Publisher's Synopsis
The study focuses on time (absolute and/or relative) and aspect (lexical and/or grammatical) in Chrisitian Bobin's La part manquante, a collection of eleven short stories written in standard French. Time and aspect form a temporal unit. To what extent are these grammatical categories linguistically expressed in Bobin? Assuming that aspect is included in time, will such a hypothesis be disproved or confirmed? How do Bobin's aphorisms elaborate a rhetorical discourse? The missing part, published in Paris by Gallimards in 1989, constitutes a semantic entity within which semantic networks are woven. The analysis of the aspecto-temporal system is complex, because the grammatical morpheme translating the aspect is inexistent in French. The textual semantics approach identifies the temporal location, the processes, the aspectual order from the phrase to the sentence to the discourse, describes the modes of expression of time under its different semantic, morphological and syntactic markings.
