The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French
Left detachment constructions (LDs) (e.g. un buffet de campagne, c’est un meuble) are examined in a corpus of informal spontaneous conversation between educated native speakers of French. The overwhelming majority of these constructions are shown to have a clearly pragmatic motivation. The author’s observations support a view of LD in French as a particular type of paratactic structure which should be seen primarily as a feature of unplanned discourse. The analysis partly builds on views expressed by Knud Lambrecht in an earlier contribution tot this series.
[Pragmatics & Beyond, VI:3] 1985. viii, 123 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgments
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vii
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1. Introduction
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1
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1.1. Purposes of the study
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1
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1.2. The language of the corpus
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2
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2. Review of the Literature
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5
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2.1. Syntactic descriptions and the syntactic-pragmatic correlation hypothesis (SPCH)
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5
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2.2. Pragmatic descriptions
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9
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3. The Data-General Observations and Hypotheses
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13
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3.1. Preliminary observations
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13
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3.2. Problems with the syntactic-pragmatic correlation hypothesis
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16
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3.3. Contrastiveness and topic shift
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21
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3.4. A new hypothesis — in search of LDs of minimal pragmatic motivation
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24
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3.5. Alternative syntactic analyses
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26
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3.6. The ‘domain’ of LD: sentence-topic and discourse-topic
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28
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4. Pronominal Detachments
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37
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4.1. ‘Personal’ pronouns: first person: moi, nous
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37
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4.2. ‘Nonpersonal’ pronoun:
ça
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45
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5. Lexical NP Detachments
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49
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5.1. With nonpersonal anaphor
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49
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5.2. With personal anaphor: NP il/elle …
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59
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5.3. NP-LDs with nonsubject anaphors
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89
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5.4. The definiteness constraint
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92
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6. Special Cases
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95
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6.1. ‘Topicalization’ and ‘Focus Movement’ in spoken French
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95
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6.2. No-anaphor LDs
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98
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6.3. Double LDs
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104
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7. Conclusion
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111
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Notes
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115
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References
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121
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BIC Subject: CF – Linguistics
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General