Étude contrastive des phrases OSV en chinois et en français : application didactique

This article presents a contrastive study of the Object– Subject–Verb (OSV) sentence structure in French—specifically, left-dislocated object constructions—and in Chinese, where it corresponds to subject–predicate topicalization constructions. Although the canonical word order in both languages is SVO, the OSV structure is frequent in both, yet often overlooked in French as a foreign language (FLE) instruction. The analysis shows that in both languages, the shift from SVO to OSV serves similar pragmatic functions of focus: it turns the object into a contrastive focus and shifts the informational focus onto the final constituent. Furthermore, this construction functions as an alternative to the passive voice, enabling object thematization when canonical passivization is syntactically or semantically constrained. A major difference lies in the pronominal resumption of the dislocated object, which is obligatory in French but optional—and often redundant—in Chinese, posing a significant challenge for Chinese-speaking learners. The article concludes with a didactic application carried out at Beihang University, which confirms the effectiveness of a contrastive approach for teaching this grammatical feature.