Comparative analysis of the functions of the French particle donc and Russian zhe for expressing causality

the article presents a contrastive analysis of the mechanisms for actualizing causality by the French particle "donc" and its Russian dictionary equivalent "zhe". It examines the status of particles as a word class in both languages and their functional-semantic potential, while also classifying their modal-expressive meanings that influence the expression of causal relations. The study is based on data from the French parallel subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. The analysis reveals and compares zones of functional correspondence and divergence between the particles. Both particles function as pragmatic markers that implicitly express causal relationships based on shared knowledge and contextual logic. However, "donc" typically points to a consequence, prompting the addressee to reconstruct the cause independently, whereas "zhe" conveys causality by appealing to an obvious and known fact. The research findings can be applied in the fields of language pedagogy and translation studies. The identified functions and meanings of the particles will enable the improvement of teaching materials and methods for French and Russian as foreign languages, particularly in developing pragmatic competence in French learners, as well as systematizing translation strategies for conveying subtle modal nuances while minimizing interference and literalism.

modal particles, causality, pragmatics, contrastive analysis, parallel corpus