Des Liens Entre Prosodie Et Fonctionnement Discursif : Le Cas De La Structure The-N-is

This article deals with the the-N-is construction and its lexico-grammatical variants (the thing is, the idea is, the funny thing is etc.) in spoken English and focuses in particular on the way it functions from a syntactic, prosodic and discursive point of view. Through the study of a corpus of spoken British English, prosody is used to question the traditional categories this construction is associated to. A particular attention is paid to tonality and the impact the position of the tone unit boundary has on the discursive function of the construction.The construction is organised in two parts linked by a form of the copula be, and, as such, is sometimes associated to specificational copular sentences. The aim of the construction would then be to specify the referent of a weakly referential noun. This analysis has however already been questioned (Keizer, 2013). This has led to new approaches to the construction, which has been analysed as a projective construction following interactional approaches (Auer, 2009). The study of the corpus through the lens of prosody shows that prosody can be used to foreground a specificational reading of the construction, or, on the contrary, to background this specificational reading, thus giving way to other discursive functions. This article shows that the position of tone unit boundaries plays a central role in this construction and contributes to its discursive functions.