Cover not available
Part of
On Spoken French: An Ashby Reader
William J. Ashby
[Studies in Language Companion Series 226] 2023
► pp. 207–248

The syntax, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics of left- and right-dislocations in French

| University of California, Santa Barbara

Aspects of the syntax, pragmatics and sociolinguistic distribution of left- and right-dislocations in a corpus of spoken French are treated. Most tokens of both types have clear pragmatic motivation, two functions being common to both, with other functions particular to one or another type. The social distribution of weakly motivated tokens does not support the view that, as French moves toward verb-initial typology, dislocated subjects are being grammaticalized as ordinary subjects.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Syntax of left- and right-dislocations
  • 3.Discourse status
  • 4.Pragmatic functions of left- and of right-dislocations
  • 5.Dislocations with weak pragmatic motivation
  • 6.Summary and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Editor’s/translator’s references
  • Appendix
Published online: 2 March 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.226.c18
References
Ashby, William J.
1982 The drift of French syntax. Lingua 57, 29–46. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barnes, Betsy
1983 Moi, c’est pareil n’est pas pareil: Chinese-style topics in French. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of Linguistic society of America, Minneapolis.
1985 The pragmatics of left detachment in spoken standard French. Pragmatics and beyond. Vol. VI: 3. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Calvé, Pierre
1983 Un trait du français parlé authentique: La dislocation. The Canadian Modern Language Review 39, 779–793. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carroll, Suzanne
1982 Les dislocations ne sont pas si populaires que ça. In: S. Carroll (ed.). La syntaxe comparée du français standard et populaire: Approches formelles et fonctionnelles, Vol. 2, 211–246. Québec: Office de la langue française.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace
1976 Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view. In: C. Li (ed.). Subject and topic, 27–55. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Dik, Simon C.
1978 Functional grammar. Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy
1983 Topic continuity in discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harris, Martin
1978 The evolution of French syntax: A comparative approach. London: Longman.Google Scholar
1983 Review of Lambrecht (1981). Romance Philology 37, 85–91.Google Scholar
1985 Word order in contemporary French: A functional view. Working Papers in Functional Grammar 1, 1–16.Google Scholar
Labov, William
1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud
1981 Topic, antitopic and verb agreement in Non-Standard French. Pragmatics and beyond. Vol. II: 6. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1987 On the status of SVO sentences in French discourse. In: Russell S. Tomlin (ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse. Typological studies in language. Vol. 11, 217–261. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1988 Presentational cleft constructions in spoken French. In: John Haiman and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.). Clause-combining in grammar and discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Larsson, Eva
1979 La dislocation en français: étude de syntaxe générative. Etudes Romanes de Lund 28. Lund: Gleerup.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen
1981 Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In: Peter Cole (ed.). Radical pragmatics, 223–255. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Vennemann, Theo
1974 Topics, subjects, and word order: From SXV to SVX via TVX. In: John M. Anderson and Charles Jones (eds.), Historical linguistics, Vol. 1, 339–376. Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar

Editor’s/translator’s references

Andersen, Henning
1973 Abductive and deductive change. Language 49(4): 765–793. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ashby, William J.
1973 The Rise of Prefixed Inflection in French. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
1974/This volume. Il parle or Iparle? Prefixed inflection in French. Semasia 1: 83–93.Google Scholar
1977a Clitic Inflection: An Historical Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
1980/This volume. Prefixed inflection in Parisian French. In Italic and Romance Linguistic Studies in Honor of Ernst Pulgram [Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science IV, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 18], Herbert J. Izzo (ed.), 195–207. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1992/This volume. The variable use of on versus tu/vous for indefinite reference in Spoken French. Journal of French Language Studies 2: 135–157. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coveney, Aidan
2000 Vestiges of nous and the 1st person plural verb in informal spoken French. Language Sciences 22: 447–481. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003 ‘Anything you can do, tu can do better’: tu and vous as substitutes for indefinite on in French. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(2): 164–191. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004a The alternation between l’on and on in spoken French. Journal of French Language Studies 14(2): 91–112. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004b La variation entre elles et ils en français parlé. In Variation et francophonie:Mélanges édités par Aidan Coveney, Marie-Anne Hintze et Carol Sanders en hommage à Gertrud Aub-Buscher, Aidan Coveney, Marie-Anne Hintze & Carol Sanders (eds), 301–329. Paris: L’Harmattan.Google Scholar
2010 Vouvoiement and tutoiement: Sociolinguistic reflections. Journal of French Language Studies 20(2): 127–150. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fonseca-Greber, Bonnie B.
2018 A relative verb for Spoken French: The missing link. Lingua 210–211: 1–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fonseca-Greber, Bonnie & Waugh, Linda R.
2003a On the radical difference between the subject personal pronouns in written and spoken European French. In Corpus Analysis: Language Structure and Language Use [Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics 46], Pepi Leistyna & Charles F. Meyer (eds), 225–240. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
2003b The subject clitics of Conversational European French: Morphologization, grammatical change, semantic change, and change in progress. In A Romance Perspective on Linguistic Knowledge and Use [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 238], Rafael Núñez-Cedeño, Luis López & Richard Cameron (eds), 99–117. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
King, Ruth, Martineau, France & Mougeon, Raymond
2011 The Interplay of internal and external factors in grammatical change: First-person plural pronouns in French. Language 87: 470–509. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Laberge, Suzanne & Sankoff, Gillian
1980 Anything you can do. In The Social Life of Language, Gillian Sankoff (ed.), 271–293. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
2001 Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
2010 Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 3: Cognitive and Cultural Factors. Hoboken NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peeters, Bert
2006 Nous on vous tu(e): La guerre (pacifique) des pronoms personnels. Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 122(2): 201–220. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Waugh, Linda R.
2010a Power and prejudice: Their effects on the co-construction of linguistic & national identity. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 7 (2–3): 112–130. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010b Pronominal choice in French conversational interaction: Indices of national identity in identity acts. In: Discourses in Interaction [Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 203], Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen, Marja-Liisa Helasvuo, Marjut Johansson, Mia Raitaniemi (eds), 81–100. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Williams, Lawrence & van Compernolle, Rémi
2009 ‘On’ versus ‘tu’ and ‘vous’: Pronouns with indefinite reference in synchronous electronic French discourse. Language Sciences 31(4): 409–427. DOI logoGoogle Scholar