Périphéries gauche et droite

This article describes a pilot French/English contrastive study of some peripheral expressions. A “peripheral expression” is understood as one which occurs at the beginning (“left-peripheral” (LP)) or at the end (“right-peripheral” (RP)) of an utterance which acts as its host and over which it has scope. (The nature of the formal link between the peripheral expression and its host is left open for the purposes of this article.) These peripheral slots are prime sites for the expression of speaker stance towards the idea expressed by the host unit, and for the expression of coherence relations between the idea in the host clause and the previous idea(s). They harbour a wide range of adverbial connectors, discourse particles and comment clauses. The pilot study establishes a basic framework, within a broadly functional approach, for the identification and analysis of peripherals that can serve for contrastive study of French and English. Within the framework, the study has two main goals. One is to test whether and how, for French and/or for English expressions that can occur at either periphery, position correlates with other features of the expressions in context: function, prosodic pattern, information status and syntactic status of the host (and potentially other features of the co-text); in particular, the aim is to discover, if position is not random, what the main motivations appear to be in each case. The other main goal, and the focus of this article, is contrastive: to examine the frequencies and distributions, based on the feature analysis, of comparable peripheral expressions across French and English, to identify what generalizations, if any, can be made across the two languages. Interspeaker variation is also monitored. The primary variables here are position (right vs. left) and language (French vs. English).Recent interest in the peripheries has focused on four main issues: defining the peripheries, including devising a model of syntax that adequately accounts for peripheral expressions; determining the order of expressions, where a periphery contains several; tracing the emergence of peripheral expressions through language change; and identifying potential correlations between position and function. The first two issues have been addressed in formal linguistics, where a cartographic model of the syntactic structure of the periphery has been developed (e.g. Speas & Tenny 2003; Haegeman & Hill 2013; Rizzi & Cinque 2016). Functional and cognitive linguists until recently tended to ignore the syntactic status of peripheral elements like discourse particles and connectors, which were often claimed to be “outside” of syntax (e.g. Kaltenböck et al. 2016; Brinton 2017). Some scholars identify clause-initial pragmatic-marker “slots” (e.g. Aijmer 1996). Others posit a special “discourse grammar” distinct from “sentence grammar” (e.g. Heine et al. 2013, Fernandez Vest 2015). It has also been suggested, for English, that RP particles now constitute a formal paradigm (Haselow 2013). Overall, the third and fourth issues have received greater attention. Diachronically, in European languages investigated so far, RP appears to be a relatively recent development that can be viewed as “further grammaticalization” (almost all forms occurring at RP occur also, and occurred earlier, in other positions). The potentially different synchronic functions linked to LP and RP have mainly been investigated from the pragmatic and discourse-analytic perspectives. One widely-cited hypothesis is that the LP is specialized for subjectivity (speaker stance), while the RP is specialized for intersubjectivity (speaker-hearer relations) (e.g. Degand and Fagard 2011; Beeching and Detges 2014a). Subsequent work across languages has been inconclusive, providing moderate support for this hypothesis along with some counter-evidence (Traugott 2012). Where peripheral expressions are connective, it has been suggested for English that at RP their main function is retrospective connectivity (Haselow 2012), tying the host closely to the previous idea and/or modifying the modal or illocutionary force of the previous idea, while at LP they express interpropositional relations more loosely and can scope over longer stretches of discourse. But little attention has been paid to the role of particles at either periphery in signalling prominence relations and information structure, and relatively few studies have focused on prosodic features (v. Wichmann 2001; Bertrand and Chanet 2005; Dehé and Wichmann 2010; Romero Trillo 2018). Discourse particles, especially at LP, are often assumed to have “comma intonation”, but this assumption rests on insufficient evidence and contradictory claims are found. English final particles, it is claimed, are prosodically integrated (Haselow 2016). Although work in different language varieties has started to clarify some of these issues, few constrastive-linguistic studies have so far been carried out. For this article the peripheral expressions chosen were French alors and English then. Both expressions have developed from their lexical roots into modal adverbs and then discourse particles and/or connectives. Alors and then are both temporal adverbs that have developed very similar non-temporal polysemies. And, relevantly for this study, both now occur as discourse particles of various kinds at both the left and the right peripheries. This corpus-based study first describes a pilot methodology for the contrastive analysis. Data sources are comparable selections of dialogue from spoken-language corpora. Occurrences (and their co-text) are coded for position and on the four parameters listed above (function, prosody, information structure, syntax). The data set is too small for extrapolation, but the study suggests differences in frequency, distribution and usage across the two languages for the comparable genres. It also suggests increased divergence between alors and then for the more abstract and interactional uses. The results of this pilot study can be used to refine the approach in preparation for further work on peripheral expressions"tandis qu’à la PD based on larger corpora.