QUE vs DA – The Case Of Correlative Structures in French and Serbian

Abstract

This paper presents the results of further research on the forms QUE in French and DA in Serbian, whose first results were published in “QUE vs DA. Prilog proučavanju nepromenljivih kategorija reči u francuskom i srpskom jeziku” (Nasleđe No 44) and “QUE vs DA ou Question sémantique vs question terminologique” (Jezici i kulture u vremenu i prostoru 9/1). In this paper, the authors study the use and value of the mentioned forms in correlative structures in French and Serbian. Considering that correlation is a basic characteristic of comparative and consecutive structures, our aim was to find answers, always going from French to Serbian, to following questions: 1. Does correlation work in the same way in these two languages? 2. Will the French form QUE always have the Serbian form DA as an equivalent? 3. If, on the other hand, QUE and DA are not equivalent, how do they differ?

The corpus is excerpted from literary texts in French and their translations into Serbian. Relying on contrastive analysis, cognitive theory and a semantic approach, this paper shows that QUE and DA are equivalent only in consecutive correlative structures (subordinate consecutive sentence), while the French QUE has some other equivalents in comparative correlative structures in Serbian. The analysis showed certain structural and semantic similarities and differences of one type of syntactic structures which in French linguistics evade the unique classification of subordinate sentences (subordinate consecutive sentences or a special type of subordinate sentences) which is not the case in Serbian grammars in which these structures are classified in the class of subordinate adverbial sentences, i.e. consecutive sentences. Following the typologies of consecutive correlative structures determined by Charlotte Hybertie and Miloš Kovačević, the analysis showed that there is a perfect coincidence of the observed forms in both basic types by Hybertie for the French language (intensity and manner), i.e. in the first and fourth type of consecutive sentences in Serbian (according to Kovačević).