Démonstratifs indéfinis en suédois et leurs correspondants en français

Résumé 0

Non-definite demonstratives in Swedish and their correspondents in French Demonstrative pronouns and adverbs are generally described as definite in languages of the world. What is seldom mentioned is that in all languages there also seems to be a demonstrative category with a basic non-definite sense. In Finnish e.g. there are non-definite demonstrative adjectives, comparable to English such and Swedish sådan, whose sense is non-definite. Usually sådan is described as a “comparative pronoun”, whose most natural French equivalent is tel, but Swedish-French dictionaries also propose expressions containing demonstratives, like de ce genre et comme cela (ça). Some French grammars mention the anaphoric function of tel and draw on its affinity with demonstratives. In order to get a clear picture of the correspondence between Swedish sådan and French demonstrative expressions, a computerized sentence-aligned bilingual corpus was used, consisting of ten Swedish 20th century novels and their French translations and ten French novels from the same period with their Swedish translations. A search was made for all instances of sådan (sådant, sådana, sån, sånt, såna) and their correspondences in the French source and target texts. Only 21% (143) of the 683 instances found of sådan, had tel as correspondent, whereas 39% (266) were the translation of, or translated by, expressions containing a demonstrative. Surprisingly, the most frequent demonstrative correspondent to non-definite NPs introduced by sådan was the definite ce+N, and particularly so in French source texts. In the French target texts ce genre de N was more frequent. From the analysis of the correspondences sådan N ↔ ce N, resulting from a modulation [-def.] ↔ [+def.], it turned out that the French demonstratives usually referred to subclasses and had a predicative rather than an identifying function. Many of them were plural and the nouns involved were semantically empty or had a very general or abstract sense. A tentative conclusion was drawn that (definite) demonstratives more naturally refer to subclasses in French than in Swedish, where they usually refer to particular objects and individuals.