ABOUT TWO CLAUSE-LINKAGE STRATEGIES IN FRENCH: GROUPINGS AND PARALLEL STRUCTURING

International audienceThis paper investigates French utterances which are made up of sequences of two successive Verb-Phrases which do not make use of any kind of subordinating element such as conjunctions, thus showing a mere paratactic or correlative relation. Building on the opposition between microsyntax and macrosyntax, we will suggest that a broad distinction may be drawn between two fundamentally different modes of clause-linking: macrosyntactic groupings, a mode of combination between clauses which can be given a fully syntagmatic status; and parallel structuring, which is based on the paradigmatic nature of the relationship holding between successive sequences. Our proposal is based on a series of criteria relating to the possibility to organize the successive units in a paradigmatic way, the mode of connection between each clause, and the degree of autonomy of each sequence