The aim of this thesis is to examine the question of word order in Korean and French, and to shed light on the way in which these two genetically and typologically very different languages manifest the same notion of verb cluster. We develop a simple modeling of word order in Korean within the framework of topological dependency grammar - the first topological modeling for this language - a system of formal rules accounting for the correspondence between the dependency tree of a sentence and an ordered constituent structure. At that stage the verb cluster appears, a cohesive topological constituent, which favors the non-projectivity of constructions such as relativization, clefting and topicalization. It appears in Korean as well as in French, albeit with different properties in each language. We thus show that a small number of linearization rules can account for the word order facts of Korean, considered as a language with a relatively free order. This result relies on our preliminary endeavor to analyze the structure of the Korean sentence in a simple and coherent way based on the theory of (categorial) transfer.
