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In language, there exists a distinction between abstract words and concrete words. It can be said that abstract words refer to generic concepts, while concrete words pertain to physical actions or objects associated with physical movement. With respect to the linguistic community, it is often claimed that French words function at a higher degree of abstraction than English words. However, this claim lacks empirical evidence. The present study aims to examine the usage of concrete and abstract words in word association tasks, which are part of Cultura: an intercultural, web-based project that brings foreign language students from different countries and linguistic backgrounds together in a telecollaborative exchange of ideas. Specifically, this study examines the degrees of abstraction of generic nouns in French and English. / text

The present paper is an attempt to examine the functional potential of deverbal abstract nouns in the clause. The verbal to nominal transfer has long been recognized as an important phenomenon in English. However, the peculiarities of usage of deverbal abstract nouns as well as their potential for expressing a range of semantic and syntactic functions have been little analysed in linguistic literature. The paper examines the concept of deverbal abstract nouns as non-congruent representation of processes, provides an overview of semantic and syntactic functions in the clause, and presents a detailed inventory of the range of semantic functions expressed by deverbal abstract nouns and their syntactic realization in the clause based on the linguistic evidence drawn from the corpus under investigation. The research was based on the semantic approach for interpreting the clause as representation of a process suggested by systemic functional linguistics. The examination of the scientific discourse text determined that deverbal abstract nouns were used in clauses of all types of processes, the most frequent being material and relational types; the semantic potential of deverbal abstract nouns was not limited to specific semantic functions as they were used to perform a full range of semantic functions in the clause; the most frequent semantic roles expressed by deverbal abstract nouns were those of the Circumstance, the Carrier and the Affected; the syntactic potential of deverbal... [to full text]