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The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French
Author
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
Published online on 21 November 2011
Published online on 21 November 2011
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
- Prelim pages | pp. i–iv
- Table of contents | pp. v–vi
- Acknowledgments | pp. vii–viii
- 1. Introduction | pp. 1–4
- 1.1. Purposes of the study
- 1.2. The language of the corpus
- 2. Review of the Literature | pp. 5–12
- 2.1. Syntactic descriptions and the syntactic-pragmatic correlation hypothesis (SPCH)
- 2.2. Pragmatic descriptions
- 3. The Data-General Observations and Hypotheses | pp. 13–36
- 3.1. Preliminary observations
- 3.2. Problems with the syntactic-pragmatic correlation hypothesis
- 3.3. Contrastiveness and topic shift
- 3.4. A new hypothesis — in search of LDs of minimal pragmatic motivation
- 3.5. Alternative syntactic analyses
- 3.6. The ‘domain’ of LD: sentence-topic and discourse-topic
- 4. Pronominal Detachments | pp. 37–48
- 4.1. ‘Personal’ pronouns: first person: moi, nous
- 4.2. ‘Nonpersonal’ pronoun: ça
- 5. Lexical NP Detachments | pp. 49–94
- 5.1. With nonpersonal anaphor
- 5.2. With personal anaphor: NP il/elle …
- 5.3. NP-LDs with nonsubject anaphors
- 5.4. The definiteness constraint
- 6. Special Cases | pp. 95–110
- 6.1. ‘Topicalization’ and ‘Focus Movement’ in spoken French
- 6.2. No-anaphor LDs
- 6.3. Double LDs
- 7. Conclusion | pp. 111–114
- Notes | pp. 115–120
- | pp. 121–123
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