LES CONSTRUCTIONS PARTICIPIALES DÉTACHÉES POUR EXPRIMER LA CAUSALITÉ.

The article questions the role of detached participial constructions (CDpart, in French) in the expression of causality. In a study examining the textual role of CDpart in French, it was observed that CDpart contributes to textual coherence at three levels of linkage defined by Gagnon (2008, 2015): 1) CDpart contribute to coherence at the referential level since, as a reduced propositions, they have an underlying referent that can be related to a nominal syntagm (SN) present in the context and thus play a role in thematic continuity; 2) CDpart contribute to coherence at the informational level since they convey new information from the secondary level and carry out a priorisation of information; 3) CDpart contribute to coherence at the event level by establishing a relationship between the event described in the participial verb and the one described in the main one. The analysis of the CDpart at the event level has shown that in a large number of cases, the CDpart is in a frontal position and that in these cases, the relationship most often established between the event described in the participial verb and that described in the main one is a causal relationship (Combettes 2005), as in the following example from the corpus (Laberge 2019): Promoting withdrawal into oneself, it (the cell phone) breaks the dialogue with family or friends during a meal (...) The article presents the analysis that has been made, from the event point of view, of some occurrences of CDpart found in texts written by undergraduate university students or in journalistic texts. The results of this analysis confirm that CDpart should be considered as linguistic resources that can express causality in French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]