Le verbe francais dans un cadre cognitif

Abstract

The following book is a collection of reflections concerning the nature and functioning of the verb category in the French language in the light of cognitive linguistics. The first part will deal with widely understood cognitivistics. The author describes in it the history of cognitive revolution, the origins and the research status in the field of cognitive linguistics and its connections with other areas of science, which underlines the interdisciplinary character of cognitive research. The second part consists of the main theories connected with the description of the verb categories representing different research approaches. The author wanted to show that within cognitive research all the previous attempts to describe the verb category and/or information which a given form in a given communication situation carries i.e. tense, aspect, valency and modality complement each other proving at the same time the complexity of the problem. The following chapters contain a suggestion concerning the analysis of French tenses and conditionals on the basis of the semantic-cognitive scheme, prototype use and semantic invariant. The research aimed to show that a verb form, which is chosen by the speaker, is a configured collection of data resulting from processing the data (the conceptualization process) and its use is determined by an extralinguistic context i.e. the psycho-affective state of speaker and his/her communicative intention. Elaborating on particular realizations of the verb categories in the French language the author paid attention to the phenomenon of the stabilization of verb forms, which are strongly connected with language evolution, thus social awareness, which, in turn, is connected with frequency of use. According to the author, the question of language mistake appears when the norms of natural logic, which come into being on the basis of world experience and so-called common sense, are flagrantly violated.