Noms d’animés humains et opacité : le cas des conversions verbe - nom en anglais

Abstract

International audienceThis paper is part of a broader investigation into how we designate humans. We suggest that nouns that designate humans tend to be more opaque than those which designate other entities. We hypothesise that this is linked to the way we conceptualise humans, i.e. as being more than the sum of their acts. In this paper we look more specifically into verb to noun conversions in English. First, we note that these are, within the domain of word-formation, very transparent, insofar as the base is not modified in any way. Then we observe that few designate humans; it seems that denoting a human on the ground of his or her participation in a process would amount to ignoring that person’s essential complexity. Lastly, we look at the few cases of conversion which do designate humans, in order to try and understand what makes this possible; we show that they tend to be derogatory or to reflect a personal relationship with the referent. Transparency then appears as a means to convey this personal relationship: the designations appear to be individual, rather than conventional