Les appositions adnominales en français et en suédois écrits : Étude contrastive des prédications secondes détachées dans une perspective quantitative et informationnelle

• This thesis investigates differences in the use of the “apposition”, in French and Swedish formal, written language. The apposition is defined as a secondary predication, detached from the rest of the sentence by, for instance, commas, and determining a noun phrase. The apposition can take on the following forms: noun phrase, prepositional phrase, adjective phrase, past and present participle phrase and the so-called absolute construction. The corpus consists of parts of 20 French and 20 Swedish texts, fiction and non-fiction, and translations into the other language.In the first part of the analysis, the quantitative use of appositions in the two languages is studied. The results show that the apposition is considerably more frequent in the French texts than in the Swedish texts. Also, the relation between the form of the apposition and its correspondence in the other language is examined. For example, it is shown that the French NP apposition often corresponds to an apposition in Swedish, whereas the French present participle apposition rarely does so. It is also shown that when an apposition is used in the French text, the Swedish text often contains a finite clause or a structure where the commas have been omitted: a pre- or postposed modifier. These differences can partly be explained by the fact that French is a noun-oriented language, whereas Swedish is verb-oriented. There also seems to be a norm according to which commas are used more frequently in French.In the second part of the study, the differences in the use of appositions are studied in an informational perspective. The apposition is described as a unit associated with a low degree of “communicative dynamism” in the sentence, expressing for instance explanations, descriptions or examples. The analysis demonstrates that in French, information is often hierarchically structured in different units, whereas in Swedish, this information structure is often implicit, to be worked out by the reader.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

French

Swedish

contrastive linguistics

corpus linguistics

language typology

apposition

punctuation marks

translation

information structure

communicative dynamism

French language

Franska språket

French

franska

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