Les tours du type selon A, les « îlots textuels » et la portée de la prise en charge imputée

Abstract

In this paper, we study extracts taken from a corpus of written press where expressions of the type selon A ‘according to A’ introduce quoted phrases (fr. « îlots textuels ») and so become co-markers (together with the quotation marks) of autonymic modalisation. We propose to relate the issue of the form of the phrase governed by selon and the syntax of selon A expressions to the issue of discourse endorsement. Our hypothesis is that due to their heterogeneous syntactic behaviour and to the complex mechanisms of modalisation that they set up (based both on the content and the use of words), textual sequences introduced by the expressions of the type selon A represent – in what the scope of discourse endorsement is concerned – a particularly blurred case of modalisation by recalling another discourse, which is typical for written press.

Keywords

• selon a ‘according to a’
• autonymic modalisation
• modalisation of content
• modalisation en discours second ‘modalisation in second discourse’
• discourse endorsement