De la perception du mouvement dans le semantisme du verbe tomber et de ses correspondants polonais

Abstract

The French verb tomber can be translated into Polish as paść I padać and its derivatives formed with various prefixes, which denote the path ofmotion (semantic features of vertical orientation and downward direction are included in the base paść I padać). ln this paper, we discuss four meanings of the verb tomber extracted from the dictionnary Les Verbes Francais ('choir, chuter', 'se detacher', 'se defaire', 'survenir sur') and their Polish equivalents. We provide a comparison which shows differences of the perception ofmotion by the French and Polish language users.