Analyse contrastive de la progression thématique dans les écrits d’étudiants francophones et sinophones

Abstract

At the intersection of textual linguistics and intercultural rhetoric, this article examines the coherence and cohesion of texts written by French and Chinese students through the analysis of thematic progression, drawing from a comparable corpus. We aim to identify similarities and differences in thematic progression between two typologically distant languages. Our study focuses on the paragraph, which serves as a key unit of analysis between the sentence and the entire text. There are several differences in the way paragraphs are organised in paragraph: French speakers tend to use a linear progression, while Chinese speakers prefer a constant progression. In addition, we observed differences in the linguistic devices used to indicate thematic progression. Mandarin often features zero anaphora, regardless of the type of thematic progression, while French employs explicit anaphoric repetitions. These differences are partly attributable to the syntactic properties of the two languages, such as the requirement to mark the subject in French and the omission of the third-person singular pronoun in Mandarin. Rhetorically, these divergences reflect distinct approaches to handling the subject within the paragraph, leading to varied communicative dynamics. Thus, the results offer interesting perspectives for understanding meaning construction from an intercultural point of view.

Keywords

• anaphora
• cohesion
• coherence
• paragraph
• thematic progression
• intercultural rhetoric