Conjunctive markers of contrast in English and French: syntactic patterns and discourse effects
(2021) Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (6th edition) — Location: Bertinoro (9.September.2021)
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- Conjunctive markers (CMs) are linguistic items that express logical relationships between textual units, such as however, although or and (see e.g. Martin 1992). They are usually identified on the basis of syntactic criteria. For example, one necessary condition is that they must link clauses or larger units. Elements that occur below the clause are not considered to perform a conjunctive function (e.g. Hoek et al. 2017). In addition, the textual segments related by CMs may be of various structural types (i.e. include a verb in the finite or non-finite form, or even no verb at all), or function at different syntactic ranks (i.e. main, hypotactic, embedded or minor clause, where minor clauses refer to verbless, non-finite or hypotactic clauses standing alone). However, research on CMs has customarily focused on the semantic features of these units, with very little attention paid to their syntactic patterning. The objective of this study is to shift the focus to syntax by investigating and comparing the types of syntactic segments in which English and French CMs are included, focusing on the category of contrast. The study is based on a comparable corpus of newspaper editorials (c. 2 million words per language). Following automatic extraction of all potential English and French CMs of contrast from the corpus, the data was disambiguated manually in context to weed out irrelevant instances. The disambiguated data set (15,364 markers in total) was then coded manually for (i) type of CM (coordinator, subordinator or conjunctive adjunct); (ii) structural type of the host clause (finite, non-finite or verbless); and (iii) rank status of the host clause (main, hypotactic, embedded or minor). The study shows that the dominant syntactic patterns of use of CMs of contrast are similar in English and French. However, it also highlights a number of significant differences between the languages. For instance, CMs used in minor clauses, as in (1), are significantly more frequent in French than in English, which displays a significantly higher proportion of subordinators used in verbless clauses than French, as in (2). (1) Nous nous enflammons pour ou contre Dieudonné, pour ou contre le voile islamique, demain pour ou contre les coups de canif à la loi de 1905. Mais sur le meurtre de Van Gogh, qui nous parle exactement de la même chose, pas d’émotion, pas d’indignation, pas d’effroi. [But on Van Gogh’s murder (…) no emotion, no indignation, no terror]. (2) Efforts at political reform in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait, while welcome, are but partial remedies. A qualitative analysis of the results reveals that the patterns identified are not equivalent regarding the discourse effects that they produce. For example, the use of a coordinator or conjunctive adjunct in a minor clause – as in (1) – typically lays emphasis on both the relation of contrast expressed by the marker, and the segment introduced by it. Such patterns of use contribute to increasing the ‘punchy’ character of a text, in line with the highly persuasive tone of the editorial register (e.g. Biber 1988: 148). In other words, syntactic choices related to the use of conjunctive markers reflect broader (differences in) strategies of textual development in English and French, which highlights their role at the syntax-discourse interface. References Biber, D. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chuquet, H. & Paillard, M. 1987. Approche linguistique des problèmes de traduction anglais-français. Paris: Ophrys. Hoek, J., Evers-Vermeul, J. & Sanders, T. 2018. Segmenting discourse: Incorporating interpretation into segmentation? Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 14(2): 357–386. Martin, J. 1992. English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Dupont, M. (2021). Conjunctive markers of contrast in English and French: syntactic patterns and discourse effects. Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (6th edition), Bertinoro. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/113719