The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French

Download or read book The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French written by Betsy K. Barnes and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Left detachment constructions (LDs) (e.g. "un buffet de campagne, c est un meuble") are examined in a corpus of informal spontaneous conversation between educated native speakers of French. The overwhelming majority of these constructions are shown to have a clearly pragmatic motivation. The author s observations support a view of LD in French as a particular type of paratactic structure which should be seen primarily as a feature of unplanned discourse. The analysis partly builds on views expressed by Knud Lambrecht in an earlier contribution tot this series.