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This paper is about two competing marking strategies for contrastive topics in a topic shift context in French: emphatic pronouns and contrastive adverbs. We analyse the choice between these markers in one specific syntactic position, i.e. when they occur between the subject and the finite verb, in different corpora consisting of formal written, informal written and spoken French. Our results indicate that the frequency of emphatic pronouns and contrastive adverbs is register-dependent. Emphatic pronouns appear more often between the subject and the finite verb in the informal written and spoken corpora, whereas contrastive adverbs occur more frequently in this position in the formal newspaper corpora. Moreover, we show that the use of emphatic pronouns is affected by pragmatic constraints, which is not the case for contrastive adverbs: emphatic pronouns typically modify subjects with a clearly identifiable – preferably human – referent. Hence, in a more general way, this study provides evidence for the idea that both language-internal and language-external factors should be taken into account when analysing the “free” choice between two similar linguistic marking strategies. Cet article porte sur deux stratégies concurrentes pour marquer des topiques contrastifs dans un contexte de changement de topique en français : les pronoms emphatiques et les adverbes contrastifs. Nous analysons le choix entre ces marqueurs dans une position syntaxique spécifique, c’est-à-dire lorsqu’ils figurent entre le sujet et le verbe fléchi, dans différents corpus de français écrit formel, français écrit informel et français parlé. Nos résultats indiquent que la fréquence des pronoms emphatiques et des adverbes contrastifs dépend du registre. Les pronoms emphatiques se trouvent plus souvent entre le sujet et le verbe fléchi dans les corpus de français écrit informel et français parlé, tandis que les adverbes contrastifs apparaissent plus fréquemment dans cette position dans les corpus de français formel journalistique. Nous montrons également que l’emploi des pronoms emphatiques est influencé par des contraintes pragmatiques, ce qui n’est pas le cas pour les adverbes contrastifs : les pronoms emphatiques modifient généralement des sujets avec un référent clairement identifiable, qui est de préférence humain. Ainsi, de façon plus générale, cette étude indique qu’il est important de prendre en compte des facteurs internes et externes à la langue lors de l’analyse du choix « libre » entre deux stratégies de marquage similaires.

This paper is about the influence of text formality on the syntactic position of contrastive adverbs in French. We analyze the distribution of the two contrastive adverbs en revanche and par contre, both conveying a meaning similar to English ‘on the other hand’, in three written corpora representing different levels of formality. We show that (i) these adverbs occur more often in clause-initial position as the level of formality decreases, and that (ii) the formal character of en revanche and the informal character of par contre explain distributional differences between the two adverbs. We conclude that text formality has a significant influence on the position of these two contrastive adverbs, next to factors such as text type and lexical idiosyncrasy, which had been put forward in the linguistic literature. Our findings also corroborate the idea that French is largely characterized by formality-induced variation, even with respect to word order patterns, which have not received much attention in previous research on formality. ispartof: Papers of the Linguistic Society of Belgium vol:15 pages:1-12 status: Published online