English and French causal connectives

in contrast

Sandrine Zufferey and Bruno Cartoni*

Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium), University of Geneva
(Switzerland)

Discourse connectives are often said to be language specific, and therefore not
easily paired with a translation equivalent in a target language. However, few
studies have assessed the magnitude and the causes of these divergences. In this
paper, we provide an overview of the similarities and discrepancies between
causal connectives in two typologically related languages: English and French.
We first discuss two criteria used in the literature to account for these differenc-
es: the notion of domains of use and the information status of the cause segment.
We then test the validity of these criteria through an empirical contrastive study
of causal connectives in English and French, performed on a bidirectional cor-
pus. Our results indicate that French and English connectives have only partially
overlapping profiles and that translation equivalents are adequately predicted by
these two criteria.

Keywords: discourse connectives, causality, domains of use, translation,

English/French

1. Introduction

Discourse connectives like ‘but’, ‘because’ or ‘while’ form a functional category

of lexical items that are very frequently used to mark coherence relations such
as explanation or contrast between units of text or discourse (e.g. Halliday and
Hasan, 1976; Mann and Thomson, 1992; Knott and Dale, 1994; Sanders, 1997).
Even though most languages possess such a set of items, important variations exist
in the number of connectives every language has to express a given relation and
in the use that is made of them to structure texts. For these reasons, connectives
are often said to be difficult to translate (Baker, 1993; Halverson, 2004; Mason,
1998), and to master for second language learners (Lamiroy, 1994; Granger and

Languages in Contrast 12:2 (2012), 232–250.  doi 10.1075/lic.12.2.06zuf

issn 1387–6759 / e-issn 1569–9897 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 English and French causal connectives in contrast 233

Tyson, 1996; Nølke, 1989). However, the magnitude of these discrepancies and the
criteria that determine the equivalence of connectives across languages have never
been discussed systematically.
In this paper, we focus on the category of so-called backward causal connec-
tives (e.g. Sanders et al., 1992; Degand and Pander Maat, 2003), in other words
connectives introducing a relation between an antecedent and a consequent seg-
ment, with the consequence prototypically presented before the cause explaining
it. We also limit our investigation to lexicalised (sometimes called grammati-
calised) connectives, i.e. connectives that have an invariable form and an arbi-
trary form-function relation. Therefore, relators like “for the reason that” are not
included in our category of connectives. English backward causal connectives thus
defined mostly include ‘because’, ‘since’, ‘as’, ‘for’, ‘given that’ and ‘seeing that’. In
French, these connectives are parce que, car, puisque, étant donné que, vu que and
comme. Despite the fact that they all convey a causal meaning, these connectives
are in many cases not interchangeable (Zufferey, 2012), indicating that some ad-
ditional differences must govern their use. This article discusses the criteria that
can explain these differences and assesses their importance from a cross-linguistic
perspective, more specifically their role in the choice of translation equivalents.
The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we discuss linguistic studies
that have provided criteria to specify the meaning of causal connectives. Using
these criteria, we provide a first comparative representation of the meaning of
causal connectives from a cross-linguistic perspective. Section 3 introduces the
methodology underlying our cross-linguistic and empirical study of causal con-
nectives. The main results from this study are presented in Section 4 and lead to a
discussion of the criteria used to classify them and a comparison of the translation
strategies used in both languages, presented in Section 5. A general conclusion is
sketched in Section 6.

2. Theoretical and empirical studies on causal connectives

Discourse connectives have been extensively studied in linguistics during the

past decades, from many theoretical angles and descriptive points of view. In this
section, we limit our discussion to studies that have provided some answers to
the main question raised in this paper: what are the relevant criteria governing
the choice of a causal connective in a given language? We discuss in turn two
important factors that have been identified in the literature, namely the notion
of domains of use (Section 2.1) and the information status of the cause segment
(Section 2.2). These criteria will provide the basis for a first comparison of English
and French connectives, based on their analysis in the literature (Section 2.3).
234 Sandrine Zufferey, Bruno Cartoni

2.1 Connectives and their domains of use

A well-known property of discourse connectives is that they can be used to relate

various kinds of propositional content. For example, Sweetser (1990) makes a dis-
tinction between content or real-world uses (example 1), epistemic uses (example
2) and speech act uses (example 3) of connectives.
(1) The snow is melting because the sun is shining.
(2) John must be ill, because he did not come to work today.
(3) Is anybody coming to the party? Because it is time to go.

This distinction has proved to be crucial to define the meaning of many causal con-
nectives. Contrary to the English connective ‘because’ used in the examples, most
connectives cannot be used in all domains but rather tend to specialize in one or
two of them. In many cases, a connective can either be used in the content domain
or in the other two domains. For this reason, not all authors accept Sweetser’s tri-
partite distinction, and some of them only separate semantic and pragmatic uses
(van Dijk, 1979), sometimes also called external and internal uses (Halliday and
Hasan, 1976). Some authors have advocated a more fine-grained division, based on
a scalar notion going from objective (content) to subjective (speech act) relations
(Pander Maat and Degand, 2001; Degand and Pander Maat, 2003; Pit, 2007). The
degree of subjectivity of a relation is assessed following a number of explicit criteria,
such as the involvement of a protagonist, the proximity of the relation to the speaker
and the speech point and the fact that the protagonist is left implicit. More recently,
this distinction has been reduced again to a binary opposition between objective
and subjective uses in order to make it more operational for annotation and experi-
mental purposes (e.g. Canestrelli et al., to appear; Stukker and Sanders, 2012).
Terminological issues aside, the important point is that the separation be-
tween domains of use seems to draw a line between several causal connectives. For
instance, in English, the connective ‘since’ is specifically used in the speech act and
in the epistemic domains (Sweetser, 1990), in other words to convey subjective
relations. In French, many studies have found that parce que is used to convey ob-
jective relations, while car and puisque are both used to convey subjective relations
(e.g. Lambda-l Group, 1975; Roulet et al., 1985; Moeschler, 1989). However, recent
studies have also stressed that if this distinction still holds in the written modality,
the absence of car in contemporary spoken French has led to an extension of parce
que, used for all kinds of relations (Simon and Degand, 2007; Degand and Fagard,
2012; Zufferey, 2012). Several studies have confirmed that many other languages
like Dutch and German have specific connectives for objective and subjective rela-
tions (for a recent survey, see Stukker and Sanders, 2012).
 English and French causal connectives in contrast 235

However, the use of a connective in a specific domain is a question of accept-

ability rather than grammaticality, or as Degand and Pander Maat (2003) put it, of
“natural environment”. In other words, if a connective is used in a context that is
too remote from its typical domains of use, the causal relation becomes awkward
or even difficult to process. Stukker and Sanders (2012) have also stressed that
the categorization of connectives into domains of use is prototype-like. Therefore,
uses that are marginal or even external to the natural domain of a connective are
also expected to occur.
In sum, the notion of domains of use is useful to draw a line between con-
nectives like parce que and ‘because’ on the one hand, that can be used to convey
objective relations, and connectives like puisque, car and ‘since’ on the other hand,
that are used to convey subjective relations. However, this distinction does not
explain why connectives like car and puisque, used in similar domains, are almost
never interchangeable (Zufferey, 2012).

2.2 The information status of the cause segment

A second criterion discussed in the literature to define the meaning of causal con-
nectives is the information status of the cause segment. This status can either be
new, if the speaker considers that the hearer is not aware of the cause, or given, if
the speaker considers that it is part of the common ground.
This criterion seems to be directly related to the choice of one connective
over another. Vandepitte (1993: 91) analysed the information status of clauses in-
troduced by ‘because’, ‘since’ and ‘as’ in a corpus of oral parliamentary answers.
Results indicate that ‘because’ is used to introduce new information in 64.4% of
the cases, while ‘since’ and ‘as’ introduce given information in 59.1% and 78.3% of
the cases, respectively.
In French, the Lambda-l Group (1975) argued that the difference between car
and puisque was a question of speaker attitude. While car is used to present a justi-
fication for a speech act, puisque introduces a causal relation between a known or
indisputable cause and its logical consequence. Again, this distinction is clearly re-
lated to the information status of the cause. While a new justification is announced
by car, a known cause is alluded to with puisque. However, existing data on French
connectives also indicates that this notion should be somewhat redefined. First,
Ducrot (1984) provided a series of examples indicating that the cause following
puisque was not always known. Second, the Lambda-l Group (1975) had already
observed that the cause following parce que was not always new. They also noted
that when the cause was not new, the new element conveyed by parce que was the
causal relation itself. For example, if Alex utters the sentence shown in example
4 to Peter, while it is manifest to him that Peter both knows that John is in a bad
236 Sandrine Zufferey, Bruno Cartoni

mood and that John lost his wallet, the role of parce que is to inform him that there
is a causal relation between these two known facts.
(4) Jean est de mauvaise humeur parce qu’il a perdu son porte-monnaie.
“John is in a bad mood CONNECTIVE he lost his wallet.”

The same holds true of some uses of puisque, where the speaker does not pres-
ent the cause segment as given but the causal relation itself, using this status to
make it appear indisputable. In sum, as argued by Vandepitte (1993), the notion of
given should not be treated as indicating known information, but rather informa-
tion that is manifest. This notion, borrowed from relevance theory (Sperber and
Wilson, 1986), is weaker in that it only implies that the cause is either perceptible
or inferable.
Finally, the notion of information status has often been related to another dis-
tinctive criterion between connectives in the literature: their prototypical position
in the sentence. Altenberg (1984) found in several corpora of English that ‘because’
is mostly used in argument final position while ‘since’, and to a larger extent ‘as’, ap-
pear mostly in sentence initial position. Altenberg relates this syntactic phenom-
enon to the thematic ordering of the sentence, where given arguments are typi-
cally presented first, in order to introduce newly asserted ones. According to him,
‘because’ is placed between the two clauses to introduce new information, while
‘since’ and ‘as’ are used more often at the beginning of the sentence to introduce
a given cause. Meier (2002) also studied the correlation between the information
status of the cause and the position of the connective in the sentence in English
and Norwegian and found that these two criteria were often matching. Indeed,
many connectives conveying given information tend to be used in sentence ini-
tial position like the English ‘as’ (Vandepitte, 1993) and the Dutch aangezien (Pit,
2007). However, this is not an absolute rule. For example, the French puisque, a
connective strongly associated with given information, is mostly used in clause
final position like parce que and car (Pit, 2007). This shows that the two criteria,
although correlated, are not always convergent. Similarly, Green (1980) has pre-
sented many arguments indicating that the thematic ordering of the sentence, with
given information coming first and new information coming last, does not always
hold true. As a consequence, we chose to investigate the status of the cause seg-
ment independently of the connective’s syntactic position in the sentence.

2.3 A cross-linguistic classification based on the literature

So far we have argued that causal connectives can be classified according to two
well-defined criteria: the objectivity or subjectivity of the relation and the status
of the cause segment that can be either new or given, in the sense of mutually
 English and French causal connectives in contrast 237

manifest. In the literature, some causal connectives have been defined in English
and French according to these or similar criteria. They are summarized in Table 1.
In English, Sweetser (1990) classified ‘because’ and ‘since’ in terms of domains of
use (i.e. our opposition between objective and subjective), based on a theoretical
analysis. Vandepitte (1993) and Meier (2002) addressed the question of the status
of the cause segment of ‘because’, ‘since’ and ‘as’ in empirical studies. In French,
work from the Lambda-l Group (1975) provided the grounds for classifying car,
parce que and puisque from a theoretical perspective, with some reassessments
from an empirical study by Zufferey (2012). Finally, Degand and Fagard (2012)
provided additional empirical data for the pair made of car and parce que.

Table 1.  Properties of causal connectives described in the literature.

Connective objective subjective new given
because + + +
since + +
as ? ? +
parce que + + (speech) +
car + +
puisque + +

The first observation from Table 1 is that data on the classification of causal con-
nectives is still lacking. For example, the status of ‘as’ for the objective/subjective
criterion has not been described. Moreover, not all criteria have been assessed
empirically. This first cross-linguistic comparison also brings a number of ques-
tions. What are the main translations of connectives like car, that do not have
exact equivalents in Table 1? What is the role of these two criteria in choosing
translation equivalents? In order to provide an answer to these questions, we have
conducted an original empirical study.

3. A corpus-based contrastive study

We begin this section by describing the bidirectional corpus that we created for
our study (3.1) and explaining the methodological choices that we made (3.2).
Finally, we describe the annotation that was performed on the most frequent con-
nectives in the corpus (3.3).
238 Sandrine Zufferey, Bruno Cartoni

3.1 Description of data

In order to make a cross-linguistic comparison of causal connectives, we used the

Europarl corpus (Koehn, 2005), a multilingual collection of the minutes of de-
bates from the European Parliament. In this corpus, each deputy speaks in his/her
own language, and his/her statement is then translated into the other official lan-
guages of the EU (23 in total at the time of writing). The Europarl corpus is freely
available, and automatically sentence-aligned for research purposes. The language
used in the corpus is intermediate between speech and written language, as depu-
ties’ statements are spoken during the session and these statements are later tran-
scribed and edited.
Parallel corpora are particularly useful for the study of specific items like con-
nectives, because explicit correspondence pairs can be extracted and analysed.
For the purpose of this study, we extracted from the Europarl corpus two direc-
tional sub-corpora, in other words parallel corpora where the original and the
translated sides are clearly identified. One corpus contained English original texts
and their French translations, and the other contained French original texts and
their English translations (for details of the methodology, see Cartoni et al., 2011;
Cartoni and Meyer, 2012). Our corpus, described in Table 2, includes only the
years 1996 to 1999 of the Europarl corpus.1

Table 2.  Size of the sub-corpora extracted from the Europarl Corpus.

English into French French into English
Statements   5,507   4,004
Sentences 60,006 45,380
Words 1,404,973 (En) / 1,480,530 (Fr) 1,179,540 (Fr) / 1,184,288 (En)

3.2 Extraction method

We extracted parallel sentences containing backward causal connectives using

the bilingual concordance tool ParaConc (Barlow, 2008). The frequencies of these
connectives, both in original data and in translated data, are given in Table 3 for
English and Table 4 for French.
An important methodological problem for our analysis is that some connec-
tives from our list are ambiguous. In some cases like the word ‘since’, this ambigu-
ity lies between two connective uses (temporal and causal) while in others like ‘for’,
the ambiguity is between connective uses and non-connective uses (like a preposi-
tion in the case of ‘for’). Some connectives like ‘as’ are even more ambiguous and
convey both several meanings as connectives but also an important number of
 English and French causal connectives in contrast 239

Table 3.  Frequency of English causal connectives in original and translated data.

Original English corpus Translated English corpus
Nb of Ratio per Nb of Ratio per
occurrences 100,000 words occurrences 100,000 words
because 1,670 118.86 1 461 123.37
since (causal)   135    9.61   690   58.25
for (causal)     57    4.06     60    5.07
given that     70    4.98     94    7.94
as (causal)   144   10.25   575   48.55
seeing that      3    0.21      6    0.51

Table 4.  Frequency of French causal connectives in original and translated data.

Original French corpus Translated French corpus
Nb of Ratio per Nb of Ratio per
occurrences 100,000 words occurrences 100,000 words
parce que 971 82.32 569 38.43
car 897 76.05 939 63.42
puisque 534 45.27 153 10.33
étant donné que   26   2.20 166 11.21
vu que   35   2.97   47   3.17
comme (causal)   68   5.75    7   0.47

non-connective uses. When the connectives were ambiguous, we have first auto-
matically filtered the occurrences directly in the concordance tool, by excluding
frequent collocations (for example ‘as well’ or ‘the same as’ when extracting the
connective ‘as’). We then manually verified the proportion of causal uses amongst
all the remaining occurrences. This problem concerns comme in French and ‘for’,
‘as’ and ‘since’ in English.2 The connective ‘for’ raised a specific problem, because it
is a very frequent lexical item, with over 14,000 occurrences in the original English
portion of the corpus, but it is extremely infrequent as a connective. In this case,
the numbers given in Table 3 are estimates based on the manual verification of
500 sentences in translated and original data. This estimate is corroborated by the
translation spotting of causal connectives in the French parts of the bidirectional
corpus: ‘for’ is used only 3 times as a translation of 650 French causal connectives
that were annotated (Fr→En), and was used in the original English texts trans-
lated by a French causal connective in 25 cases out of the 630 that were annotated
(En→Fr).
240 Sandrine Zufferey, Bruno Cartoni

3.3 Annotation

The first annotation step consisted of manually spotting the translation equiva-
lents. In order to reach reliable conclusions, we limited our analysis to connectives
that had over 100 occurrences. In the case of highly frequent connectives, only the
first 200 randomly selected occurrences were annotated. This translation spotting
revealed the range of possible translations, from equivalent causal connectives to
other lexical items or syntactic formulations (especially gerunds). The category
“other” in Tables 5–10 contains connectives and punctuation marks that were sel-
dom used.
The second step was the annotation of the two criteria discussed in Section 2,
that is the objective or subjective nature of the relation and the new or given status
of the cause segment. This annotation was performed independently by the two
authors for all occurrences. All cases of disagreement were resolved through dis-
cussion. The initial agreement was 85.8% on average for the objective/subjective
criterion and 88.1% for the given/new criterion. For all connectives, some occur-
rences had to be discarded because one of the two criteria could not be ascertained
on the basis of the available context.
For the objective/subjective criterion, the annotation was guided by the crite-
ria defined in Degand and Pander Maat (2003) and presented in Section 2. In ad-
dition to these criteria, the presence of an epistemic marker such as a modal verb,
the use of conditional or some specific locutions (‘possibly’, ‘in my view’, ‘probably’,
etc.) were also used as indicators of subjectivity. For example, example 5 is an ob-
jective relation from the corpus where the connective ‘because’ relates two facts
concerning external parties. Example 6 is a case of subjective relation from the
corpus, where ‘because’ relates the speaker’s personal claim and its justification.
(5) UK officials have said they will destroy these cigars because Mr Smith has
refused to pay £90 in duty.
(6) But even at the age of 18 or 21 it is still unacceptable because these people
are not criminals.

The new/given criterion was more difficult to ascertain, because our data did not
consist of entire texts, but only isolated utterances. As a consequence, we decid-
ed to annotate as “given” only causes implying internal states of affairs from the
Parliament that were therefore obviously manifest to the audience. Example 7 from
the corpus was annotated as introducing given information. Example 8, also from
the corpus, was annotated as introducing new information. Cases such as 9 were
also annotated as introducing new information, even though they arguably con-
tain information pertaining to members of Parliament’s world knowledge. This is
a rather conservative approach, adopted to ensure that only given information was
 English and French causal connectives in contrast 241

annotated as such. It implies that the proportion of sentences annotated as “given”

is probably on the lower side of those that were actually presented as given by the
speakers.
(7) Madam President, this is a very technical but important report since we are
dealing with the question of food safety and hygiene.
(8) I welcome the President-in-Office to Parliament officially since it is the first
time I have had this direct contact with him.
(9) We must insist that all Member States play by the rules, since capital
investment in smaller states will never be forthcoming.

4. Results: Similarities and differences across languages

In this section, we present the results of translation spotting for all the connectives
that were frequent enough to be analysed, together with the results of our an-
notation of the two criteria described in Section 2. Tables 5 to 7 report results for
English, and Tables 8 to 10 for French.

Table 5.  Annotation and translation spotting of ‘because’.

car parce para- zero dans la en puisque other total
que phrase mesure effet
où
obj./new  3 27 11 2 0 2 1 1   47
obj./given  4  3  3 0 1 0 1 0   12
subj./new 62 30 15 4 4 2 0 5 122
subj./given  5  6  4 2 1 0 1 0   19
total 74 66 33 8 6 4 3 6 200

Table 5 indicates that the main translations of ‘because’ are car and parce que, in
similar proportions (37% and 33%, respectively). Table 5 also confirms that ‘be-
cause’ can be used to convey both subjective and objective relations (122+19/200
= 70.5% and 47+12/200 = 29.5%, respectively). The predominance of subjective
relations is probably due to the nature of our corpus, that contains argumentative
speeches, triggering the use of subjective relations (Sanders, 1997). Table 5 also
indicates that parce que is chosen to translate objective uses of ‘because’ (51%),
while car is the main translation of its subjective uses (47.5%). Finally, ‘because’ is
mostly used to convey new information, in 84.5% of its uses.
242 Sandrine Zufferey, Bruno Cartoni

Table 6.  Annotation and translation spotting of ‘since’.

puisque étant car dans la gerund para- vu que other total
donné mesure phrase
que où
obj./new  1  1  1  1  1  2  0  2    9
obj./given  0  0  0  1  1  0  0  0    2
subj./new 10 10 19  6  5  3  2 14   69
subj./given 20 17  2  5  3  2  2  4   55
total 31 28 22 13 10  7  4 20 135

Table 6 indicates that the main translations of ‘since’ are puisque (23%), étant don-
né que (21%) and car (16%). It also shows that ‘since’ is a subjective connective
(92% of the cases) that can be used to convey both new and given information,
to similar extents (58% and 42% respectively). It is mainly translated by car when
it conveys new information (27.5%) and by puisque or étant donné que (36% and
31%) when it conveys given information.

Table 7.  Annotation and translation spotting of ‘as’.

car étant puisque dans la zero gerund other total
donné mesure
que où
obj./new  4  6  2  6  1  2  5   26
obj./given  0  2  2  0  0  2  2    8
subj./new 26  7  4  6  5  5 19   72
subj./given  4  6  9  1  1  6  8   35
total 34 21 17 13  7 15 34 141

Table 7 indicates that ‘as’ is translated by car, étant donné que, puisque and dans la
mesure où. It conveys mostly subjective relations (75.8%) and is preferentially used
to convey new information (69.5%). When it conveys objective relations, its main
translations are étant donné que and dans la mesure où. When it conveys subjec-
tive relations, its main translations are car, puisque and étant donné que. When it
conveys given information, its main translation is puisque followed by étant donné
que and when it conveys new information, its main translation is car.
 English and French causal connectives in contrast 243

Table 8.  Annotation and translation spotting of parce que.

because since as zero gerund para- total
phrase
obj./new   70 1 3 1 1 2   78
obj./given   14 0 0 1 0 0   15
subj./new   75 6 5 5 0 0   91
subj./given   13 0 1 2 0 0   16
total 172 7 9 9 1 2 200

Table 8 shows that parce que is predominantly translated by ‘because’ (87%). It

also indicates that this connective is used to convey both objective and subjective
relations, to similar extents (46.5% and 53.5% respectively). It is on the other hand
strongly biased towards the introduction of new information (84.5%).

Table 9.  Annotation and translation spotting of car.

because as since for zero para- total
phrase
obj./new 10  2  2  1  1 0   16
obj./given  3  3  0  0  0 0    6
subj./new 73 26 21 20 14 1 155
subj./given  6  4 11  2  0 0   23
total 92 35 34 23 15 1 200

Table 9 indicates that even though car is mostly translated by ‘because’ (46%), it
has many other frequent translations: ‘as’ (17.5%), ‘since’ (17%), and ‘for’ (11.5%).
It is predominantly a subjective connective (89%), used to convey new informa-
tion (85.5%). When it conveys given information, its main translation is ‘since’
(38%), while it is ‘because’ when it conveys new information (48.5%).

Table 10.  Annotation and translation spotting of puisque.

since as because given zero para- other total
that phrase
obj./new  1  0  0  0  0 0 0    1
obj./given  1  0  0  0  0 0 0    1
subj./new 36 17 16  6  3 1 2   81
subj./given 49 32 17  6  7 4 2 117
total 87 49 33 12 10 5 4 200
244 Sandrine Zufferey, Bruno Cartoni

Table 10 indicates that the main translation of puisque is ‘since’ (43.5%), followed
by ‘as’ (24.5%) and ‘because’ (16.5%). These results also indicate that puisque is a
very strongly subjective connective (99%), most often used to convey given in-
formation (59%), but also frequently used to introduce new information (41%).
‘Since’, followed by ‘as’, are its main translations when it conveys given information
(42% and 27%). When it conveys new information, ‘since’ is again its most fre-
quent translation (44.5%), followed by ‘as’ and ‘because’ (20% each).
Finally, Figures 1 for English and 2 for French indicate the number of times
a connective was used to translate subjective and objective relations in the source
text and to introduce new and given causes, all source connectives confounded.
These data therefore differ from those in Tables 5 to 10 in that they reflect the use
of connectives in translated (vs. original) data.

180
160
140
Nb of occurrences

120
100
80
60
40
20
0
Objective/new Objective/given Subjective/new Subjective/
given
Because 80 17 164 36
Since 4 1 63 60
As 5 3 48 37
Figure 1.  English connectives used in translation depending on annotated criteria.

Figure 1 shows that ‘because’ is virtually the only connective used to translate ob-
jective relations. It is also highly predominant when translating subjective rela-
tions introducing new content. When subjective relations introduce given infor-
mation, ‘since’ is the most frequent choice. The connective ‘as’ has a similar profile
to ‘since’, albeit with a lower frequency.
Figure 2 shows that parce que is the predominant connective to translate ob-
jective relations. For subjective relations, car is the most frequent choice when new
information is introduced, while puisque is chosen to introduce given informa-
tion. Contrary to English, the three French connectives display a specific profile.
 English and French causal connectives in contrast 245

180
160
140
Nb of occurrences
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
Objective/new Objective/given Subjective/new Subjective/
given
Parce que 22 3 27 13
Car 4 4 84 12
Puisque 3 1 12 25
Figure 2.  French connectives used in translation depending on annotated criteria.

5. Cross-linguistic comparison and translation equivalents

Based on the data presented in Section 4, we draw a synthetic empirical compari-

son of the uses of causal connectives in English and French source texts. The cross-
linguistic comparison is presented in Table 11. A χ2 test of independence (3x4)
was calculated for both languages. Results indicate that the distributions of con-
nectives across categories are significantly different from a random distribution,
in both languages.3 Moreover, an analysis of standardised residuals4 indicates that
the dependence between connectives and categories in English is due to an over-
use of ‘because’ and an underuse of ‘since’ in the objective/new category and to an
overuse of ‘since’ and an underuse of ‘because’ in the subjective/given category.
Other differences are not significant.
For French, this dependence is due to an overuse of parce que in the objective/
new category, with a marked underuse of puisque and to a lesser extent of car. It is
also due to an overuse of car and an underuse of parce que in the subjective/new
category. In the subjective/given category, differences are even bigger. Puisque is
strongly overused and parce que and car are strongly underused. All significant
overuses are indicated in bold in Table 11.
One of the main advantages of Table 11 compared to Table 1 drawn from re-
sults found in the literature is that it provides a more refined view of the possible
uses of connectives in a given language than simple binary theoretical distinctions.
Moreover, our statistical analysis confirms that in French the three connectives
have a specific profile, while connectives are not significantly different in English
in the subjective-new category. It also reveals some important cross-linguistic
246 Sandrine Zufferey, Bruno Cartoni

Table 11.  Cross-linguistic comparison of connectives in source texts based on empiri-

cal observations. The percentages add up to 100% for the four occurrences of every
connective.
objective subjective
because 23.5% because 61%
since   6.5% since 51%
as 18.5% as 51%
new
parce que 39% parce que 45.5%
car   8% car 77.5%
puisque   0.5% puisque 40.5%
because   6% because   9.5%
since   1.5% since 41%
as   5.5% as 25%
given
parce que   7.5% parce que   8%
car   3% car 11.5%
puisque   0.5% puisque 58.5%

differences. For example, both ‘since’ and puisque have been classified as subjec-
tive connectives and are often treated as a translation pair, especially in bilingual
dictionaries (e.g. Robert and Collins, 1990). Our study indicates that there are
nevertheless some significant differences between them. Notably, even though the
criteria used for assigning given content were very strict, puisque still has more
given than new uses. This is not the case with ‘since’, that has a majority of uses in
the new category.
Moreover, in our data, ‘since’ is the most frequent translation of puisque when
it introduces both new and given information, while puisque is the main transla-
tion of ‘since’ only when it conveys given information. All this tends to indicate
that puisque and ‘since’ differ both in their degree of subjectivity (99% for puisque
vs. 89% for ‘since’) and in the type of information that they prototypically convey:
given for puisque and both given and new for ‘since’. Moreover, their respective
frequency in original and in translated data reveals an important role of the source
language: ‘since’ is used six times more often in translated than in original data,
probably triggered by the high frequency of puisque (45.27 occurrences per mil-
lion word versus 9.54 for ‘since’). Conversely, puisque is more than four times as
frequent in original than in translated data. Our hypothesis is that no connective
in English strongly triggers its use, because there is no equivalent connective in
English that is as strongly subjective and biased towards given information.
 English and French causal connectives in contrast 247

Table 12.  Main translation equivalents per type of use.

objective/new subjective/new subjective/given
because parce que car
since car puisque, étant donné que
as étant donné que, dans la mesure où car puisque, étant donné que
parce que because because
car because since
puisque since since, as

Our analysis also provides some empirical validation of the two criteria used
for the annotation. For instance, it confirms that no connective is prototypically
used in the objective/given category. This seems to indicate that the two criteria
are interrelated: a relation introducing given information has a high probability of
relying on the speaker’s subjective claim.
Moreover, the translation differences observed in our contrastive study pro-
vide further confirmation that these criteria, defined from a monolingual per-
spective, are sound and reflect genuine differences of use between connectives.
Our study shows in addition that they are consistent across languages. Indeed,
the connectives chosen in translation are always consistent with their prototypical
category in the source language, as indicated in Table 12, summarizing the main
translation equivalents for every connective depending on their type of use. Only
categories representing more than 10% of a connective uses are given.
More generally, this study also suggests that French and English-speaking
translators apply different strategies when dealing with connectives in the source
language. While English-speaking translators mainly used English connectives to
translate French ones, French-speaking translators used more varied translations,
with notably a frequent use of paraphrases and gerunds and even zero translations.
As a consequence, English translations contained more causal connectives than
original texts, while the reverse was true for French.

6. Conclusion

In this paper, we presented a cross-linguistic analysis of French and English back-

ward causal connectives, providing an empirically grounded overview of the main
translation equivalents between these two languages. We also discussed and as-
sessed the relevance of two criteria defined from a monolingual perspective in
order to differentiate causal connectives: the objective or subjective nature of the
relation and the informational status of the cause segment (given or new).
248 Sandrine Zufferey, Bruno Cartoni

This first contrastive analysis also left a number of pending questions. Notably,
the status of other causal connectives such as ‘given that’, vu que and comme, left
out of our analysis because of their low frequency, should also be assessed. This
analysis will require the use of corpora pertaining to different genres and even
possibly in some cases like comme from the spoken modality. The influence of reg-
ister on the use of causal connectives has already been pointed out by Vandepitte
(1993), who found that ‘since’ and ‘as’ were more formal connectives, used only in
her corpus of Oral Parliamentary Answers.
Another question worth investigating is the impact of translation on the use
of connectives. Degand (2004) found that the degree of subjectivity of the connec-
tive aangezien increased in Dutch translations with respect to Dutch original texts,
under the influence of puisque in the source language. Similar influences should
also be systematically sought in translated data for the English/French pair.

Notes

*  This work was financed by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) award-
ed to the first author (PA00P1_139613/1) and through the SNSF Sinergia project COMTIS
(www.idiap.ch/project/comtis) for the second author. Part of this work was conducted while the
first author was working at the University of Geneva.

1.  The reason for this limitation is that in the years 2000s, the translation policy has changed
at the Parliament and many translations are now done through a pivot language. In order to
ensure that our data contained only direct translations, the most recent data from the corpus
has therefore been excluded.

2.  The non-connective use of the word car, meaning a type of vehicle, is very infrequent in
comparison to the connective use of this word and was not found in our dataset.

3.  For English, the result is: χ2 = 54.2, df = 6, and p < 0.001. For French, the result is: χ2 = 267,
df = 6, and p < 0.001.

4.  Residuals are standardised differences between observed and expected frequencies. Following
a rule of thumb, all values > 2 are considered significant.

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Corresponding author’s address

Sandrine Zufferey
Université catholique de Louvain
Institut Langage et Communication
Place B. Pascal, 1 -L3.03.33
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
sandrine.zufferey@uclouvain.be