The discourse uses of the verb dire ‘to say’ in Vernacular French: A corpus-based exploration

Abstract

This article provides a descriptive account of the major uses of the speech verb dire “to say” in Vernacular French. CLAPI Corpus (Corpus de Langue Parlée en Interaction), which is a multimedia database of corpora recorded in real situations (i.e. professional, institutional, commercial, didactic, and medical) is used. Five major uses of the verb dire are found, namely quotative (speech) dire, epistemic dire¸ evocative dire, desiderative dire, and copular dire. Unlike quotative dire, epistemic dire, evocative dire, desiderative dire and copular dire are restricted in terms of their occurrences (with varying degrees between them). For instance, the verb dire under some of these uses does not take place in the perfect tense, while under other uses it is only restricted to a specific type of subjects (i.e. the demonstrative pronoun ça). We take these restrictions as evidence that this verb undergoes different stages of grammaticalization. Therefore, the study concludes that the verb dire is a target of a grammaticalization process that causes the semantic shift that the verb dire in Spoken French witnesses.

Keywords

• Epistemic verbs
• grammaticalization
• speech verbs
• Vernacular French