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Article published In:
English Text Construction
Vol. 8:1 (2015) ► pp.88–124

Word order in English and French

The position of English and French adverbial connectors of contrast

Drawing upon the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper compares the word order patterns of English and French adverbial connectors of contrast in a comparable bilingual corpus of quality newspaper editorials. The study shows that the two languages offer the same possibilities in terms of connector positioning but differ markedly in the preferred patterns that they display. In both languages, connector placement proves to be influenced by three main types of factors: language-specific syntactic, rhetorical and lexical factors. The notion of Rheme, which tends to be under-researched in the literature in comparison to that of Theme, plays a key role in the analysis.
Keywords: connectors, contrast, Systemic Functional Linguistics, English, French
Published online: 10 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.8.1.04dup
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Brysbaert, Jorina & Karen Lahousse
2022. Marking Contrastive Topics in a Topic Shift Context: Contrastive Adverbs versus Emphatic Pronouns. Discours :31 DOI logo
Dupont, Maïté
2020. Placement patterns of English and French conjunctive adjuncts of contrast. Languages in Contrast 20:2 ► pp. 263 ff. DOI logo
Crible, Ludivine
2017. Discourse markers and (dis)fluency in English and French. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22:2 ► pp. 242 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2018. Discourse Markers and (Dis)fluency [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 286], DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Conjunctive Markers of Contrast in English and French [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 99], DOI logo

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