A Typological and Contrastive Study of aller ‘go’/venir ‘come’ in French and pāj ‘go’/māː ‘come’ in central Thai
Author: Bunkham, Nichuta
Under the direction of: Alice Vittrant and Anna Sörés
Lumière University Lyon 2
Texte français
Keywords: Language science, Thailand, Going/coming, Paj/ma, Spatial/non-spatial values, Deictic verb, Dynamic deixis, Grammaticalization, TAM.
Abstract
This Ph.D. thesis entitled focuses on the study of the morphemes aller ‘go’ and venir ‘come’ in French in comparison with the morphemes pāj ‘go’ and māː ‘come’ in central Thai (Tai-Kadai, Thailand). The aim of this study is threefold : (1) to distinguish and classify the spatial and non-spatial meaning of these morphemes (2) to investigate their spatial meaning in detail, and (3) to compare and highlight the specificity of these morphemes in each language i.e. French and Thai. In French, aller ‘go’ and venir ‘come’ belong to the verb class and are generally used for the expression of motion events (either physical motion or abstract motion) and the expression of time. In Thai, pāj ‘go’ and māː ‘come’ are both transcategorial (i.e. they can be instantiated as different word classes either lexical or lexical and grammatical) and polyfunctional regarding the morphosyntactic, semantic, as well as discursive properties (for e.g., speaker, narrator, and character’s perspective). The thesis is based on two parallel corpora compiled from a contemporary French novel translated into Thai and a contemporary Thai novel translated into French.
