Eirik Hvidsten Un pronom pas comme les autres

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Eirik Hvidsten
Un pronom pas comme les autres
Une étude sur la fonction du pronom clitique « en » en français
Masteroppgave i fransk
Trondheim, 15.11.2014
Norges teknisk-vitenskapelige universitet
Det humanistiske fakultet
Institutt for språk og litteratur

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Remerciements
Je tiens à remercier vivement ma directrice de mémoire Nelly Foucher Stenkløv, pour tous les
conseils qu’elle m’a donnés pendant le travail sur ce mémoire. Son aide m’a été précieuse tout
au long de mes études de français.
Finalement, un grand merci à ma famille pour son soutien et ses encouragements.

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Abstract
This master’s thesis is an analysis of the French pronoun en. The objective of the thesis is to
analyse the syntactic distribution of en in order to create a typological framework to
determine the acceptability of en pronominalization in French. This includes scrutinizing en
from a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic point of view.
The pronoun en is often a challenging pronoun both to understand and to use in discourse for
Norwegian learners of French, because there is no equivalent in Norwegian. We have
therefore done a test on the use of en among Norwegian students of French at NTNU to
discover in which areas the use of this pronoun seems to be the most challenging.
Furthermore, we have also included Norwegian translations of phrases containing en in some
of our analysis to underline the differences at play between the languages.
Most of the examples in this thesis are fabricated. There are, however, a fair share of authentic
examples found in French literature or in a French internet database called Frantext. The
origin of the authentic examples are cited.
The use of en comprises three main syntactic categories, replacing a constituent in a
quantitative or partitive setting, replacing a prepositional complement of a noun phase or
replacing a verbal complement introduced by the preposition de. All of these are included in
the analysis.