La dislocation adroite comme ressource pour l'alternance des tours de parole: vers une syntaxe incrementale

Translated Title: Right-Dislocation as a Means for the Alternation of Speech Turns: Towards an Incremental Syntax

Travaux neuchatelois de linguistique (v.47)
by Horlacher, Anne-Sylvie

Abstract:

In spoken interaction, participants can sometimes be seen to self-select after a possible turn completion point, expanding thus their own speaking turn. Conversation analytic research has variously described such turn-continuations; the wide-spread accepted term being increments (Schegloff. 1996, 2000, 2001; Ford, Fox & Thompson, 2002; Walker, 2001, 2004; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono, 2007). In French, extensions of this kind consist frequently of a nominal phrase which is co-referential with the referent figuring in the first part of the turn. The syntactic structure resulting from such expansions has been called by functional linguists a right-dislocation & sometimes interpreted in terms of afterthought{that is some kind of post hoc clarification of a referential item. Drawing on radio phone-in confidential chats, we will first show that the notion of increment is somehow problematic when analyzing naturally occurring data in which syntax is to be taken as a real-time phenomenon, which is deployed moment-by-moment & locally managed, so that a syntactically complete turn-so-far can always be extended through further additions. Secondly, we will argue against the notion of afterthought as an explanation for the late delivery of the nominal phrase. Focusing on the research which has been undertaken in recent years in the field of interactional linguistics, we will show that one interactional task which speakers accomplish through turn extensions is to delete the first possible turn completion point & to exhibit the end of the extension as a new slot which creates a second opportunity for the interlocutor to take the turn or to exhibit alignment. In this sense, formulating a turn extension can be seen not only as an example of emerging grammar, but also as a resource that participants use for pursuing a response & creating an opportunity space for co-participants to display their aligning stances. Finally, we will discuss the implications that the realization of these incremental right-dislocations have for the conception of syntax & grammar.

This one comes directly from our "Discourse is Syntax and vice versa" dept. I'm a big fan of this kind of work, as crazy as it might be. I believe, as many others do, that we are making a mistake when we ignore the interaction between linguistic components. For example, I think a language's phonology has an enormous impact on its syntactic structure, both diachronically and within a speaker or an utterance. Until recently, I thought the reason why most linguists ignored these interactions was because it was incredibly difficult to discover and quantify them: A worthy complaint if you believe that the most important questions to answer in the field are those posed during the Chomskian revolution. But then I discovered that there are prominent linguists out there who truly believe that the compartmentalization of these linguistic sub-systems, from phonology to discourse/pragmatics, is not only practical, but a cognitive reality! In other words there are plenty of respectable minds who operate under the assumption that intonational units are unaffected by syntactic constituents and vice versa...

I believe that , while we do have the tools and the knowhow to make decent predictions about how discourse strategies affect language processing and the syntax produced for some real utterance, I don't think we are able to measure those interactions with scientific rigor. But this abstract tells me that people are trying and I'm really happy to see that.