Situationsframes als Kategorien des Sprachvergleichs: Periphrastische Passiva in der französischen und italienischen Wissenschaftssprache des 18. Jahrhunderts

Abstract This article deals with the discourse-functional distribution of the so-called periphrastic passive (formed with être / essere or venire + past participle) in the French and Italian scientific language of the late 18th century. The comparative and translational study takes a frame-based approach and investigates from a cognitive perspective how the French and Italian periphrastic passives are used to conceptualize given real-world situations. It will be analyzed to what extent the French and Italian periphrastic passive show the same range of uses with regard to the encoding of certain situation frames, that is, mental configurations containing a bundle of semantic properties and discourse conditions concerning the participants and the nature of the situation referred to. The study is based on a corpus of French scientific texts and their Italian translations published in seven Italian scientific journals between 1771 and 1791 as well as a comparable corpus of non-translated Italian scientific texts published in the same period and in the same journals.