A contrastive approach to temporal deixis in English, French and German

Agnès Celle (1)

1 CLILLAC-ARP (EA_3967) - Centre de Linguistique Inter-langues, de Lexicologie, de Linguistique Anglaise et de Corpus

The aim of this corpus-based study is to compare temporal deixis in English, French and German. The contrastive analysis of now, nun, jetzt, à présent, maintenant shows that reference to the time of utterance is governed by a distinction that may be drawn between strong deixis and weak deixis in French and German; some deictic markers separate an occurrence from other occurrences by locating it in aspecto-temporal terms, while others specify the occurrence by locating it relative to the interior of the notional domaini.e. to a prototype. The occurrence is evaluated as normal or expected by a subjective originthe enunciator or the coenunciator. In this respect French differs from both German and English because only the enunciator may function as deictic centre in French. 

Keywords: temporal deixis; contrastive linguistics

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Linguistics

Agnès Celle. A contrastive approach to temporal deixis in English, French and German. nternational Symposium on Deictic Systems and Quantification in Languages Spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia, Udmurt State University, Izhevsk, and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, May 2001, Izhevsk, Russia. pp.17-31. ⟨hal-01227309⟩