Organisation périodique, narrativité et topologie de l’énoncé en germanique à la fin du xvie siècle

The purpose of this contribution is to investigate the degree of elaboration of the period as a syntactic and semantic unit in a High German/Danish parallel corpus of narrative prose from the late 1580’s. The question of period has not been considered from the point of view of Early Modern Danish yet. Furthermore, 16th century narrative prose is sometimes considered to be immune to periodic writing, which at that time was arguably still a feature of rhetorical genres. Narrative prose, in Renaissance French, is claimed to display another type of syntax, the “linked sentence”, which exhibits neither the same binary composition, nor the same formal strategies of clause-linkage. The study of the corpus leads to the distinction between two levels of periodic organization: the discourse level, based on the dispositio of côla, and the level of syntactic clause‑linkage, where correlative constructions play a central role. The comparison of the two languages shows the functional equivalence between correlative marking in Danish and topological strategies in German: the order of constituents and the placement of the verb are used as opening and closing signals; they can mark a periodic composition of the côla even when the formal markers are typical of the “linked sentence”. The two notions are therefore not strictly antithetical in a language like German. Finally, the analysis is extended to ellipsis and anaphora, which can also participate in a periodic organization of discourse breaks and continuities.