Hvordan man ligger sig til hovedrollen på fransk efter først at have væltet kaffen: To anvendelser af Per Durst-Andersens teori om aspekt og sprogtypologi til forklaring af centrale aspekter ved dansk og fransk

The article treats two fundamental aspects of French and Danish that can be explained by Per Durst Andersen’s theory: 1) Restrictions on the use of the free adjunct to the object. 2) The expression of concrete and abstract movement and position in Danish and French. The first construction type behaves in the same way in the two languages, probably due to the human cognitive apparatus. Durst-Andersen’s theory permits to explain an important aspect of that problem that could not be explained by the “classical” theory of “aktionsart”. As for the second construction type, Danish and French behave very differently, a typological difference that is due to the different lexical structures of the two languages.1 The last part of the article contains different strategies that can be used in the translation of these constructions from Danish to French,and it appears that the same strategy can be used when translating something abstract and something concrete.