Coherence Relations and Information Structure in English and French Political Speeches

Abstract

This study addresses the marking of additive coherence relations in French and English political speeches. It is based on a balanced comparable corpus of ministerial political speeches spanning the late 1990s and early 2000s. Additive relations are expected to be the least marked relations, as where a discourse follows on naturally from what has gone before, coherence is easily assured by continuity intonation, a discourse continuity marker such as English ‘and’, or simple juxtaposition. Density and variety of additive markers are found to be much greater in the French speeches compared with the English, where additive relations are more often left implicit, resulting in quite different discourse patterns. The role of markers is illustrated by a case study comparing the roles of en effet and its dictionary equivalent indeed, which are found to function differently. The findings arguably reflect the greater distance between literary and conversational French than is the case for English. At the same time, the higher frequency of a number of the French markers seems to go along with greater grammaticalization towards rhetorical, ‘presentational’ functions.