1887
Volume 43, Issue 4
  • ISSN 0521-9744
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9668
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Abstract

French and English pragmatic texts are not presented and organized in the same way. The aim of this paper is to study some of the differences presented by a wide variety of pragmatic texts translated from English into French or vice versa.This study is based on the analysis of a corpus of more than six hundred thousand words. The corpus includes newspapers and magazines articles, brochures, leaflets, bulletins, communiqués, booklets, etc. Most of these texts were published in North America.This paper will focus on specific semantic, lexical and syntactic points. It will show that French texts tend to be less explicit and to give only the informations which are textually relevant, that they use varied linguistic means (use of pronouns, deictics and synonyms, for example) to avoid redundancies and repetitions, that they show a strong preference for subordinate sentences, while English texts prefer juxtaposed or coordinated sentences, and that generally French texts use more complex phrases and sentences. This study will also present a general semantic and syntactic classification of such verbs as comporter, présenter, disposer de, s'agir, s'avérer, constituer, compter, etc. which are very often used by French speakers to replace two taboo verbs: to have and to be.

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/content/journals/10.1075/babel.43.4.04qui
1997-01-01
2024-09-11
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  • Article Type: Research Article
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