La notion de cause: à propos de trois façons de mourir de faim en lituanien

International audienceThe phrases mirti bad-u (to die hunger-is), mirti iš bad-o (to die iš hunger-gs), mirti nuo bad-o (to die nuo hunger-gs) are generally considered as 3 synonymic ways to express a cause of death.Still, if the instrumental case, the preposition iš and the preposition nuo may be exchangeable without a difference of interpretation in this expression out of context, these 3 syntactic constructions can not be considered as equivalent: the precise analysis of the contexts where these constructions occur shows that each construction corresponds to a specific semantic value, which distinguishes it from the other 2. In sum, these 3 syntactic constructions provide 3 different representations of the event ‘die of hunger’, hence the fact that in some contexts, the substitution of one construction by another is not possible. The analysis of this micro phenomenon will enable us to extend our study to other expressions involving a cause, to propose definitions of the semantics of the instrumental case and of the prepositions iš and nuo and finally to observe that ‘cause’ is a complex label covering very different cases which proceed directly from the forms constructing them