Quelques apports sur le traitement syntaxique de la forme « alors que »

Abstract

This article presents the first results of an ongoing research devoted to the French conjunction “alors que”. The traditional analysis usually conceives this grammatical form as a mere subordination marker. In our theoretical framework, the only presence of a “subordinating conjunction” does not prove in itself the existence of any genuine dependency relation in the utterance: we consider that syntactic dependency must necessarily correlate with several paradigmatic properties, such as the equivalence with a pronoun, the possibility to be cleft, and some other criteria. We will show that three main uses of “alors que” must be distinguished on a syntactic and semantic basis, and will illustrate our analysis with utterances mostly drawn from spoken corpora.

Keywords

• descriptive linguistics
• subordination
• pronominal approach
• semantics / pragmatics