Ce que de grands corpus nous révèlent sur l’usage littéral et figuré des termes pain (français) / bread (anglais)

Denis Jamet-Coupé

doi:10.18290/rh25738.6

Published : 2025-10-15

Vol. 73 No. 8 (2025)

What Large Corpora Reveal about the Literal and the Figurative Use of the Terms Pain (French) and Bread (English)

Denis Jamet-Coupé

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3784-9748

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh25738.6

Abstract

This article offers a contrastive study of the French term pain and the English term bread, by analyzing first their frequencies of use, then the preferred collocations (subject, object, and/or, etc.) in two large corpora hosted on the SketchEngine platform: French Web 2020 (frTenTen) and English Web 2020 (enTenTen). These first analyses allow us to discover the similarities, but also the differences in the contextual uses of pain and bread. The figurative representations – essentially metonymic and metaphorical – of the terms pain and bread are also discussed, as well as the axiology (positive, neutral, negative) that emerges from the expressions in French and English, in order to explain their multiple uses and the differences between the two languages.

Keywords:

corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor, axiology

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