Concessive Alors que and Its Translation into Italian: Theoretical, Empirical and Contrastive Remarks

The concessive value of alors que in French and its translation into Italian are studied through the translations of a group of 30 Italian students. Since there is a difficulty in identifying alors que - mostly in its concessive form - we examine it in monolingual and bilingual French-Italian dictionaries. In addition, we compare the different studies of alors que in a selection of French grammars and specialized works, as well as in French grammars for italophones. As a matter of fact, only the French monolingual dictionaries seem to fully analyse alors que. The last part of the article puts forward a new proposal for the analysis of alors que on the basis of contextual and syntactical criteria. Adapted from the source document