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Abstract:

This paper is about the influence of text formality on the syntactic position of contrastive adverbs in French. We analyze the distribution of the two contrastive adverbs en revanche and par contre, both conveying a meaning similar to English ‘on the other hand’, in three written corpora representing different levels of formality. We show that (i) these adverbs occur more often in clause-initial position as the level of formality decreases, and that (ii) the formal character of en revanche and the informal character of par contre explain distributional differences between the two adverbs. We conclude that text formality has a significant influence on the position of these two contrastive adverbs, next to factors such as text type and lexical idiosyncrasy, which had been put forward in the linguistic literature. Our findings also corroborate the idea that French is largely characterized by formality-induced variation, even with respect to word order patterns, which have not received much attention in previous research on formality.