Parallel Concordancing and French Personal Pronouns

This paper is concerned with the potential contribution of parallel concordancing to the study of linguistic systems. While fully acknowledging the usefulness of monolingual concordancing, it aims to show that the strategic use of parallel concordancing can provide new and valuable insights into certain thorny issues. The example chosen is the interaction between French personal pronouns and the animate/inanimate distinction, with particular reference to the use of stressed pronouns. After a brief overview of this issue and its treatment in a number of current grammars, the paper describes various ways of exploiting the bilingual nature of parallel corpora/ concordancer s and discusses the results of different types of search. The evidence shows that stressed pronouns can have inanimate antecedents, but that this is relatively rare and mostly confined to one specific function. Parallel concordancers of the kind used in the study thus provide useful opportunities to approach problems laterally.