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A typological study of the (a)symmetrical expression of Path


  Contact person
Clement VOIRIN

Scientific framework and objectives

This Ph.D. thesis, under the supervision of Anetta Kopecka (Université Lyon 2 & Laboratoire DDL), has begun in October 2016 and is funded by the LabEx ASLAN until September 2019. It focuses on the Source/Goal asymmetry which consists of considering that the morphosyntactic expression of Path (spatiotemporal axis of a motion event) is ruled by a cognitive hierarchy between its different parts (Goal > Source > Trajectory) (cf. Ikegami 1987; Dirven & Verspoor 1998; Regier & Zheng 2007). After a preliminary research on this topic during my Master’s degree (2014-2016), the Ph.D. thesis investigates three barely explored research axes (cf. Stefanowitsch & Rohde 2004; Ishibashi 2010; Kopecka & Ishibashi 2011; Voirin 2015, 2016). In particular, the study aims to (1) investigate to what extent the typological properties of a language affect the (a)symmetrical expression of Path, (2) replace the research problematics at the discourse level (e.g. narrative, pragmatic aspects) and (3) adopt a diachronic perspective in order to evaluate the effects of typological changes on the expression of Path. The study relies on a corpus of parallel texts which was assembled and explored for the purpose of the Master’s dissertation. This corpus provides with written data extracted from French, English and Polish novels. In order to enrich this corpus, other sources of data will also contribute to this work: (1) the parallel corpus ParaSol and (2) corpora or text databases of individual languages such as Frantext, British National Corpus and National Corpus of Polish.


  Financial support
  • Contrat Doctoral ASLAN
    A typological study of the (a)symmetrical expression of Path
    Labex ASLAN - Université de Lyon
    2016-2019

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