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Le verbe dar est une unité lexicale particulièrement riche en nuances significatives. Parmi les études qui ont abordé cette unité, certaines font l'hypothèse d'une désémantisation lors de la 'grammaticalisation' du verbe. Ce processus serait illustré notamment par l'existence du marqueur discursif dale ainsi que par les emplois de dar en tant que 'support' dans des constructions verbo-nominales plus ou moins lexicalisées ou dans périphrases verbales du type dar un golpe, dar que hablar. L'hypothèse envisagée dans cette étude – menée dans le cadre théorique de la linguistique du signifiant, qui prône l'unicité du signe linguistique – est que le verbe dar exprime une notion d'existence sous-jacente à tous ses emplois discursifs. Le signifié de langue de dar exprimerait l'accès à l'existence d'une entité b, pour le bénéficiaire c d'une opération conduite par une entité a. Cette notion d'existence serait présente dans toutes les occurrences d'un lexème qui n'apparaît jamais vidé – ne serait-ce que partiellement – de son contenu lexical. Afin de valider cette hypothèse, les différentes capacités référentielles du verbe dar seront analysées à travers un corpus de l'espagnol péninsulaire et de l'Amérique latine. / The Spanish verb dar is a lexical item particularly rich in nuances of meaning. Some of its senses have been studied under the « semantic bleaching » hypothesis consequent upon the « grammaticalization » of the verb. This process would reveal mainly in the discourse marker dale and in the use of dar as a « support verb » in nominal predicates like dar un golpe, dar un paseo, dar una mano de pintura, etc. According to the theoretical framework for this research, which accounts for the distinction between language and discourse as well as the unicity of the linguistic sign, an existential notion underlies every discourse realization of this verb. The notion conveyed by the signified of dar is that an entity B gains access to existence in the sphere of an entity C as a result of the action of an entity A. Hence, this existential meaning appears in every use of a lexeme whose semantic content is never affected.

Within the field of second language acquisition of phonology, the role of immersion experiences on language learners' pronunciation has recently become a topic of greater interest. While students of a foreign language with study abroad experience (one to six months) have shown relatively little progress in pronunciation gains, language learners group with extended immersion experience—approximately 24 months abroad—have demonstrated more native-like pronunciation. This study compares the pronunciation of L2 Spanish /u/ among native English speakers enrolled in the same third-year Spanish course who belong to two different groups based on the context of their previous language learning: extended immersion in a Spanish-speaking country or traditional classroom instruction. The effects of syllabic stress and speech task type on the pronunciation of these two groups are also examined. Acoustic data from participants' speech is used to conduct statistical analyses. Words and phrases are subject over time to a process called grammaticalization, especially those that are used frequently. This process causes a gradual shift from use as lexical items to use as grammatical devices. Semantic bleaching also occurs, which means that the earlier or original lexical content of a word or phrase is partially or completely lost. Verbs expressing the idea of possession are particularly susceptible to this type of change. The Spanish verb tener ('to have'), while still retaining its lexical content, has come to be used in constructions that do not represent the explicit idea of possession—they incorporate a bleached usage of the word. This alteration is evident in four construction types examined in this paper. These constructions all have three essential elements: a "possessor" argument, a "possessed" argument, and a third modifying component. The analyses of these constructions include templates that describe both their semantic content and their syntactic structure.

Light verb constructions in Humanistic Czech This thesis surveys the supposed properties of light verb constructions (LVC, in Czech analytická verbonominální spojení, AVNS, in German Funktionsverbgefüge) on an extensive corpus of Czech texts dating from the Humanistic period. The LVC, a combination of a semantically bleached (light, semantically weak) verb and an abstract noun (a preposition and such a noun, respectively), are defined rather broadly and understood not necessarily as a syntactic unit (predicate) but rather as a lexical unit different from both free collocations and phrasemes. Special attention is paid to transitional examples of these constructions with non- prototypical properties of the verb or noun. In the individual chapters, the semantic and syntactical properties of the light verbs are discussed, as well as the word formation (derivation) patterns of the abstract nouns forming the LVC. The core of the analysis lies in the prepositional constructions, on which the LVC-delimitation criteria are applied. It is shown that the meanings of such constructions are subjects to stabilizing and develop from spatial (or directional, respectively) to abstract meanings, including their lexicalization. Moreover, the possibilities of using alternative means of expression are examined. The last chapter...