Article published In: Interactional Linguistics
Vol. 1:1 (2021) ► pp.64–89
“You turn your back and there’s somebody moving in”
Syntactic anacrusis in spoken English
This article is available free of charge.
Published online: 6 May 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/il.20009.hop
https://doi.org/10.1075/il.20009.hop
Abstract
Anacrustic Coordination (AC) is a type of biclausal conjunction such that an initial clause or phrase sets up a
state of affairs and is followed by and and a strongly focused second clause, for example three years
it’s been sitting here and I haven’t done it. AC figures in a number of kinds of interaction. One is the
topic/comment conditional, as in call it up and there’s something that actually says your number. It is a
possibility for enhancing certain illocutionary acts such as threats and warnings: I’m gonna take that and I’m gonna dig
it into you. It is a basis for syntactic mirativity, the coding of surprise and unexpectedness (DeLancey, S. (1997). Mirativity:
The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic
Typology 11: 33–52. ): you turn your back and there’s somebody moving in. AC raises questions
about the nature of constructions and of Construction Grammar.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: Coordination with and
- 2.Constructions in spoken language
- 2.1Constructions
- 2.2Constructions in Conversational Data
- 3.Anacrustic Coordination
- 3.1Syntactic Anacrusis
- 3.2Structuration of the anacrusis
- 3.3Co-construction of anacrustic coordination
- 4.Semantics and pragmatics of anacrustic coordination
- 4.1Speech acts
- 4.2Conditional
- 4.3Mirativity
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Symbols used in transcripts
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