In this comparative study, relativizers have been examined in two versions of the Bible: the King James Bible Version from 1611 and the New King James Bible Version from 1990. The hypothesis of this investigation was that, as the English language has undergone noticeable changes from the year 1611, the changes might also concern the usage of relativizers. Thus, the aim was to analyse how the use of relativizers has changed and try to find out reasons for these changes. To examine this, The Gospel According to Luke in both Bible versions was studied, because it is the longest of the 27 books of the New Testament. During this study, all the relativizers were sought out and counted. The results showed that in particular, there were remarkable discrepancies concerning the frequency of the relativizers who, which and that. In the King James Bible Version the relativizers which and that have a high frequency of occurrences, whereas the relativizer who does not appear as frequently. In the light of several examples, the usage of the relativizers was discussed and it has been found that the discrepancies depend on different factors. The most obvious difference in the usage of relativizers is that the relativizer which has both human and non-human antecedents in the King James Bible Version, whereas there is a clear distinction in the usage of who and which in the New King James Bible.

Cette thèse propose une description du vietnamien en comparaison avec le français autour du phénomène de la relativisation, dans le cadre de la linguistique typologique et contrastive. Elle s’articule en deux parties. La première traite des questions préliminaires et du cadre typologique. Il s’agit de présenter quelques traits dominants de la langue vietnamienne, langue isolante, par rapport au français, langue flexionnelle, en passant en revue certaines notions de base en linguistique générale telles que sujet/sujet grammatical, thème/rhème, phrase/proposition et subordination/subordonnant. La notion de subordination sera ensuite introduite dans le cadre typologique adopté (Creissels 2006) pour la présentation de la relativisation translinguistique ainsi que pour l’analyse des relatives en français et en vietnamien. La seconde partie est consacrée à l’étude contrastive des relatives en français et en vietnamien, et cela, avec un double objectif. Le premier est de dégager, aux niveaux morphosyntaxique et fonctionnel, les propriétés de la relativisation en examinant la structure syntaxique du nom de domaine, les stratégies de relativisation, la Hiérarchie d’Accessibilité à la relativisation ainsi que les types de relatives. Le second est de mettre en évidence les particularités du fonctionnement du vietnamien par rapport au français, et plus spécifiquement, la relation minimale (Lemaréchal 1997) entre un nom et une relative et la polyfonctionnalité du relativiseur mà. Cette étude, qui se veut contribuer à la typologie de la relativisation, fournit une description systématique de la subordonnée relative dans une perspective typologique, et jamais une telle étude n’a été entreprise, à notre connaissance, en linguistique vietnamienne. / This thesis proposes a description of Vietnamese in comparison with French around the phenomenon of relativization in the frame of typological and contrastive linguistics. It is divided into two parts. The first part specifies the preliminary matters and typological framework. It presents some salient features of the Vietnamese language, an isolating language, compared to the French inflected language. It reviews some basic concepts in general linguistics such as subject / grammatical subject, theme / rheme, sentence / clause and subordination / subordinator. The notion of subordination is then introduced into the typological framework adopted (Creissels 2006) for the presentation of crosslinguistic relativization as well as for the analysis of relative clauses in French and in Vietnamese. The second part is devoted to the constrative study of the relative clauses in French and in Vietnamese with two objectives. The first objective is to identify the properties of relativization at the morphosyntactic and functional levels by examining the syntactic structure of the head noun, the strategies of relativization, the Accessibility Hierarchy for relativization and the typology of relative clauses. The second objective is to highlight the peculiarities of the functioning of Vietnamese compared with French, and more specifically, the Minimum relationship (Lemaréchal 1997) between a head noun and a relative clause and the polyfunctionality of the relativiser mà. This study, which aims at contributing to the typology of relativization, provides a systematic description of the relative subordination in a typological perspective, and never such a study has been undertaken, to our knowledge, in Vietnamese linguistics.