Cover not available

In:Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context: Studies in honor of Knud Lambrecht
Edited by Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. Myers
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 244] 2014
► pp. 223–240

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Left dislocation in French

Information structure vs. (?) interactional linguistics

Published online: 5 March 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.244.11ker
A number of studies of Left Dislocation (LD) in spoken French within the Interactional Linguistics (IL) framework (de Fornel 1988; Pekarek Doehler 2001; Chevalier 2011b) have been critical of the information-structure analyses of this construction as set forth in Lambrecht (1981, 1994) and Barnes (1985). This discussion attempts to clarify the original information-structure analysis, arguing that the pragmatic definition of LD should be limited to the explicit marking of the sentence-topic and its associated comment. This topic-comment configuration is compatible with a large variety of particular functions with respect to the larger discourse and to speakers’ interactional purposes. Explanatorily useful IL analyses are those that make clear the connection between the topic-comment configuration and the proposed interactional function.
References (36)
References
Brown, Gillian, and George Yule. 1983. Discourse Analysis . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace L. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chevalier, Fabienne. 2011a. “Language and Social Interaction: An Introduction.” Nottingham French Studies 50 (2):1–18. .Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011b. “On the Emergent and Interactive Character of Grammatical Resources in Interaction: a Single-case Analysis of a Left Dislocation in Spoken French.” Nottingham French Studies 50 (2):77–93. .Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Cat, Cécile. 2007. French Dislocation: Interpretation, Syntax, Acquisition . Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Fornel, Michel. 1988. “Constructions disloquées, mouvement thématique et organisation préférentielle dans la conversation.” Langue française 78: 101–23. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Stefani, Elwys. 2007. “La dislocation à gauche rythmée comme dispositif de clôture séquentielle.” Travaux neuchâtelois de linguistique 41: 147–63.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Galambos, Sylvia J. 1980. “A Clarification of the Notion of Topic: Evidence from Popular Spoken French.” In Papers from the Parasession on Pronouns and Anaphora , ed. by J. Kreiman and E.A. Ojeda, 125–38. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gregory, Michelle L., and Laura A. Michaelis. 2001. “Topicalization and Left-Dislocation R evisited: A Functional Opposition Revisited.” Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1665–1706. .Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette. 1975. “Left Dislocation and the Role of Topic-comment Structure in Linguistic Theory.” Ohio State Working Papers in Linguistics 18: 72–131. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. 1987. “Emergent Grammar.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 13: 139–57. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J., and Sandra A. Thompson. 1980. “Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse.” Language 56 (2):251–99. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Horlacher, Anne-Sylvie. 2007. “La dislocation à droite comme ressource pour l’alternance des tours de parole: Vers une syntaxe incrémentale.” Travaux neuchâtelois de linguistique 47: 117–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. “Entre évaluation formulaïque et résumé généralisant: Le rôle de la dislocation à droite dans la clôture d’épisodes conversationnels.” In CMLF 2008 1er Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française , ed. by Jacques Durand, Benoît Habert, and Bernard Laks, 749–59. Paris: EDP Sciences. .Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kerr, Betsy. 1983. Minnesota Corpus. Available by request from the creator.
. 1984. “A Pragmatic Constraint on Lexical Subjects in Spoken French.” Chicago Linguistic Society , 20 (1):239–56.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1987. “On the Status of SVO Sentences in French Discourse.” In Coherence and Grounding in Discourse , ed. by Russell Tomlin, 217–61. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, focus, and the mental representation of discourse referents . Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. .Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001. “Dislocation.” In Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook , ed. by Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, and Wolfgang Raible, 1050–78. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Larsson, Eva. 1979. La dislocation en français: étude de syntaxe générative . Etudes romanes de Lund, vol. XXVIII. Lund: CWK Gleerup.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Likhacheva, Lidia. 2010. “La construction détachée à gauche dans l’alternance des tours de parole.” French Language Studies 20:171–88. .Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mondada, Lorenza. 1999. “L’organisation séquentielle des ressources linguistiques dans l’élaboration collective des descriptions.” Langage et Société 89:9–36. .Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001. “Pour une linguistique interactionnelle.” Marges Linguistiques 1:1–21.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pekarek Doehler, Simona. 2001. “Dislocation à gauche et organisation interactionnelle.” Marges Linguistiques 2:177–94.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. “Organisation séquentielle et configurations syntaxiques de la parole-en-interaction: l’exemple des constructions disloquées.” In CMLF 2008 1er Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française , ed. by Jacques Durand, Benoît Habert, and Bernard Laks, 789–802. Paris: EDP Sciences.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. “Emergent Grammar for All Practical Purposes: the On-line Formatting of Left and Right Dislocations in French Conversation.” In Constructions: Emerging and Emergent, ed. by Peter Auer and Stefan Pfänder, 45–87. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pekarek Doehler, Simona, Elwys de Stefani, and Anne-Sylvie Horlacher. 2011. “The Grammar of Closings: The Use of Dislocated Constructions as Closing Initiators in French Talk-in-Interaction.” Nottingham French Studies 50 (2):51–76. .Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1981. “Toward a Taxonomy of Given-New Information.” In Radical Pragmatics , ed. by Peter Cole, 222–55. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1984. “Topicalization and Left Dislocation: a Functional Analysis.” In Discourses in Reading and Linguistics, ed. by S.J. White and V. Teller. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 433: 213–55.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1997. “On the Functions of Left-Dislocation in English Discourse.” In Directions in Functional Linguistics , ed. by Akio Kamio, 117–143. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reinhart, Tanya. 1982. “Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics.” Distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club. Bloomington, Indiana.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey, and Emanuel A. Schegloff. 1979. “Two Preferences in the Organization of Reference to Persons in Conversation and the Interaction.” In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology , ed. by George Psathas, 15–21. New York: Irvington Publishers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Ozerov, Pavel
2021. Multifactorial Information Management (MIM): summing up the emerging alternative to Information Structure. Linguistics Vanguard 7:1 DOI logo
Ozerov, Pavel
2024. Left Dislocation in Spoken Hebrew, it is neither topicalizing nor a construction. Linguistics DOI logo
Wehr, Barbara
2021. Márton Gergely Horváth,Le français parlé informel. Stratégies de topicalisation. Ber­lin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2018 (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 421). 277 Seiten.. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 72:1 ► pp. 249 ff. DOI logo
Shibasaki, Reijirou
2018. Sequentiality and the emergence of new constructions. In Explorations in English historical syntax [Studies in Language Companion Series, 198], ► pp. 283 ff. DOI logo
Shibasaki, Reijirou
2018. From the inside to the outside of the sentence. In New Trends in Grammaticalization and Language Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 202], ► pp. 333 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue