Coherence Relations and Information Structure in English and French Political Speeches

Abstract

This study addresses the marking of additive coherence relations in French and English political speeches. It is based on a balanced comparable corpus of ministerial political speeches spanning the late 1990s and early 2000s. Additive relations are expected to be the least marked relations, as where a discourse follows on naturally from what has gone before, coherence is easily assured by continuity intonation, a discourse continuity marker such as English 'and', or simple juxtaposition. Density and variety of additive markers are found to be much greater in the French speeches compared with the English, where additive relations are more often left implicit, resulting in quite different discourse patterns. The role of markers is illustrated by a case study comparing the roles of en effet and its dictionary equivalent indeed, which are found to function differently. The findings arguably reflect the greater distance between literary and conversational French than is the case for English. At the same time, the higher frequency of a number of the French markers seems to go along with greater grammaticalization towards rhetorical 'presentational' functions.

Post-Editing Neural MT in Medical LSP: Lexico-Grammatical Patterns and Distortion in the Communication of Specialized Knowledge

“…Table 1 presents token counts for each sub-corpus as well as the translation coefficient, i.e., the token count ratio, for the two French-language sub-corpora. The coefficient is somewhat higher than the usually quoted expansion rate for this language pair, i.e., 15-20% [22] (p. 159), but similar to what was previously observed for these texts [19].…”

Contrastive Pragmatics and Corpora

“…Discourse Relations in a Contrastive Genre Perspective An excellent illustration of how adding a genre perspective can enrich the crosslinguistic analysis of discourse-pragmatic phenomena is provided by Lewis (2017). Lewis' aim was to test the hypothesis that there are differences between English and French in the area of discourse marking and that these differences could also be due to the genre.…”