Grieve - Dictionary of contemporary French connectors

La langue crite qui recherche la prcision et qui a le loisir dune prparation rflchie complique volontiers lexpression de la relation entre les phrases suivant les nuances de la pense.

J. Vendryes, Le langage : introduction linguistique lhistoire (La renaissance du livre, 1921, p. 174)

This dictionary is intended for any speakers of English who wish to improve their ability to read and write discursive, dialectical or analytical French prose. I assume it will be consulted both by those seeking a French equivalent for an English structure and by those who seek clarification of the functioning of a French structure.

Perhaps the latter will find the dictionary more informative than the former, if only because of the difficulty of giving a useful list of English equivalents from which to start. I do give such a list, Some English structures, at page 19. Whether it will prove very useful in practice remains to be seen. By virtue of the way we speak our language and pronounce it, English expository connectors tend to be much less precise than French. There are, if not fewer of them, at least fewer that are necessary and specific in their function: one could almost get by in English with a basic half-dozen, actually, also, anyway, but, however and in fact. There is far less consensus among English-speakers about, say, the difference between indeed and in fact than among the French about the difference between en effet and en fait. And if one starts from what is sometimes called a charnire-zro (Vinay & Darbelnet, 225), meaning the lack of an explicit connector, a common feature of English, how does one find an appropriate French structure? How can you list a more or less non-existent English equivalent for the points de suspension as used to hint at a coming pun or joke, especially when English-speakers are also ignorant of the existence and special role of this connector in French? Or, starting from a single English structure such as on the one hand on the other, how is one to direct English readers both to dun ct de lautre and to dune part dautre part, without warning them that each of these two structures, which usually work in quite distinct ways and tend not to be interchangeable, is an equivalent for only one of the two functions combined in the English structure? This versatility, these absences and the comparative imprecision of the functioning of many English connectors lessen the potential usefulness of any attempt to cross-list them with straightforward French equivalents. Indeed, were it possible to pair off English and French connectors in that way, other dictionaries would have done it long ago.