International symposium: Possession and its expressions

The aim of this symposium is to examine the notion of possession and its various declensions (alienable possession, inalienable possession, part-whole relations), with a focus on corpus linguistics. Following the advent of the theoretical framework of construction grammars and in the era of digital humanities, new statistical procedures have emerged, making it possible to propose multifactorial analyses on the basis of very extensive data. Although the notion of possession and its derivatives have been the subject of numerous studies, few are based on quantified corpus data and tool-based methods.

The colloquium will bring together studies - in synchronicity or diachronicity - on one, two or more languages from the same or genealogically distant families, based on different theoretical concepts or scientific fields. Thus, contrastive approaches will give rise to the examination of problems specific to traductology; taking into account specialty languages, including law, will bring out specificities in the linguistic expression of possession in one or other field; at the cognitive level, we'll look at the acquisition of possessive structures and how language disorders can affect their use; communication in didactics will suggest improvements for learning possessive structures in both foreign languages (such as FLE) and native languages; finally, we'll consider effective ways of signifying possession in sign language.

The symposium therefore has a strong cross-disciplinary dimension, bringing linguistics into dialogue with several other, more or less related fields/disciplines: translatology, law, acquisition, didactics, health, etc., with a focus on digital humanities in the broadest sense.