Contrasting Relativization in some Naomi Alderman’s Novels and their French Translation from a Syntactic and a Semantic Perspectives

Language in usage is the result of various operations. Linguistic operations are worth studying so as to uncover the subtleties which make languages to be unique in their inner organization. These operations occur within various linguistic units (words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, and texts) and can be studied at various levels of linguistic analysis (Dutoit, 2000). Provided the wide range of such operations, the notion of clause operations is therefore the subject of this article; more specifically, this study intends to contrast relativization from a syntactic and semantic point of view based on an English-French translation corpus (extracted from three novels by Naomi Alderman and their French translations). With the aid of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT), the findings suggest that there are convergent and divergent syntactic properties, shared syntactic processes, and common syntactic functions related to the translational renderings of relative markers. Moreover, the contrastive analysis of relativization from a semantic viewpoint reveals some semantic functions undertaken by relative markers, some correspondence types between relatives of different versions of the corpus, and some translation procedures used by translators while rendering the overall meaning of the source text.