Les verbes de position suédois stå, sitta, ligga et leurs équivalents français : étude contrastive

Sammanfattning: The Swedish posture verbs stå ‘stand’, sitta ‘sit’ and ligga ‘lie’ are used prototypically to refer to human beings in standing, sitting and lying positions. These polysemous verbs are components of the lexical profile of the Swedish language – they are verbs of high frequency and alongside their prototypical uses they also have many metaphorical, lexicalised and grammaticalised uses with no straightforward lexical equivalents in French. The aim of this study was to survey and describe the syntactic and semantic similarities and differences between these Swedish posture verbs and their French equivalents. I have studied them on the basis of the CPSF (Corpus Parallèle Suédois–Français), a Swedish-French parallel corpus containing forty texts: ten Swedish original texts with their French translations and ten French original texts with their Swedish translations. The corpus contains a total of some 2.8 million words, including 6,149 occurrences of the verbs stå (2,449), sitta (1,822) and ligga (1,878). Because the CPSF contains both original texts and their translations it is possible to observe and describe significant differences in frequency between Swedish posture verbs in the original texts and in the translated texts. A statistical study revealed that Swedish posture verbs are consistently underused in the translations into Swedish of the French original texts. This thesis has five main chapters, in which five different categories of use of the Swedish posture verbs are discussed: prototypical uses (chapter 2), locative expressions (chapter 3), predicative constructions (chapter 4), pseudo-coordinations (chapter 5) and collocations (chapter 6). In each chapter, the semantic and syntactic characteristics of each type of use are described, and their French equivalents are mapped. The French equivalents are divided into four main categories: (1) explicit expressions of posture, (2) general verbs and verbal phrases, (3) variants and (4) zero equivalents. In addition to the readily predictable lexical equivalents between Swedish posture verbs and explicit expressions of posture and general verbs or verbal phrases in French the corpus contains a quantitatively significant and typologically interesting group of variants. Among the French equivalents classified as variants, one particular group of dynamic verbs and verbal phrases is distinguished as the equivalents of the more static Swedish posture verbs. The study also indicates that Swedish posture verbs are often without explicit equivalents in the French texts (zero equivalence). Zero equivalence in French, which occurs in the corpus for each of the five categories of use of the Swedish posture verbs, is one of the main explanations for the underuse of Swedish posture verbs in the texts translated from French.