Clause combining across languages

Abstract

This study explores clause combining in English and French, with special emphasis on the relationship between and/et -coordination and subordination. More precisely, the claim that English shows a strong preference for coordination while French makes more intensive use of subordination is tested against bilingual corpus data, viz. a comparable corpus of original texts and a bidirectional translation corpus. The study shows that the number of shifts from coordination to subordination is higher in translations from English into French than in translations from French into English. This finding lends strong support to the initial hypothesis.