La modalisation de l’illocution en français et italien. Une analyse contrastive des adverbiaux illocutoires dans les discours parlementaires européens

The goal of this contribution is to fill a gap in the literature by proposing a first contrastive study on the so-called illocutionary adverbials in French and Italian. Based on data drawn from the Europarl7 parallel corpus, comprising parliamentary speeches delivered at the European Union, we analyze the translation correspondences of E. frankly in both French and Italian. This procedure allows to highlight important convergences and divergences between the two Romance languages. Specifically, we show that French and Italian present a rather broad set of linguistic expressions to translate E. frankly, but that the expressions included in these sets differ cross-linguistically both in terms of their lexical meaning and morphosyntactic form. Moreover, our analysis reveals that, albeit being cognates, Fr. franchement and It. francamente are not used with the same frequency and do not occur in the same translation contexts. In the conclusions, after summarizing our main findings, we list possible parameters explaining the variation observed in French and Italian.