(Inter)subjectification des connecteurs : le cas de car et parce que

Abstract

In the paradigm of French causal conjunctions, car and parce que make quite an odd pair. While both of them can be translated by «because», their use in Spoken vs Written French is very different: they roughly have the same frequency in written corpora, but parce que is by far more frequent in the spoken language than in written texts, whereas car is almost absent from Spoken French. Besides, previous studies have shown that, while car is quite stable semantically, parce que is very different in Written and Spoken French. Is it possible to explain these differences? The goal of this paper is to find answers to this question in the diachrony of French. A detailed corpus study of car and parce que in Medieval French enables us to make assumptions about their subsequent evolution. Our hypothesis is that the grammaticalization of parce que was accompanied by a process of subjectification and that it ended up replacing car in the spoken language, but has not yet done so in Written French.

Keywords

• Grammaticalization
• subjectification
• causality
• diachrony
• corpus study