Word order in English and French

Abstract

Drawing upon the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper compares the word order patterns of English and French adverbial connectors of contrast in a comparable bilingual corpus of quality newspaper editorials. The study shows that the two languages offer the same possibilities in terms of connector positioning but differ markedly in the preferred patterns that they display. In both languages, connector placement proves to be influenced by three main types of factors: language-specific syntactic, rhetorical and lexical factors. The notion of Rheme, which tends to be under-researched in the literature in comparison to that of Theme, plays a key role in the analysis.