L’emploi des connecteurs causaux français et finnois dans un corpus littéraire

This doctoral thesis examines the use of three French and Finnish backward causal connectives (French: car, parce que and puisque; Finnish: sillä, koska and kun) in a literary corpus in contexts that would syntactically allow the use of any of these connectives. The objective of this study is i) to describe the similarities and differences between French connectives according to different contextual factors (intra-language comparison), ii) to conduct a similar analysis of Finnish connectives (intra-language comparison), and iii) to examine the extent to which the connectives of these two languages correspond to each other (inter-language comparison). The French as well as the Finnish corpus consists of 30 contemporary literary works published in the period 1991–2015. The use of connectives is examined according to ten contextual factors (so-called linguistic variables). Most of the variables (the type of causal relation, the human participant involved in the relation, the presence of subjectivity markers in the consequence and cause segments, the use of verb tenses and modes in the two segments and the information status of the two segments) are associated with the notion of subjectivity, and two other variables (the distinction between dialogical and non-dialogical sequences and the presence of orality markers) with the representation of speech. The statistical method used in the analysis is mixed-effects logistic regression, a multivariable method that enables to examine simultaneously the effect of linguistic variables on the choice of a causal connective by considering the variation in connective frequency in individual literary works. The results of the analysis show that almost all examined variables are, at least to some extent, related to the choice of connectives in both languages. With regard to the use of parce que and car, which are by far the most frequent French connectives, objective contexts, i.e. categories of variables indicating a low degree of subjectivity, as well as “oral” contexts, i.e. dialogical sequences and presence of orality markers, favour the choice of parce que and disfavour the choice of car, the latter being favoured by subjective and “non-oral” contexts. As for the most frequent Finnish connectives, koska and sillä, the use of koska is favoured by objective and oral contexts, whereas the use of sillä is favoured by subjective and non-oral contexts. The distinction between parce que and car is in this sense strongly similar to that between koska and sillä. In addition, the results on the use of these connectives highlight important differences in frequencies of connectives between individual literary works. The connective puisque differs from other French connectives especially in that it more frequently introduces known information in the cause segment, but other factors, especially the type of causal relation, are also relevant for the choice of this connective. In Finnish, the use of kun is, like that of puisque in French, particularly favoured by addressee-known information in the cause segment, but kun also appears frequently in oral contexts. The results of the analysis show a striking similarity in the usage profile of car and sillä. The connectives parce que and koska resemble each other to a lesser extent, mainly because oral contexts in French favour especially the use of the connective parce que, whereas in Finnish these types of contexts favour more strongly the use of kun than that of koska, and in iv this sense parce que and kun resemble each other. On the other hand, kun resembles puisque as it often introduces known information in the cause segment. The results underline the importance of simultaneously examining i) factors related to subjectivity, ii) those related to representation of speech, as well as iii) differences between individual works, when analysing the use of French and Finnish connectives in literary language.