par Hoelbeek, Thomas 
Référence Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 116, 1, page (55-84)
Publication Publié, 2015
Référence Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 116, 1, page (55-84)
Publication Publié, 2015
Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | In this contribution, we deal with two main questions concerning the French expressions à travers and au travers (meaning both '(way) through/across') in combination with the preposition de ('of/from'). These complex dynamic expressions, derived from the word travers ('breadth') and stemming from Latin tran(s)versu(m) ('oblique, across'), belong in French to the limited group of the main markers of spatial dynamic relations with a medial polarity. In the past, the preposition de could combine with both à travers and au travers; today, à travers de does no longer exist, and neither does au travers (used as an adverbial expression only). Using a corpus retrieved from the Frantext database and covering four Centuries (from 1500 to 1899), this paper offers a diachronic analysis of how the combinations [à/au travers + de] have evolved in time. Theoretically, we take our inspiration in functional approaches developed in the framework of cognitive linguistics. We determine when the combinatory freedom of à travers and au travers with respect to the use of the preposition de ceased to exist (the beginning of the 18th Century for à travers, the beginning of the 17th Century for au travers), and examine whether semantic consequences entailed by this process can be found. It is shown that both à travers (de) and au travers (de) were subjected to a semantic reorganization, which affected the uses described by the functional notion of Contrast, and the proportion of dynamic and static uses. Finally, we observe an increasing amount of Abstract tokens. |
