The pragmatics of left detachment in spoken standard French / Betsy K. Barnes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barnes, Betsy K.

Series:

Pragmatics & beyond ; 6:3.

Pragmatics & beyond, 0166-6258 ; 6:3

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French language--Syntax.

French language.

French language--Spoken French.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (131 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : J. Benjamins Pub. Co., 1985.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

THE PRAGMATICS OF LEFT DETACHMENT IN SPOKEN STANDARD FRENCH; Editorial page; Title page; Copyright page; Table of contents; Acknowledgements; 1. INTRODUCTION; 1.1. Purposes of the study; 1.2. The language of the corpus; 2. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE; 2.1. Syntactic descriptions and the syntactic-pragmatic correlation hypothesis (SPCH); 2.2. Pragmatic descriptions; 3. THE DATA-GENERAL OBSERVATIONS AND HYPOTHESES; 3.1. Preliminary observations; 3.2. Problems with the syntactic-pragmatic correlation hypothesis; 3.2.1. LD in contrastive contexts; 3.2.2. Introduction of new referents

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; 3.6.1. The notion of discourse-topic; 3.6.2. LD, sentence-topic, and discourse-topic in the corpus; 4. PRONOMINAL DETACHMENTS; 4.1. 'Personal' pronouns: first person: moi, nous; 4.2. 'Nonpersonal' pronouns: ça; 5. LEXICAL NP-DETACHMENTS; 5.1. With nonpersonal anaphor; 5.1.1. NP c'est ...; 5.1.2. NP aV; 5.2. With personal anaphor: NP il/elle ...

5.2.1. LD and information statuses - background 5.2.2. The data; (I) Introduction and summary; (II) LD with evoked referents; (III) LD with new referents; 5.2.3. LD and the ya-cleft; 5.2.4. LD vs. NP-subjects: the grounding principle; 5.3. NP-LDs with nonsubject anaphors; 5.4. The definiteness constraint; 6. SPECIAL CASES; 6.1. 'Topicalization' and 'Focus Movement' in spoken French; 6.2. No-anaphor LDs; 6.3. Double LDs; 7. CONCLUSION; NOTES; REFERENCES

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

1-283-35917-0

9786613359179

90-272-7961-6

OCLC:

769342228