Table des matières
LONGRÉE Dominique & HALLA-AHO Hilla : « Préambule ; Foreword »
PAGANI-NAUDET Cendrine : « Prolepse et dislocation : notions rivales ou complémentaires ? »
HALLA-AHO Hilla : « A historical perspective on Latin proleptic accusatives »
BORTOLUSSI Bernard : « Quelle position syntaxique l’accusatif proleptique occupe-t-il ? »
SZNAJDER Lyliane : « Considérations sur la prolepse en hébreu biblique et son traitement dans la traduction latine. Première partie : Aspects des constructions proleptiques en hébreu biblique. »
SZNAJDER Lyliane : « Deuxième partie : la traduction biblique latine et le traitement des prolepses : les situations calques et leurs limites. »
JULIA Marie-Ange : « Comment trouver des prolepses en fonction des genres littéraires par l’exemple des Comédies de Plaute. »
LONGREE Dominique, Caroline PHILIPPART DE FOY Caroline & PURNELLE Gérald : « Conditionnements linguistiques des dislocations à gauche chez César et Tacite : l’apport du projet LatSynt. »
Foreword
Hilla Halla-Aho (University of Helsinki)
Dominique Longrée (University of Liège)
Dominique.Longree@ulg.ac.be
hilla.halla-aho@helsinki.fi
Prolepsis (‘anticipation’) has generally been discussed in the context of rhetoric, and even inside linguistics, the variety of usages is great (e.g., Gonda 1958b). Usually, however, the term has been applied to syntactic constructions, e.g., ‘the presence, in a completive construction, of a word or phrase in the main clause, which functions syntactically in it, and is also co-referent with the subject (or the object) of the following subordinate clause,’ (Fraser 2001). e.g.,
(1) ‘I saw him in the battle range about, and watch’d him how he singled Clifford forth’
(Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, II.1.11-12, op. cit.)
.
The term ‘prolepsis’ has also been used to refer to noun-phrase internal constructions such as possessive constructions in Ge’ez, an ancient Ethiopian Semitic language:
(2) bet-u lä-negus
house-his to-king
‘The king’s house’
in opposition to
(3) bet-ä negus
house-OBL king
‘A/the house of a/the king.’
In example (3), definiteness is not specifically marked, while in the proleptic construction in example (2), the reading is almost invariably definite. In this case, prolepsis describes constructions in which there is apparent ‘double encoding’ of a single relation.
However, as a number of studies (e.g., Gonda 1958a) have shown, the term is applied in a vague and inconsistent manner to syntax, and it has only rarely been considered in the framework of contemporary linguistics. Moreover, almost all discussions of prolepsis as a syntactic construction have focused on Latin and Greek (exceptionally, see Zewi 1996). This has made difficult the kind of cross-linguistic study necessary for the evaluation of prolepsis as a valid term of analysis. Nevertheless, the set of core phenomena identified as prolepsis has raised many interesting problems; for example, it is almost universally agreed that proleptic constructions encode marked discourse functions (Gonda 1958a, Touratier 1980, Panhuis 1984, Bolkestein 1981), when in opposition to a non-proleptic construction. However, the precise nature of these functions is still very much at issue, and opinions tend to differ significantly. Also, from a diachronic perspective, proleptic constructions seem to be especially prone to grammaticalization (Fraser 2001). Furthermore, even inside one language, e.g. Latin, the definition of prolepsis varies, and sometimes it is used more generally as a synonym for left dislocation (see Longrée et al. forthcoming); concerning discourse functions, these are often similar to other types of proleptic constructions.
The papers presented here are the result of a workshop organised by Eitan Grossman, Hilla Halla-aho, and Dominique Longrée, June 1st and 2nd, 2010, at the Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis (FUSL-Brussels) and at the University of Liège (ULg). Under the aegis of the LASLA (Laboratoire d’Analyse Statistique des Langues anciennes, ULg) and of the SeSLa (Séminaire des Sciences du Langage des FUSL), this workshop had attempted to delimit criteria for identifying proleptic constructions and to understand their discourse functions in diverse languages, but mainly in Latin.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOLKESTEIN A. M., 1981, «Embedded predications, displacement and pseudo-argument formation in Latin», in: A. Machtelt Bolkestein, Henk A. COMBÉ, Simon C. DIK, Casper de GROOT, Jadranka GVOZDANOVIC, Albert RIJKSBARON and Co VET (eds.) Predication and expression in Functional Grammar. London 1981. 63-112.
CHRISTOL A., 1989, «Prolepse et syntaxe indo-européenne», in : G. CALBOLi (ed.) Subordination and other topics in Latin (Proceedings of the Third Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, Bologna, 1-5 April 1985), Amsterdam/Philadelphia 1989. 65-89.
FRASER B., 2001, «Consider the lilies: prolepsis and the development of complementation», Glotta 77, 7-37.
GONDA J., 1958a, «On the so-called proleptic accusative in Greek», Mnemosyne 11, 117-122.
GONDA J., 1958b, «Prolepsis of the adjective in Greek and other ancient Indo-European languages», Mnemosyne 11, 1-19.
LONGRÉE, D., PHILIPPART DE FOY, C. & PURNELLE, G., 2010, « Subordinate Clause Boundaries and Word Order in Latin: The Contribution of the L.A.S.L.A. Syntactic Parser Project LatSynt », in : P. ANREITER & M. KIENPOINTNER (éds), Proceedings of the 15th International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, (Innsbruck, 4-9 avril 2009), Innsbruck (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft), 673-681.
MILNER J. C., 1980, «La prolepse en grec ancien», Lalies 1 (Actes des sessions de linguistique et de littérature) 1980, 39-52.
PANHUIS D., 1984, «Prolepsis in Greek as a discourse strategy», Glotta 62, 26-39.
TOURATIER Ch., 1980, «L’Accusatif proleptique en latin», Lalies 1 (Actes des sessions de linguistique et de littérature), 53-56.
ZEWI T., 1996, «Subordinate nominal sentences involving prolepsis in biblical Hebrew + an examination of variant syntactical structuring through a grammatical analysis of Semitic linguistic traditions», Journal of Semitic Studies 41 (1), 1-20.
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