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The pragmatics of left detachment in spoken standard French
Journal of Pragmatics North-Holland
11 (1987) 817-825
817
BOOK REVIEWS
Betsy K. Barnes, The pragmatics of left detachment in spoken standard French.
(Pragmatics & Beyond VI:3.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 123 pp. Hfl. 70,-/$28.00
John Benjamins, 1985.
This book, which deals with ‘left detachment’ (more commonly, ‘left dislocation’; hereafter LD), analyzes and classifies a corpus of informal spontaneous conversations between educated native speakers of French. The definition of LD given by Barnes is the following: “any of a number of constructions occurring in French and other languages characterized by the occurrence, to the immediate left of an already syntactically complete sentence, of an NP, PP or pronoun, which is ordinarily ‘doubled’, so to speak, by a coreferential pronoun within the sentence” (p. 1). Before entering upon a discussion of the data (ch. 3) a brief review of the literature is given in chapter 2, which focuses on syntactic descriptions and the syntactic-pragmatic correlation hypothesis advanced by Cinque (1977), a hypothesis which will be discussed further in section 3.2. Since a pragmatic description of the LD constructions involves a consideration of the topic-comment structure, the notion of topic is clarified according to Reinhart (1982), who does not identify givenness with topichood. Some other questions (mainly, the level of topic to which LD corresponds), which will be answered in the following chapters, are briefly mentioned. At the beginning of chapter 3 we find a table (p. 14) of the LD constructions from Barnes’ corpus, grouped in (i) types of detached noun phrases (pronominal, lexical, combined), and (ii) grammatical functions of anaphoric expressions (personal and non-personal subject, D.O., I.O., oblique, poss. det.) or no anaphor. Some data are noteworthy: 8 1% of the LDs are the grammatical subject; in lo%, we have no anaphor at all, while in 9% the anaphora is non-subject. Further, the majority of the LDs (62%) have a pronominal NP as their lefthand element; as lexical NP detachments with subject anaphors, the vast majority (74%) is the non personal c- or ~a; the majority (69%) of pronominal LDs with subject anaphors are with the first person singular moi. Following her data, Barnes argues that “the particular pragmatic distinction proposed in the SPCH (syntactic-pragmatic correlation hypothesis) is without empirical validity, at least for French” (p. 20). After having emphasized the close relation between the functions of contrast and topic shift, the author looks for a new hypothesis, in search of LDs of ‘minimal pragmatic motivation’, related to the grammaticalization of the LD structure (e.g. c’est LD). Before 0378-2166/87/$3.50
0
1987, Elsevier Science Publishers
B.V. (North-Holland)
818
Book reviews
clarifying this hypothesis, alternative syntactic analyses and the question of sentence-topic and discourse-topic (the coexistence of multiple topics is claimed) are considered again; next, pronominal detachments (ch. 4) and lexical NP-detachments (ch. 5) are closely examined, in order to better present the data of the corpus and to validate the author’s view. A great number of examples is produced, each one of them appropriate and introduced in their context. Another question that is addressed and answered, following the data, is the ‘information statuses’ of LDs. The occurrences of evoked/new/non discourse referents with subject anaphors are counted (see table 2, p. 63) and it is shown that one third has new referents; further, within the category of textually evoked referents, the most frequent type is the one “where the referent has just been mentioned but is not yet established as a topic of the discourse” (p. 65). Before coming to her conclusion, some special cases, i.e. topicalization, focus movement, no anaphor LDs and double LDs are taken into consideration (ch. 6), both in the literature and in the corpus. In chapter 7 Barnes, answering the above-raised questions synthetically, presents “a more nuanced description of the pragmatic function of LD than the previously prevailing view of LD as overtly marking the topic-comment relation and effecting a shift in the DT (discourse topic)” (p. 111). The LD-referent is simply ‘motivated’ (following Larsson ( 1979)) and must be identifiable by the hearer. Restating the primary function of LD outlined by Keenan and Schieffelin (1976) i.e. to bring into the foreground of the listener’s consciousness a referent which is usually not currently a ‘center of attention’, the author focuses on the difference between French and English LD, with respect to the previous information status of the LD referent. The grounding principle (viz. that the givenness constraint on subject applies only in foregrounded parts of a discourse) is finally indicated, along with the view that more research is needed to support the claim that LD is a feature of the foregrounded parts of spoken language. In my opinion, not only the analysis of more corpuses of actual oral discourse (as Barnes herself suggests) would be useful to explain this pragmatic phenomenon more satisfactorily, but also written corpuses could be drawn upon (in a perspective of ‘topic continuity of discourse’, see Given (1983)); this holds for both newspapers (where LDs are frequent, at least in Italian ones, as works in progress are showing), and literary texts (e.g. the high frequency of LDs in Yourcenar’s work has been demonstrated in an unpublished thesis by Moretti). Further, theoretical demonstration grounded on exclusively oral material is debatable, not least because the unplanned nature of oral discourse makes false starts frequent and some LD examples could be considered to be mere reformulations. In conclusion, this book is a stimulating discussion of a complex phenomenon of considerable interest both on a syntactic and a pragmatic level -
Book reviews
even though the detailed theoretical considerations, of the data.
analysis of the corpus which are interspersed
819
is more substantial than the with the author’s discussion
Carla Bazzanella Universita di Torino Istituto di Filologia Classica Via S. Ottavio 20 I-10124 Torino, Italy
References Cinque, G., 1977. The movement nature of Left Dislocation. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 397411. Given, T., ed., 1983. Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-language study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Keenan, E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin, 1976. Foregrounding referents: A reconsideration of left dislocation in discourse. Berkeley Linguistics Society 2: 246257. Larsson, E., 1979. La dislocation en francais: Etude de syntaxe generative. ( = Etudes romanes de Lund, 28.) Lund: CWK Gleerup. Moretti, M.A., 1984. La dislocazione a sinistra nel francese scritto contemporaneo. Torino. (Unpublished thesis.) Reinhart, T., 1982. Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics. Distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington, Indiana.
Carla Bazzanella et al.: Lavorare sulla lingua. Indicazioni didattiche e materiali Milano, Edizioni Scolastiche Bruno per la media inferiore e il biennio. Mondadori, 1984. 199 pp. Lit. 13.000. Die theoretische Situierung des von Carla Bazzanella herausgegebenen Bandes wird in den einleitenden Bemerkungen des Buches (pp. 5-6) von Piero Bertolini mit folgenden Worten angegeben: “Che la lingua non sia un sistema ma un ‘polisistema’ e the dunque vada trattata second0 questa prospettiva ha o dovrebbe avere delle precise conseguenze a live110 di programmazione e di interventi didattici” (‘Die Tatsache, da13 Sprache kein System, sondern ein Polysystem ist und dalj sie dementsprechend aus dieser Sicht beurteilt werden sollte, hat konkrete Konsequenzen hinsichtlich der planerischen und der didaktischen Implikationen, oder sollte sie haben’, p. 5). Die Frage, welche Varietat zu vermitteln ist, gilt fur den muttersprachlichen Unterricht ebenso wie fur die Didaktik des Italienischen als Fremdsprache. Der Band beriihrt damit ein grundlegendes Problem der Diskussion urn die Vermittlung einer kommunikativen Kompetenz, die im Rahmen der in Italien seit Jahren laufenden Reformbestrebungen zu einer ‘educazione linguistica
11 (1987) 817-825
817
BOOK REVIEWS
Betsy K. Barnes, The pragmatics of left detachment in spoken standard French.
(Pragmatics & Beyond VI:3.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 123 pp. Hfl. 70,-/$28.00
John Benjamins, 1985.
This book, which deals with ‘left detachment’ (more commonly, ‘left dislocation’; hereafter LD), analyzes and classifies a corpus of informal spontaneous conversations between educated native speakers of French. The definition of LD given by Barnes is the following: “any of a number of constructions occurring in French and other languages characterized by the occurrence, to the immediate left of an already syntactically complete sentence, of an NP, PP or pronoun, which is ordinarily ‘doubled’, so to speak, by a coreferential pronoun within the sentence” (p. 1). Before entering upon a discussion of the data (ch. 3) a brief review of the literature is given in chapter 2, which focuses on syntactic descriptions and the syntactic-pragmatic correlation hypothesis advanced by Cinque (1977), a hypothesis which will be discussed further in section 3.2. Since a pragmatic description of the LD constructions involves a consideration of the topic-comment structure, the notion of topic is clarified according to Reinhart (1982), who does not identify givenness with topichood. Some other questions (mainly, the level of topic to which LD corresponds), which will be answered in the following chapters, are briefly mentioned. At the beginning of chapter 3 we find a table (p. 14) of the LD constructions from Barnes’ corpus, grouped in (i) types of detached noun phrases (pronominal, lexical, combined), and (ii) grammatical functions of anaphoric expressions (personal and non-personal subject, D.O., I.O., oblique, poss. det.) or no anaphor. Some data are noteworthy: 8 1% of the LDs are the grammatical subject; in lo%, we have no anaphor at all, while in 9% the anaphora is non-subject. Further, the majority of the LDs (62%) have a pronominal NP as their lefthand element; as lexical NP detachments with subject anaphors, the vast majority (74%) is the non personal c- or ~a; the majority (69%) of pronominal LDs with subject anaphors are with the first person singular moi. Following her data, Barnes argues that “the particular pragmatic distinction proposed in the SPCH (syntactic-pragmatic correlation hypothesis) is without empirical validity, at least for French” (p. 20). After having emphasized the close relation between the functions of contrast and topic shift, the author looks for a new hypothesis, in search of LDs of ‘minimal pragmatic motivation’, related to the grammaticalization of the LD structure (e.g. c’est LD). Before 0378-2166/87/$3.50
0
1987, Elsevier Science Publishers
B.V. (North-Holland)
818
Book reviews
clarifying this hypothesis, alternative syntactic analyses and the question of sentence-topic and discourse-topic (the coexistence of multiple topics is claimed) are considered again; next, pronominal detachments (ch. 4) and lexical NP-detachments (ch. 5) are closely examined, in order to better present the data of the corpus and to validate the author’s view. A great number of examples is produced, each one of them appropriate and introduced in their context. Another question that is addressed and answered, following the data, is the ‘information statuses’ of LDs. The occurrences of evoked/new/non discourse referents with subject anaphors are counted (see table 2, p. 63) and it is shown that one third has new referents; further, within the category of textually evoked referents, the most frequent type is the one “where the referent has just been mentioned but is not yet established as a topic of the discourse” (p. 65). Before coming to her conclusion, some special cases, i.e. topicalization, focus movement, no anaphor LDs and double LDs are taken into consideration (ch. 6), both in the literature and in the corpus. In chapter 7 Barnes, answering the above-raised questions synthetically, presents “a more nuanced description of the pragmatic function of LD than the previously prevailing view of LD as overtly marking the topic-comment relation and effecting a shift in the DT (discourse topic)” (p. 111). The LD-referent is simply ‘motivated’ (following Larsson ( 1979)) and must be identifiable by the hearer. Restating the primary function of LD outlined by Keenan and Schieffelin (1976) i.e. to bring into the foreground of the listener’s consciousness a referent which is usually not currently a ‘center of attention’, the author focuses on the difference between French and English LD, with respect to the previous information status of the LD referent. The grounding principle (viz. that the givenness constraint on subject applies only in foregrounded parts of a discourse) is finally indicated, along with the view that more research is needed to support the claim that LD is a feature of the foregrounded parts of spoken language. In my opinion, not only the analysis of more corpuses of actual oral discourse (as Barnes herself suggests) would be useful to explain this pragmatic phenomenon more satisfactorily, but also written corpuses could be drawn upon (in a perspective of ‘topic continuity of discourse’, see Given (1983)); this holds for both newspapers (where LDs are frequent, at least in Italian ones, as works in progress are showing), and literary texts (e.g. the high frequency of LDs in Yourcenar’s work has been demonstrated in an unpublished thesis by Moretti). Further, theoretical demonstration grounded on exclusively oral material is debatable, not least because the unplanned nature of oral discourse makes false starts frequent and some LD examples could be considered to be mere reformulations. In conclusion, this book is a stimulating discussion of a complex phenomenon of considerable interest both on a syntactic and a pragmatic level -
Book reviews
even though the detailed theoretical considerations, of the data.
analysis of the corpus which are interspersed
819
is more substantial than the with the author’s discussion
Carla Bazzanella Universita di Torino Istituto di Filologia Classica Via S. Ottavio 20 I-10124 Torino, Italy
References Cinque, G., 1977. The movement nature of Left Dislocation. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 397411. Given, T., ed., 1983. Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-language study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Keenan, E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin, 1976. Foregrounding referents: A reconsideration of left dislocation in discourse. Berkeley Linguistics Society 2: 246257. Larsson, E., 1979. La dislocation en francais: Etude de syntaxe generative. ( = Etudes romanes de Lund, 28.) Lund: CWK Gleerup. Moretti, M.A., 1984. La dislocazione a sinistra nel francese scritto contemporaneo. Torino. (Unpublished thesis.) Reinhart, T., 1982. Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics. Distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington, Indiana.
Carla Bazzanella et al.: Lavorare sulla lingua. Indicazioni didattiche e materiali Milano, Edizioni Scolastiche Bruno per la media inferiore e il biennio. Mondadori, 1984. 199 pp. Lit. 13.000. Die theoretische Situierung des von Carla Bazzanella herausgegebenen Bandes wird in den einleitenden Bemerkungen des Buches (pp. 5-6) von Piero Bertolini mit folgenden Worten angegeben: “Che la lingua non sia un sistema ma un ‘polisistema’ e the dunque vada trattata second0 questa prospettiva ha o dovrebbe avere delle precise conseguenze a live110 di programmazione e di interventi didattici” (‘Die Tatsache, da13 Sprache kein System, sondern ein Polysystem ist und dalj sie dementsprechend aus dieser Sicht beurteilt werden sollte, hat konkrete Konsequenzen hinsichtlich der planerischen und der didaktischen Implikationen, oder sollte sie haben’, p. 5). Die Frage, welche Varietat zu vermitteln ist, gilt fur den muttersprachlichen Unterricht ebenso wie fur die Didaktik des Italienischen als Fremdsprache. Der Band beriihrt damit ein grundlegendes Problem der Diskussion urn die Vermittlung einer kommunikativen Kompetenz, die im Rahmen der in Italien seit Jahren laufenden Reformbestrebungen zu einer ‘educazione linguistica