Expressing stance through -ly adverbs in English and -ment adverbs in French in Parliamentary debates

Details

Supervisors

Dupont, Maïté

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en communication multilingue, à finalité spécialisée: langues des affaires

Abstract

Stance has been a lot studied throughout the years. For this study, I used stance as Biber (1999) described it: expressing personal feelings, attitudes, value judgments, or assessments. Based on this I decided to compare adverbials ending in -ly in English with their French counterpart -ment. Even if they are both used, the English suffix is more productive than the French one. However, even if the suffix exists in both languages, there are other ways to translate one word. English and French have different ways of translating words. For instance, English is more concrete and to the point than French, consequently, English will use more ending -ly adverbs in contrast to French which has a preference for phrases. Moreover, when we look into bilingual dictionaries, we will always find the counterpart when translating English -ly ending adverbials. The question that I will try to answer is why we only have this possible translation in bilingual dictionaries. Is there a big difference in the use of these languages that may explain this? Is the counterpart a great majority of the translations that can explain the fact that it is used in bilingual dictionaries?