Semantic values of the French preverb entre-. A contrastive French-Polish study

The present paper aims at conducting a short French-Polish contrastive investigation of the verbs prefixed by entre -. At the beginning, the author proposes to perceive prefixation as a purely semantic phenomenon and advances a hypothesis that different meanings (i.e. semantic values) of the preverb in the source language should manifest in the translation of the prefixed verbs into the target language. The second part focuses on the results of the postulated semantic-translation analysis of 62 French verbs found in two dictionaries: Great French-Polish Dictionary and Lexicon 5 . The verbs are divided into 4 categories depending on their translation into Polish (verbs expressing reciprocity, spatial verbs, low intensity verbs, and lexicalized verbs) which, in accordance with the adopted hypothesis, allows to distinguish 3 different semantic values of entre -: reciprocity, spatiality and low intensity. Furthermore, the results of the analysis are compared with the those obtained by other linguists. Due to the fact that the conclusions of the investigation conducted in this paper and in similar studies do not differ significantly and considering the added contrastive value of semantic-translation analysis, the author suggests extending the research in this stream to other preverbs in order to reach the complete description of the French prefixation seen “through” the Polish language.