Voir et see : étude comparée de la construction à attribut de l'objet

Christelle Lacassain-Lagoin (1, 2)

1 ALTER - Arts / Langages : Transitions et Relations
2 UPPA - Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour

This paper sets out to compare the meaning and uses of the visual perception verbs see in English, and voir in French, in object-oriented predicative complement constructions. It is aimed at identifying how such sentences function both syntactically and semantically and how the verb and the complements interact, trying in particular to determine the structure of socalled object-oriented complement structures. This qualitative, corpus-based study focuses on three categories of complements - adjective phrases, preposition phrases and noun phrases. It shows that the two verbs license complements that are syntactically similar. The analysis brings to light three main types of semantic reading - visual perception, perceptual inference and cognition - and demonstrates that, for each of them, the meaning of the sentences is construed with the help of three crucial factors: the object referent and its ontological nature; the syntactic category of the predicative complement and its interaction with the object; the semantic compatibility between the predicative complement and the perception verb. It also appears that voir has a wider range of uses in the domain of cognition while see seems to have a larger range in the domain of both visual perception and perceptual inference.

Keywords: Perception verbs; See; Voir; Object-oriented complement; Visual perception; Perceptual inference; Cognition

Domains: Cognitive science; Linguistics; Humanities and Social Sciences

Christelle Lacassain-Lagoin. Voir et see : étude comparée de la construction à attribut de l'objet. Echo des études romanes, 2017, XIII (1), pp.123-146. ⟨10.32725/eer.2017.009⟩. ⟨hal-02170644⟩