Comparative Expressions with "comme" in Contemporary French

The master's thesis examines similes in contemporary French that employ the comparative marker comme, for example, clair comme de l'eau de roche (in English: crystal clear). The aim of the study is first to describe these expressions from a theoretical perspective, both formally and semantically, taking into account their treatment in scholarly literature, and to compare their conceptualization, definition, typology, and classification in general linguistic publications. The empirical part draws on corpus data to collect as many expressions as possible that convey the same comparative motif but differ in the noun phrases occupying the position of the comparandum. These expressions are subjected to detailed linguistic analysis using lexicographic resources and a linguistic questionnaire, with the goal of capturing their semantic nuances and differences in usage in everyday communication among native French speakers.