Car, parce que, puisque’ revisited: Three empirical studies on French causal connectives

Zufferey, Sandrine (2012). Car, parce que, puisque’ revisited: Three empirical studies on French causal connectives. Journal of pragmatics, 44(2), pp. 138-153. Elsevier 10.1016/j.pragma.2011.09.018

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In French, a causal relation is often conveyed by the connectives car, parce que or puisque. Since the seminal work of the Lambda-l Group (1975), it has generally been assumed that parce que, used to relate semantic content, contrasts with car and puisque, both used to connect either speech act or epistemic content. However, this analysis leaves a number of questions unanswered. In this paper, I present a reanalysis of this trio, using empirical methods such as corpus analysis and constrained elicitation. Results indicate that car and parce que are interchangeable in many contexts, even if they are still prototypically used in their respective domain in writing. As for puisque, its distribution does not overlap with car, despite their similar domains of use. I argue that the specificity of puisque with respect to the other two connectives is to introduce a cause with an echoic meaning.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of French Language and Literature

UniBE Contributor:

Zufferey, Sandrine

Subjects:

800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 840 French & related literatures
400 Language > 440 French & related languages

ISSN:

0378-2166

Publisher:

Elsevier

Language:

English

Submitter:

Sandrine Zufferey

Date Deposited:

25 Apr 2016 11:10

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 14:53

Publisher DOI:

10.1016/j.pragma.2011.09.018

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.78535

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/78535

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