Copyright by Charles Alexandre Mignot 2013 The The Dissertation Committee for Charles Alexandre Mignot Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: THE SEMANTIC IMPORT OF THE FRENCH PREPOSITION À ‘AT/TO’ IN VERBAL ARGUMENT ALTERNATIONS Committee: Cinzia Russi, Supervisor Catherine Léger, Co-Supervisor Michel Achard John Beavers Bryan Donaldson Jean-Pierre Montreuil THE SEMANTIC IMPORT OF THE FRENCH PREPOSITION À ‘AT/TO’ IN VERBAL ARGUMENT ALTERNATIONS by Charles ALlexandre Mignot, BA, MA Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my two co-supervisors, Catherine Léger and Cinzia Russi. Catherine Léger has been an extraordinary mentor—her hard work, intellectual rigor, patience and kindness have set a high standard, which I aspire to follow during my academic career. From the beginning, when this dissertation was only a blurry idea, to the very end, when the final revisions were necessary, Catherine Léger provided infallible guidance and support throughout the entire process. I cannot thank her enough for her dedication and the countless hours she has spent giving me precious directions about my research and helping me improve my analyses and style. I would like to equally thank Cinzia Russi, who has provided me with very thorough comments and feedback and helped me broaden my theoretical knowledge, thus deepening my analytical skills. I would like to thank them both for their advice, which played a decisive role in the quality of my research, correcting so many typogarphic errors and, as a way to honor them, I will do my best to get rid of this very bad habit in the future. May the reader find any typos, I claim full responsibility. I am equally very grateful to the committee members of my dissertation. I would like to thank Michel Achard and John Beavers (and his wife) for their very insightful comments that helped me better shape this dissertation and gave me invaluable guidance for my future research, and whose work has been an inspiration throughout the writing of my dissertation. I would also like to thank Bryan Donaldson and Jean-Pierre Montreuil for their equally insightful comments and their useful guidance in the academic world. I would like to thank the Department of French and Italian and the Graduate School at the University of Texas for their financial support, the past and present chair of our Department, Daniela Bini and David Birdsong, the faculty members, in particular, Carl Blyth, Barbara Bullock, Nancy Guilloteau, Michael Johnson, Karen Kelton, Hervé Picherit, Alexandra Wettlaufer, and the staff, Christine Bryce, Susan Floyd, Victor Martinez and Chaz Nailor. Thanks to all of my friends, especially to Christian Aviles, Clare Perry, Corinne Griffin/Le Bihan and Cécile Rey, for their unconditional love and support throughout the writing of my dissertation, to Rhett Morgan, Nicholas Bacuez, Nicole Barnes, Jason Brazeal, Amanda Dalola, Charlotte Détrie, Cécile Fandos, Yazz Fawaz, Karen Francisco, Laura Goudet, Cyril Grima, Anna Krusanova, Olivier Le Bihan, Eliott Le Bihan, Meredith Lehman, Mary Ellen Loper Hughes, Clémence Ozel, Matthieu Ploteau, Michael Pocquet, Hélène Poirrier, Aude Rivollet, Emma van Rossum, Hugo Vila, Jason Wohlfahrt and Stéphane Andraud, in memoria, for their support throughout my PhD years, and Libby Mallonee Gertken, Tristan Nguyen, Beki Post and Anna Troyansky for their moral support at my defense. iv My thanks also go to my family, especially, to my parents, who, despite still having trouble understanding how I could be an entitled doctor for doing some research on à ‘at/to’, have shown me great support, to my grandmother, to my siblings, Pierre- Arnaud, Vadim and Mélanie, my aunt and uncle, Liliane and Marc, to my cousins, Céline, Catherine and Marlène, and to my grandfather, in memoria. I am also very grateful to another dissertation supervisor, Nicolas Ballier, whose tremendous guidance and support, whose insightful linguistic analyses and theoretical views have largely contributed to the outcome of this dissertation, and without whom the United-States of America would have certainly been a mere touristic destination. Finally, I would like to thank a teacher, Monsieur Adem, who made me fall in love with teaching and the beauty of the French language. v THE SEMANTIC IMPORT OF THE FRENCH PREPOSITION À ‘AT/TO’ IN VERBAL ARGUMENT ALTERNATIONS Charles Alexandre Mignot, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Co-supervisors: Catherine Léger, Cinzia Russi This study examines the semantic import of the French preposition à ‘at/to’ in argument alternations. In French, some verbs can be followed by a direct object or by an indirect object introduced by the preposition à ‘at/to’ (e.g., parer/parer à ‘to ward off/to guard against’, satisfaire/satisfaire à ‘to satisfy’, toucher/toucher à ‘to touch’, etc.). Although the preposition à ‘at/to’ has been characterized in the literature as a meaningless grammatical element, and more specifically so in cases of argument alternations, this study shows that à ‘at/to’ is meaningful and that it contributes to the semantics of the indirect transitive constructions of the verbs under scrutiny. Couched in the Cognitive Grammar theoretical framework (Langacker 1987b, 1991), this study is based on the assumption that grammar is meaningful and that the meaning of grammatical items is more abstract than the meaning of lexical items. Consequently, two abstract meanings characterizing à ‘at/to’ are proposed to account for the semantic differences between the direct and indirect transitive constructions of the verbs analyzed in this study: the expression of an abstract goal and the expression of an abstract localization. For some verbs, the indirect transitive construction entails a notion of goal that is not expressed in the direct transitive construction. For other verbs, à ‘at/to’ expresses an abstract relation (i.e., an abstract localization) between the lexical semantics of the verb and the indirect object, which results in meaning differences between the direct and indirect transitive constructions based on the notion of affectedness. Following Langacker (1987a), I view transitivity as a transfer of energy and propose that the various levels of energy involved in an event correlate with the various levels of affectedness of the object. I argue that à ‘at/to’ signals a disruption of energy leading to a lower affectedness of the indirect object than that of the direct object (see also Beavers 2011). Finally, I show that, for the verb toucher ‘to touch’, the semantic import of à ‘at/to’ varies in relation to the various senses of the indirect transitive construction of the verb. vi Table of Contents List of Tables .......................................................................................................... xi List of Figures ...................................................................................................... xiv List of Symbols and Abbreviations ...................................................................... xvi Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Theoretical Assumptions ..................................................................... 11 2.1. Cognitive Grammar ............................................................................... 12 2.1.1. Theoretical assumptions ............................................................ 12 2.1.2. Conceptualization of actions and events ................................... 17 2.2. Argument realization ............................................................................. 21 2.2.1. Lexical semantic representations .............................................. 21 2.2.2. Argument alternations ............................................................... 25 2.2.3. Affectedness and transitivity ..................................................... 27 2.3. The semantics of prepositions ............................................................... 30 2.3.1. Approaches to the semantic representations of prepositions .... 30 2.3.2. Polysemy ................................................................................... 32 2.3.3. Principled polysemy .................................................................. 35 2.4. Summary ............................................................................................... 38 Chapter 3: The Preposition à ‘at/to’ ...................................................................... 40 3.1. Syntactic aspects .................................................................................. 40 3.1.1. Syntactic and morphosyntactic properties ................................. 41 3.1.2. Properties of prepositional phrases in verbal contexts .............. 45 3.2. Diachronic aspects ................................................................................. 53 3.2.1. Grammaticalization ................................................................... 53 3.2.2. Grammaticalization of à ‘at/to’ ................................................. 57 3.2.3. Grammaticalization and prototype-based polysemic networks ..................................................................................... 67 3.3. Semantic aspects .................................................................................