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Article published In:
The Complementary Contribution of Comparable and Parallel Corpora to Crosslinguistic Studies
Edited by Sylviane Granger and Marie-Aude Lefer
[Languages in Contrast 20:2] 2020
► pp. 263–287

Placement patterns of English and French conjunctive adjuncts of contrast

The impact of register

ORCID logo | Université catholique de Louvain , Belgium

In many languages, conjunctive adjuncts (e.g. however, therefore) are syntactically mobile. Several corpus-based contrastive studies have shown that languages differ in the positions that they tend to prefer for conjunctive adjuncts. However, the studies available have formulated general cross-linguistic differences in placement for languages as wholes, without considering the possibility that such contrasts may be influenced by register. The objective of this paper is to investigate and compare the placement patterns of English and French conjunctive adjuncts of contrast in two written registers (viz. editorials and research articles) in order to measure the impact of register variation on the differences between these two languages. The results suggest that, although register variation plays a significant role on placement within each language system, language is a better predictor of placement than register, since cross-linguistic differences in placement between English and French are stable across communicative situations. In a second stage, the results obtained in the comparable corpus study are complemented with the analysis of translation data, with a view to assessing the translators’ degree of awareness of the inherent word order preferences of the target language. The study is grounded in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and relies on the notions of Theme and Rheme to describe conjunctive adjunct placement.

Keywords: conjunctive adjuncts, placement, register variation, Systemic Functional Linguistics, English/French
Article outline
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2.A Systemic Functional approach to conjunctive adjunct placement
    • 2.1Theme and Rheme in Systemic Functional Linguistics
    • 2.2Classification of conjunctive adjunct positions
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Comparable corpus study
    • 3.2Translation corpus study
  • 4.Conjunctive adjunct placement in English and French: A cross-register comparison
    • 4.1Register effects
    • 4.2Register and language effects compared
  • 5.Conjunctive adjunct placement in French>English translation
    • 5.1Original vs. translated English news
    • 5.2Conjunctive adjunct placement in the French source texts and the English target texts
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00018.dup
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