Papers by Fagard Benjamin
Trait. Autom. des Langues, 2014
Bien que le changement linguistique ait fait l'objet de nombreuses recherches nume-riques, le... more Bien que le changement linguistique ait fait l'objet de nombreuses recherches nume-riques, les phenomenes diachroniques de renouvellement linguistique et plus specifiquement la grammaticalisation ont ete, semble-t-il, laisses de cote. Motives par d'autres perspectives, les differents modeles s'appuient sur des representations qui, comme nous le montrons, ne per-mettent pas d'aborder efficacement la modelisation de ce type de phenomenes. Nous proposons ici un cadre de representation visant a decrire le renouvellement linguistique et se pretant bien a la simulation numerique. Nous l'illustrons par une implementation particuliere mettant en evidence le phenomene de javellisation semantique.
STUF - Language Typology and Universals, 2017
After a wealth of studies on motion event descriptions, it seems hard to say something new: the V... more After a wealth of studies on motion event descriptions, it seems hard to say something new: the Verb-framed/Satellite-framed typology proposed by Talmy has spawned a long debate. Among other things, previous work has shown within-type variation for one of the two language types defined by Talmy, namely Verb-framed languages. In this paper, we address this debate, showing within-type variation for the other type, Satellite-framed languages, with new data elicited from native speakers of Serbian. In order to do so, we compare it with five other languages, from three Indo-European language families (Romance, Germanic and Slavic). Our data show that Serbian is a particularly interesting case, since it is structurally Satellite-framed, but behaves like Verb-framed languages in that speakers do not always express manner and path jointly (i.e. manner in the verb and path in the satellite), as expected on the basis of Talmy’s typology. The main result of our paper is thus that there is a go...
Royal Society Open Science, 2017
It is generally believed that when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequenc... more It is generally believed that when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequency of use rises with time with an S-shaped growth curve. Yet, this claim has only been supported by a limited number of case studies. In this paper, we provide the first corpus-based large-scale confirmation of the S-curve in language change. Moreover, we uncover another generic pattern, a latency phase preceding the S-growth, during which the frequency remains close to constant. We propose a usage-based model which predicts both phases, the latency and the S-growth. The driving mechanism is a random walk in the space of frequency of use. The underlying deterministic dynamics highlights the role of a control parameter which tunes the system at the vicinity of a saddle-node bifurcation. In the neighbourhood of the critical point, the latency phase corresponds to the diffusion time over the critical region, and the S-growth to the fast convergence that follows. The durations of the two phas...
Royal Society Open Science, 2017
It is generally believed that when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequenc... more It is generally believed that when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequency of use rises with time with an S-shaped growth curve. Yet, this claim has only been supported by a limited number of case studies. In this paper, we provide the first corpus-based large-scale confirmation of the S-curve in language change. Moreover, we uncover another generic pattern, a latency phase preceding the S-growth, during which the frequency remains close to constant. We propose a usage-based model which predicts both phases, the latency and the S-growth. The driving mechanism is a random walk in the space of frequency of use. The underlying deterministic dynamics highlights the role of a control parameter which tunes the system at the vicinity of a saddle-node bifurcation. In the neighbourhood of the critical point, the latency phase corresponds to the diffusion time over the critical region, and the S-growth to the fast convergence that follows. The durations of the two phas...
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2013
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:More than two decades of intense research on moti... more In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:More than two decades of intense research on motion event typology, emanating from the influential proposal of Talmy (1991, 2000) of a universal binary classification of languages into verb-framed (VF), such as French, and satellite-framed (SF), such as English, still leaves many questions unresolved. One such question is whether serial-verb languages such as Thai should be considered a third type (Zlatev and David 2003; Zlatev and Yangklang 2004), generalized by Slobin (2004) as equipollently-framed (EF). A second question is whether these two or three types should be regarded as in some sense ‘distinct’ (even if they have minor expression patterns conflicting the dominant, type-characteristic ones), or rather as forming continua with respect to certain dimensions, such as the propensity to express MANNER (Slobin 2004) or PATH (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2009). A third and related question is whether the notion of language types (with respect...
Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, 2016
HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française 2008, 2008
Linguistics, 2011
In this article, we focus on the diachronic development of causal connectives and investigate whe... more In this article, we focus on the diachronic development of causal connectives and investigate whether subjectification occurs. We present the results of ongoing and previous corpus-based analyses of the diachronic development of Dutch want and omdat, and French car and parce que, all four causal connectives roughly meaning 'because'. In addition, we try to show that "grammaticalization studies can gain from the systematic and principled use of large computerized corpora and the methods which have been developed within corpus linguistics" (Lindquist and Mair 2004: x). That's why we have combined two historical and two comparative corpus methods to chart the diachronic development of these four causals. Our study reveals that subjectification is not an integral part of the diachronic development of these causals: subjectification does occur in the rise of these connectives, but in the later stages of their development only parce que undergoes subjectification. Our analyses show that the four methods all have their own merits and limitations, but they are most effective when combined.
Languages in Contrast, 2010
In this paper, we investigate the evolution from imperatives to discourse markers in Romance, wit... more In this paper, we investigate the evolution from imperatives to discourse markers in Romance, with a corpus-based approach. We focus on the case of items coming from verbs meaning ‘to look’, in a semasiological perspective: Spanish and Catalan mira, Portuguese olha, Italian guarda, French regarde, Romanian uite. We show that they all share many uses, among which turn-taking, introduction of reported speech, hesitation phenomenon, topic-shifting and modalization, except for French regarde. We then establish (against Waltereit, 2002) that the development of these uses is the result of a process of grammaticalization, from lexical, clause-internal uses to uses as discourse markers, in a cline which tends to confirm the predictions made by Brinton and Traugott (2005). The lesser grammaticalization of French regarde could seem unimportant, but is in apparent contradiction with the now well-established fact that French is, of all Romance languages, the most grammaticalized. We try, in con...
Journal of Pragmatics, 2012
In Modern French, parce que "because" seems to be replacing car "because, for". This is not a new... more In Modern French, parce que "because" seems to be replacing car "because, for". This is not a new phenomenon: the competition between these two causal conjunctions (among others) started out almost a thousand years ago. Our corpus data show that parce que only recently gained the upper hand, but only in Spoken French, while Written French still allows the use of car on a par with parce que. We investigate here this double evolution-the dying out of car and development of parce que-with a corpus study including a written diachronic corpus (from Preclassical to Contemporary French) and modern spoken data. Our aim is to see when and how parce que came to the fore, and to study the role of grammaticalization and subjectification in this process.
Revista de Estudos Linguísticos da Universidade do Porto, 2008
Abstract: In the paradigm of French causal conjunctions, car and parce que make quite an odd pair... more Abstract: In the paradigm of French causal conjunctions, car and parce que make quite an odd pair. While both of them can be translated by «because», their use in Spoken vs Written French is very different: they roughly have the same frequency in written corpora, but parce que is by far more frequent in the spoken language than in written texts, whereas car is almost absent from Spoken French. Besides, previous studies have shown that, while car is quite stable semantically, parce que is very different in Written and Spoken French. Is it ...
TAL, 2014
Though numerous numerical studies have investigated language change, grammaticalization and diach... more Though numerous numerical studies have investigated language change, grammaticalization and diachronic phenomena of language renewal have been left aside, or so it seems. We argue that previous models, dedicated to other purposes, make representational choices that cannot easily account for this type of phenomenon. In this paper we propose a new framework, aiming to depict linguistic renewal through numerical simulations. We illustrate it with a specific implementation which brings to light the phenomenon of semantic bleaching.
In this article, we focus on the diachronic development of causal connectives and investigate whe... more In this article, we focus on the diachronic development of causal connectives and investigate whether subjectification occurs. We present the results of ongo- ing and previous corpus-based analyses of the diachronic development of Dutch want and omdat, and French car and parce que, all four causal connec- tives roughly meaning ‘because’. In addition, we try to show that “grammati- calization studies can gain from the systematic and principled use of large computerized corpora and the methods which have been developed within cor- pus linguistics” (Lindquist and Mair 2004: x). That’s why we have combined two historical and two comparative corpus methods to chart the diachronic development of these four causals. Our study reveals that subjectification is not an integral part of the diachronic development of these causals: subjectifica- tion does occur in the rise of these connectives, but in the later stages of their development only parce que undergoes subjectification. Our analyses show that the four methods all have their own merits and limitations, but they are most effective when combined.
Papers: Discourse markers and connectives by Fagard Benjamin
Revista de Estudos Linguísticos da Universidade do …, Jan 1, 2008
"In Modern French, parce que “because” seems to be replacing car “because, for”. This is not a ne... more "In Modern French, parce que “because” seems to be replacing car “because, for”. This is not a new phenomenon: the competition between these two causal conjunctions (among others) started out almost a thousand years ago. Our corpus data show that parce que only recently gained the upper hand, but only in Spoken French, while Written French still allows the use of car on a par with parce que.
We investigate here this double evolution – the dying out of car and development of parce que – with a corpus study including a written diachronic corpus (from Preclassical to Contemporary French) and modern spoken data. Our aim is to see when and how parce que came to the fore, and to study the role of grammaticalization and subjectification in this process."
Congrès Mondial de Linguistique …, Jan 1, 2008
Linguistics, Jan 1, 2011
In this paper, we focus on the diachronic development of causal connectives and investigate wheth... more In this paper, we focus on the diachronic development of causal connectives and investigate whether subjectification occurs. We present the results of ongoing and previous corpus-based analyses of the diachronic development of Dutch want and omdat, and French car and parce que, all four causal connectives roughly meaning 'because'. In addition, we try to show that "grammaticalization studies can gain from the systematic and principled use of large computerized corpora and the methods which have been developed within corpus linguistics" (Lindquist and Mair 2004: x). That's why we have combined two historical and two comparative corpus methods to chart the diachronic development of these four causals. Our study reveals that subjectification is not an integral part of the diachronic development of these causals: subjectification does occur in the rise of these connectives, but in the later stages of their development only parce que undergoes subjectification. Our analyses show that the four methods all have their own merits and limitations, but they are most effective when combined.
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Papers by Fagard Benjamin
Papers: Discourse markers and connectives by Fagard Benjamin
We investigate here this double evolution – the dying out of car and development of parce que – with a corpus study including a written diachronic corpus (from Preclassical to Contemporary French) and modern spoken data. Our aim is to see when and how parce que came to the fore, and to study the role of grammaticalization and subjectification in this process."
We investigate here this double evolution – the dying out of car and development of parce que – with a corpus study including a written diachronic corpus (from Preclassical to Contemporary French) and modern spoken data. Our aim is to see when and how parce que came to the fore, and to study the role of grammaticalization and subjectification in this process."