Les conjonctions concessives à valeur réelle: Étude contrastive français-suédois

The aim of this study is to compare the function and use of French and Swedish concessive conjunctions (bien que / quoique / encore que vs. trots att / fast / fastän). The analysis is based on a translation corpus, comprising French and Swedish fiction and non-fiction texts, and their translations into Swedish and French, respectively. It is argued that the semantic variation observed in the data is the result of a general diachronic semantic change including the following steps: nonsubjective > subjective > intersubjective. This reconstructive approach makes it possible to suggest a probable evolutionary path of the French and Swedish conjunctions and to determine their degree of grammaticalisation. The study also investigates differences in the use of the concessive conjunctions in fiction and non-fiction texts.