Syntactic position of contrast markers in different registers of French

Abstract This paper presents a quantitative corpus analysis of three syntactically mobile contrast markers in different registers of French: contrastive adverbs, emphatic pronouns, and emphatic pronouns introduced by quant à “as for”. We show that the preferred syntactic position of the three markers is influenced by their form and discourse function, but that the degree of this influence varies across registers. In informal written and spoken French, form and discourse function have a greater impact on syntactic position than in formal written French, where the standard word order subject + verb + other clause elements is favored, and non-neutral (inter)subjective peripheries are avoided. Hence, our analysis provides evidence for the idea that informal written and spoken French are (becoming) more discourse-configurational.