Metonymy and lexical aspect in English and French

Abstract: In this paper we provide evidence that conceptual metonymies are cross-linguistically significant in the coding of verbal aspect. Guillemin- Flescher (1981: Ch. 2), in an important contrastive study of narrative texts, notices that English and French differ quite often as to which phase of an aspectual situation is coded in an utterance. To illustrate, compare sentence (1), taken from François Mauriac’s well-known novel Thérèse Desqueyroux, with its English translation in (2): (1) Le train ralentit, siffle longuement, repart. (2) The train came to a halt, uttered a long whistle, and started to move again. In the French original (1) the process of moving again is coded. In contrast, it is quite striking that the English translator of (1) prefers to verbalize only the incipient phase of this process by means of an ‘inceptive verb construction’—thereby metonymically evoking the process as a whole. We explore the hypothesis that in English, in contrast to French, there is a fairly systematic exploitation of the high-level metonymy SUB-EVENT FOR WHOLE EVENT with the two sub-metonymies INCIPIENT PHASE OF EVENT FOR WHOLE EVENT and ONSET OF EVENT FOR WHOLE EVENT. A corpus search of two different text genres, bilingual transcripts of Canadian parliamentary debates and narrative fiction, reveals that in about 20% of the cases where English has a metonymically interpreted inceptive verb construction, French expresses the equivalent idea directly by means of a single verb form. We relate the findings for the incipient verb construction to the observation that English makes more extended use of the POTENTIALITY FOR ACTUALITY metonymy with perception and mental processing verbs.