The French ditransitive transfer construction and the complementarity between the meta-predicates GIVE, TAKE, KEEP, LEAVE: The hypothesis of a grammatical enantiosemy

Dominique Legallois (1)

1 CLESTHIA - CLESTHIA - Langage, systèmes, discours - EA 7345

We revisit in this chapter the status and meaning of the French Ditransitive Transfer Construction. We show that the construction allows four interpretations that can be accounted for by the antonymous Meta-Predicates GIVE, TAKE, LEAVE and KEEP. But how can the same construction be at the origin of contrary and even contradictory interpretations? The answer, in our opinion, lies in a particularity of the lexicon that is seldom taken into account in semantics and lexicology, namely enantiosemy, a property by which a lexical unit has two opposite meanings. Thus, we formulate the hypothesis that the Ditransitive Transfer scheme itself is an enantiosemic construction.

Mots clés: enantiosemy; Ditransitive Transfer Construction; meta-predicat; contrary relation; contradictory relation

Domaines: Linguistique

Dominique Legallois. The French ditransitive transfer construction and the complementarity between the meta-predicates GIVE, TAKE, KEEP, LEAVE: The hypothesis of a grammatical enantiosemy. The Polysemy of GIVE in ten Languages: from Lexicalization to Grammaticalization, 2021. ⟨hal-03154428⟩