More of the same or something different? An analysis of the French discourse marker par ailleurs in academic writing

Myriam Bouveret (1, 2) , Shirley Carter-Thomas (3, 1)

1 Lattice - Lattice - Langues, Textes, Traitements informatiques, Cognition - UMR 8094
2 UNIROUEN - Université de Rouen Normandie
3 IMT-BS - LSH - Département Langues et Sciences Humaines

This study analyses the semantic values and informational role of the French discourse marker par ailleurs(literally "by elsewhere") in modern academic writing. The corpus compiled for the study consists of one hundred French PhD thesis abstracts (and their accompanying translations in English), taken from various fields in the humanities and social sciences.The methodology is based on the analysis of a number of features of the French marker including sentence position, text position, co-textual environment and discourse functions. Five main discourse functions for the French marker are distinguished: (1) return to a prior topic, (2) addition or continuation (3) enumerative addition), (4) alterity (5) digression. A second stage of the analysis involves identifying and examining the English translation equivalents of par ailleurs used in the accompanying English abstracts. Although the marker has no generally accepted standard translation in English, our hypothesis is that this contrastive focus can serve as a heuristic to better identify the core functions of the French marker and its role in signalling topic development.

Mots clés: Translation equivalents; Par ailleurs; Discourse functions; Sentence and text position

Domaines: Linguistique

Myriam Bouveret, Shirley Carter-Thomas. More of the same or something different? An analysis of the French discourse marker par ailleurs in academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics, 2020, 156, pp.136-148. ⟨10.1016/j.pragma.2019.04.002⟩. ⟨hal-02404527⟩