Competing connectives in the causal domain: French car and parce que

In Modern French, parce que “because” seems to be replacing car “because, for”. This is not a new phenomenon: the competition between these two causal conjunctions (among others) started out almost a thousand years ago. Our corpus data show that parce que only recently gained the upper hand, but only in Spoken French, while Written French still allows the use of car on a par with parce que.We investigate here this double evolution – the dying out of car and development of parce que – with a corpus study including a written diachronic corpus (from Preclassical to Contemporary French) and modern spoken data. Our aim is to see when and how parce que came to the fore, and to study the role of grammaticalization and subjectification in this process.