La dislocation, l’emploi de c’est et il y a et l’organisation topique - focus en français parlé : des variétés d’apprenants aux usages natifs

Abstract

The paper describes the relation between dislocation, the use of c’est and il y a (there’s) in various syntactic devices and the organisation of information in oral data produced by native French speakers and by L2 learners of French. It explores the differences and identities between the marking of information in non-native French and native French.Section 1 of the paper provides a brief description of the data analyzed in the paper. The data for spoken French come from corpora collected by Giacomi (1980) and Vion (1992). The non native French data have been provided by basic variety speakers (Moroccan Arabic L1) from the ESF research project on Adult Language Acquisition (Giacomi et al. eds. 2000) and from the Swedish Interfra data base (Bartning & Schlyter 2004). Data for advanced learners of French have been provided by Bartning (1997) and Engel (2012) (Swedish L1), by Ferdinand (2002) (Dutch L1) and Klingler (2001) (Japanese L1).Section 2 discusses the theoretical background of the paper. It is based on an examination of the topic – focus dichotomy and of the distinction between categorical and thetic clauses and their implications for the analysis of data. In accord with Erteschick-Shir (2007) and Klein (2008), the paper identifies various types of topic: stage topics, permanently available topics and individual topics. Individual topics are identified through such criteria as accessibility, aboutness and animacy while stage topics and permanently available topics are assumed to refer to items that form the background of an assertion. To these different types of topics must also be added contrastive topics.Following Sasse (1987), thetic constructions, which often contribute to side structures in narratives for instance, are defined as clauses that state the existence of an entity or an event. Thetic constructions may contain stage topics and permanently available topics which identify the time of reference of the state of affairs depicted, the topic place and the topic entity. Thetic constructions include presentational clauses, existentials and identificational sentences. Lambrecht (1994: 138) describes thetic constructions as sentence-focus or argument-focus structures. Categorical utterances ascribe a property to an entity, i.e. assert and predicate (Sasse 1987). Lambrecht (1994) classifies categorical utterances as predicate-focus structures, with a topic-comment structure. Categorical utterances may contain individual topics (Erteschick-Shir 2007). Section 2 also discusses stage level predicates and individual level predicates (Carlson 1977) as two types of stative predicates, the former pointing towards a transient state and the latter a permanent state of a specific entity. It is posited that thetic clauses accept stage level predicates but not individual level predicates. The topic of a thetic clause is as a rule a stage topic. Following De Cat, the subject of an individual level predicate is deemed to represent its topic. In French, dislocation applies mainly to categorical clauses while thetic clauses seem to be mainly associated to presentationals marked by c’est and il y a (there’s).Section 3 of the paper sets out to examine the identification of topics in categorical and thetic clauses in spoken French. It is argued that left and right dislocation do not have same status in spoken French contra de Cat 2007. In this section, data from native speakers of French are discussed.Section 4 examines the information structure and the use of dislocation and c’est and il y a (there’s) in excerpts of data from basic variety speakers and from advanced learners of French L2. In early learner varieties of French, thetic clauses are marked by the use of presentationals (jana - there’s). Some conflict arise in the use of c’est and il y a. Various types of dislocation are also used in these varieties. Although the grammar of French early learner varieties diverges strongly from that of native speakers in terms of verb morphology and of the existence of a pronominal system, information structures mustered in these varieties are quite similar to those found in native spoken French. Texts from more advanced learners of French exhibit the whole range of French morphosyntax in narratives and in conversations.Section 5 is devoted to a discussion of the findings of the study. It is shown that while the morphosyntax of learner varieties in French as L2 evolve. Inflection and pronominal reference develop. Grammatical evolution bears indirectly on information marking. Besides differences in grammatical marking, native speakers and adult learners of French use dislocation and c’est and il y a in the same way in conversation and narratives.

Keywords

• dislocation
• thetic construction
• categorical construction
• topic
• focus
• French L1