The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French.

The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French.

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 auth...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Barnes, Betsy K.
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Amsterdam/Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1985.
Series:Pragmatics & beyond ; 6:3.
Subjects:
French language > Syntax.
French language > Spoken French.
FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY > French.
French language > Spoken French
French language > Syntax
Online Access:Click for online access
Table of 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 shift3.4. 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. LEXICALNP-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
  • background5.2.2. 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.

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