Project
Contrastive subjects in french: a quantitative corpus analysis
In French, contrastive subjects can be marked in different ways. In this dissertation, we focus on: (i) preverbal subjects modified by contrastive adverbs such as par contre, au contraire 'on the other hand' (Jean, par contre, est parti 'Jean, on the other hand, has left'), (ii) preverbal subjects followed by an emphatic pronoun (Jean, lui, est parti ‘Jean, him, has left’ (lit.)), and (iii) preverbal subjects followed by an emphatic pronoun introduced by quant à ‘as for’ (Jean, quant à lui, est parti ‘Jean, as for him, has left’).
While (i) has been extensively studied, (ii) and (iii) have not been analyzed in detail, and the three constructions have never been compared.
The dissertation consists of a quantitative corpus analysis of these three marking strategies in different registers: semi-formal spoken French (interviews), informal written French (online discussion forum), semi-formal written French (regional newspaper) and formal written French (national newspaper). We show that the alternation between these markers and their syntactic position are conditioned by the specific properties of the subject and the marker, as well as the register. In addition, in spoken French, there is an interaction between the use of a contrastive adverb, which explicitly signals contrastivity, and prosody, which is used to mark the scope of the contrastive adverb.