entities) fill neutral roles (in states) and active, passive or median roles (in actions). The speaker selects among participants (a) the global primary centre of attention, i.e. the subject of an utterance about which he predicates and possibly (b) one (or even two) local secondary centre(s) of attention, the direct and indirect object(s). Moreover, predication consists in assigning meta-informative status – either new or old – to utterance constituents.
In Polish and Russian, the subject of an utterance is mostly expressed by a noun phrase in the nominative case (linked up to the verb by the agreement rule). Participants chosen as subjects of utterances can fill different semantic roles (most frequently active, but possibly also passive or even median as in other accusative languages). Diathesis (which, in our approach, includes active and passive voices as well as impersonal constructions) is used to maintain discourse cohesion when the participant distinguished as the global centre of attention does not fill an active role. Passive constructions are often used without any complement phrase, thus making it possible not to mention at all the active role (either because it is unknown to the speaker or because it is not one of his centres of attention). On the other hand, impersonal constructions make it possible to treat the global centre of attention (i.e. the subject) as (very) partially determined. We proposed to name such a subject anonymous: the only information expressed about it in the utterance is the fact that it belongs either to the class of human or non-human beings. Utterances in which the subject and the predicate have the same meta-informative status (old or new) are said to be basic. In extended utterances the centre of attention is a distinguished noun phrase contrasting with the rest of the utterance: an old topic contrasting with a new comment or a new focus with an old background. In Polish and Russian, word order is used mainly in order to mark the difference between entirely new or entirely old basic utterances but not the difference between Subject and Object as in French and English. In extended utterances, word order combines with intonation and morphological markers (particles, adverbs, clitics, etc. ) in order to point to the topic and/or the focus. However, in Polish and Russian, topicalisation and focalisation can often be marked by word order only. As a matter of fact, in these languages word order is the main device of text cohesion: such a weak topic or weak focus are difficult to identify in original texts (in particular, in the written language) for French or English translators whose translations are often perfect as regards the semantic content but not the text cohesion. Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
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| Article en ligne | https://www.persee.fr/doc/slave_0080-2557_2009_num_80_1_7178 |
