A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers: Discourse Markers of Saying in English and French [1st ed. 2020] 978-3-030-24895-6, 978-3-030-24896-3

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv
Introduction: Discourse Markers Within Different Linguistic Traditions (Laure Lansari)....Pages 1-47
Defining a Theoretical and Methodological Framework for DMs of “Saying” (Laure Lansari)....Pages 49-93
Overview of the Corpus Findings (Laure Lansari)....Pages 95-113
Corpus Findings I: On va dire and Shall We Say (Laure Lansari)....Pages 115-173
Corpus Findings II: J’allais dire and I Was Going to Say (Laure Lansari)....Pages 175-215
Conclusion: Summary and Perspectives (Laure Lansari)....Pages 217-227
Back Matter ....Pages 229-230

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A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers Discourse Markers of Saying in English and French Laure Lansari

A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers

Laure Lansari

A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers Discourse Markers of Saying in English and French

Laure Lansari Department of English Studies Paris Diderot University Paris, France

ISBN 978-3-030-24895-6 ISBN 978-3-030-24896-3  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24896-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book explores four discourse markers (henceforth DMs) containing a prototypical speech verb (say/dire) in contemporary English and French: shall we say, on va dire, I was going to say and j’allais dire. The analysis aims to show that these clausal units, originally based on exponents of futurity, have pragmaticalised and acquired discourse functions mainly dealing with metalinguistic comment. They are fairly rare, especially in comparison with better-described DMs such as disons, je veux dire or you know and I mean. On va dire, j’allais dire and I was going to say are in fact “emergent” (Siouffi et al. 2016) markers, which have developed only recently and are still circumscribed to rather informal registers (Lansari 2010a, b, 2017; Steuckardt 2014, 2016). Shall we say has been attested since the mid-1800s in British English, but its frequency of use remains low. Despite these common features, the divergences of use between the four markers need to be examined in detail. Based on comparable web data, the linguistic comparison carried out here combines several levels of analysis and strives to correlate semantic, pragmatic, syntactic and collocational parameters. The scope of the study is mainly qualitative, since the discourse uses have to be identified manually. The data still reveals relevant tendencies in the use of the v

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four DMs under scrutiny. This multidimensional analysis is conducted within a theoretical framework that might be little known to Englishspeaking readers: enunciative theories, which consider DMs to reflect speaker stance. This theoretical approach sheds light on the specificity of DMs of saying: they cannot be reduced to mere speech management tools, as they more fundamentally signal that speaker commitment is at issue. The goal of this research piece is twofold. On an empirical level, it seeks to enrich our understanding of the four DMs compared here. On a more theoretical and methodological level, it aims to set up an original framework that does not restrict DMs to pragmatic functions but instead integrates various parameters to describe the DMs under discussion in terms of speaker commitment. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the scholarly literature on DMs, focusing more particularly on the pragmatic tradition dominant in English linguistics and on the “énonciation” theories that have been very influential in France and Switzerland in the last forty years. This overview aims to show that the definition of the class of DMs largely depends on the theoretical premises adopted. Chapter 2 presents the theoretical and methodological framework developed for the four DMs of saying under study, on va dire, shall we say, j’allais dire, and I was going to say. The analysis builds on an enunciative approach paying special attention to commitment issues. The main hypothesis is that DMs of saying signal that commitment is somehow problematic. The analysis specifically relies on samples of tokens retrieved from comparable web-based corpora of the TenTen family. The tokens are analysed through an annotation grid combining various parameters (semantic-pragmatic, syntactic, collocational). The aim is to provide a unique characterisation (a “discursive profile”) for each DM. Chapter 3 presents the main corpus findings in relation to the annotation grid. This short chapter successively examines the results obtained for the different levels of analysis. The overall results show that the four DMs have one pragmatic function in common: metalinguistic comment. Despite this common feature, many divergences appear, as regards both syntactic features and collocations. Chapter 4 focuses on on va dire and shall we say, while Chapter 5 compares j’allais dire and I was going to say. The main assumption is

Preface     vii

that on va dire and shall we say rely on a feigned intersubjective commitment aiming to stabilise discourse, while j’allais dire and I was going to say are associated with subjective commitment but fail to stabilise discourse. Despite these common semantic features, each DM has its own discursive profile, with specific pragmatic functions and collocational preferences. Chapter 6 summarises the main results, with the aim of assessing the degree of pragmaticalisation for each DM, and opens up future research paths for the study of DMs, particularly for DMs of saying. Paris, France

Laure Lansari

References Lansari, L. (2010a). On va dire: vers un emploi modalisant d’aller + inf. In E. Moliné & C. Vetters (Eds.), Temps, aspect et modalité en français. Cahiers Chronos (Vol. 21, pp. 119–139). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Lansari, L. (2010b). On va dire: modalisation du dire et dénomination. In P. Frath, L. Lansari, & J. Pauchard (Eds.), Res Per Nomen II - Langue, référence et anthropologie (pp. 277–295). EPURE: Reims. Lansari, L. (2017). I was going to say/j’allais dire as discourse markers in contemporary English and French. Languages in Contrast, 17(2), 205–228. Siouffi, G., Steuckardt, A., & Wionet, C. (2016). Les modalisateurs émergents en français contemporain: Présentation théorique et études de cas. Journal of French Language Studies, 26(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0959269515000472. Steuckardt, A. (2014). Polyphonie et médiativité dans un marqueur émergent: on va dire. In J.-Cl. Anscombre, E. Oppermann-Marsaux, & A. Rodriguez Somolinos (Eds.), Médiativité, polyphonie et modalité en français: études synchroniques et diachroniques (pp. 67–84). Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Steuckardt, A. (2016). A la recherche du consensus: on va dire, on va dire ça, on va dire ça comme ça. In L. Rouanne & J.-Cl. Anscombre (Eds.), Histoires de dire. Petit glossaire des marqueurs formés sur le verbe dire (pp. 293–313). Bern: Peter Lang.

Contents

1 Introduction: Discourse Markers Within Different Linguistic Traditions 1 1.1 Defining DMs in the Pragmatic Tradition 3 1.1.1 Historical Landmarks: The Rise of a “Non-syntactic” Functional Class 3 1.1.2 A (Multi)Functional Approach Rather Than a Semantic One 5 1.1.3 Different Types of Functions: Structural Ones, but Not Only 6 1.1.3.1 From Structural to Attitudinal Functions 6 1.1.3.2 Focus on “Mitigation” 9 1.1.4 DMs and Language Change: Pragmaticalisation or Something Else? 10 15 1.1.5 Summary on Pragmatics and DMs 1.2 Defining DMs from an Enunciative Perspective 15 16 1.2.1 “Enonciation”: A Speaker-Centred Theory 18 1.2.2 Discourse Markers…of Operations ix

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1.2.3 Methodology: From Operations to the Definition of a “Schematic Form” 1.2.4 Discourse Markers of Saying, Metalinguistic Reflexivity and “modalisation du dire” 1.2.5 Summary and Discussion on “énonciation” and DMs of Saying References

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2 Defining a Theoretical and Methodological Framework for DMs of “Saying” 49 2.1 DMs of Saying: To Say or Not to Say? 50 2.2 An Original Enunciative Framework 54 2.2.1 Semantic Characterisation: An Operation-Based Characterisation 55 2.2.2 Definition of the “Discursive Profile” 59 2.2.3 “Enonciation” and Pragmaticalisation? 60 2.2.4 Summary of the Theoretical Model 61 2.3 Corpus Data and Methodology 63 2.3.1 A Comparable Web-Based Corpus: The TenTen Family 63 2.3.2 Methodology: Samples for a Qualitative Analysis 66 2.3.2.1 Identifying DMs: A SemanticPragmatic Approach 68 2.3.2.2 Focus on on va dire and Shall We Say 70 2.3.2.3 Focus on j’allais dire and I Was Going to Say 73 2.3.2.4 Discourse Uses in the Four Samples: First Results 78 2.3.3 Presentation of the Annotation Grid 80 References 88 3 Overview of the Corpus Findings 95 3.1 Semantic-Pragmatic Level 96 3.1.1 Origin of Commitment and Relationship p/p′ 96 3.1.1.1 Origin of Commitment 96 3.1.1.2 P/p′ 97

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3.1.2 Pragmatic Functions 3.2 Syntactic Level 3.2.1 Scope 3.2.2 Position with Respect to the Host 3.2.3 Position at the Sentence Level 3.2.4 Position in Turn-Taking 3.2.5 Degree of Autonomy 3.3 Collocational Level 3.4 Summary of the Findings References

98 102 102 105 106 107 107 109 111 112

4 Corpus Findings I: On va dire and Shall We Say 115 4.1 Preliminary Remarks: “Emergent” on va dire vs. Well-Established Shall We Say 116 4.2 Semantic Characterisation: From Instability Towards Intersubjective Stabilisation 119 4.3 Metalinguistic Comment, Approximation and Exemplification 122 4.3.1 Approximation 124 4.3.2 Exemplification 125 4.3.3 Focus on Let’s Say 127 4.4 Different Stabilising Modes 128 4.4.1 Syntactic Divergences: Greater Stabilisation with on va dire 128 4.4.2 Co-occurrence with Other DMs and Opposition Markers 135 4.4.3 Different Reformulation Uses 140 4.5 Pragmatic Strategies: Euphemism and Irony 145 4.6 Syntactic Classification 150 4.7 Summary and Discussion: Two Distinct “Discursive Profiles” and Form-Meaning Motivation 160 4.7.1 Discursive Profiles: Greater Stabilisation with on va dire 160 4.7.2 On va dire and Form-Meaning Motivation 161 4.7.3 Shall We Say and Form-Meaning Motivation 166 References 169

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5 Corpus Findings II: J’allais dire and I Was Going to Say 175 5.1 Preliminary Remarks: Summarising the Results of the Annotation Grid 176 5.2 Metalinguistic Comment 181 5.2.1 Explicit Alterity: Mention of Both p and p′ 182 5.2.2 Implicit Alterity 190 5.2.3 Collocation Patterns 192 5.3 Topic Shifting and Affiliation 195 5.3.1 Topic Shifting in the TenTen Sample 197 5.3.2 Topic Shifting and Affiliation in the Spoken COCA 199 5.3.2.1 Focus on Topic Shifting 200 5.3.2.2 Focus on Affiliation 205 5.4 Syntactic Classification 208 5.5 Summary and Discussion: Two Distinct “Discursive Profiles” and Form/Meaning Motivation 210 References 213 6 Conclusion: Summary and Perspectives 217 6.1 Development of DM Status 218 6.1.1 Discourse Marking and DMs of Saying 218 6.1.2 Different Degrees of Pragmaticalisation? 219 6.2 Reformulation 220 6.3 Future Research: DMs Across Genres 225 References 226 Index 229

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 3.5 Table 3.6 Table 3.7 Table 3.8 Table 3.9 Table 3.10 Table 3.11 Table 3.12 Table 3.13 Table 3.14 Table 3.15 Table 4.1

Normalised frequencies in enTenTen13 and frTenTen12 (pmw) 66 Ratio of discourse uses 79 p/p′ relationship 97 Pragmatic functions 101 Scope of shall we say 103 Scope of on va dire 103 Scope of I was going to say 103 Scope of j’allais dire 104 Syntactic position relatively to the host 105 Position at the sentence level 106 Position in turn-taking 107 Degree of autonomy with the left 108 Degree of autonomy with the right 108 Co-occurrence with epistemic and degree markers 109 Co-occurrence with opposition markers 110 Co-occurrence with CMC signs 110 Co-occurrence with other DMs 111 Frequency of use of shall we say in the COCA and the BNC 118 xiii

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Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 4.8 Table 4.9 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 5.7 Table 5.8 Table 5.9 Table 5.10 Table 5.11 Table 5.12 Table 5.13 Table 5.14

Co-occurrence of on va dire et shall we say with epistemic or degree markers 121 Syntactic position of on va dire and shall we say 129 Scope of shall we say 129 Scope of on va dire 129 Co-occurrence of on va dire and shall we say with other DMs 135 Co-occurrence of on va dire et shall we say with opposition markers 138 p/p′ relationship with on va dire and shall we say 140 Co-occurrence of on va dire and shall we say with CMC signs 150 Ratio of discourse issues 176 Pragmatic functions of j’allais dire and I was going to say 178 Syntactic position with respect to the host 178 Position at the sentence level 179 Position in turn-taking 179 Scope of I was going to say 180 Scope of j’allais dire 180 Types of metalinguistic comment 182 Syntactic configurations 183 Correlation between syntactic configuration and type of metalinguistic 189 Co-occurrence with epistemic and degree markers 192 Co-occurrence with opposition markers 193 Ratio of discourse uses of I was going to say in the spoken COCA 195 Pragmatic functions of I was going to say in the TenTen and COCA samples 200

1 Introduction: Discourse Markers Within Different Linguistic Traditions

This chapter presents the theoretical background for the comparative analysis conducted here. It has a clear historical and epistemological dimension, as it seeks to confront two major traditions in the research field of discourse marking. Its scope is rather modest, though, since it does not provide an exhaustive overview of the scholarly literature on DMs. In line with the English-French contrastive view adopted in the present book, I more modestly compare two prominent traditions in the study of DMs—on the one hand, the pragmatic tradition dominant in the Englishspeaking countries; on the other hand, the enunciative tradition, which has been influential only in France and Switzerland. An overview of the literature on DMs in French and English linguistics actually highlights major epistemological differences between the two linguistic traditions. Therefore, comparing these two linguistic approaches sheds light on crucial categorisation issues concerning the definition of the class of DMs itself and the theoretical principles underlying the study of specific DMs. The questions that we need to address are the following: What is the unifying factor behind this supposed “class” of markers? What is the part played by semantics, pragmatics and syntax, respectively, in this definition? How do we account for the development of DMs and the links between the original non-discursive uses and the newly acquired discursive uses? The © The Author(s) 2020 L. Lansari, A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24896-3_1

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two traditions compared do not necessarily provide the same answers, hence the need to examine these various issues at closer quarters. In the English-speaking literature, DMs are mainly analysed as functional units in line with the pragmatic tradition initiated by Schiffrin (1987) in this research field. On the other hand, the French tradition, strongly influenced by speaker-centred theories known as theories of “énonciation” (Ducrot et al. 1980, Ducrot 1985; Culioli 1990, 1999a, b), sees DMs as traces of subjectivity reflecting various attitudinal stances. Moreover, the pragmatic tradition has never paid much attention to DMs based on a verbum dicendi (with the exception of Craig and Sanusi 2000; Brinton 2005, 2008: 73–110), whereas the French enunciative framework has given rise to many studies on such DMs (Saunier 2012; Péroz 2013; Gómez-Jordana Ferary and Anscombre 2015; Rouanne and Anscombre 2016 to name only the most recent ones). Theories of “énonciation” have been mainstream theories in France and Switzerland for the last forty years. Outside the French-speaking community, however, they remain largely unknown, part of the reason for this being that few publications are in English (with the notable exception of Ranger 2018, who provides a full-fledged presentation of Culioli’s theory, the Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations). The two goals pursued in this chapter are to familiarise scholars with enunciative linguistic approaches and to assess the convergences and divergences between these theories and better-known pragmatics-based theories. Section 1.1 lays out the main tenets underlying the study of DMs within a pragmatic framework, successively examining several aspects of this linguistic tradition. I shall first briefly retrace the rise of DMs as a “non-syntactic” but functional class in the 1980s (Sect. 1.1.1). I shall then shed light on the functionalist view defended by pragmatics, at the expense of a semantics-based analysis (Sect. 1.1.2). Subsection 1.1.3 explores the different types of functions that DMs may serve, and Subsection 1.1.4 discusses pragmaticalisation and other diachronic processes that may lead to the development of DMs. Concluding remarks are presented in Sect. 1.1.5. In Sect. 1.2, I move on to the definition of DMs within the French-speaking tradition of “énonciation”. I shall start with a general presentation of “énonciation” as a speaker-centred theory (Sect. 1.2.1). The next Subsection (1.2.2) is devoted to the definition of DMs as “markers

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of operations” in enunciative frameworks, while Sect. 1.2.3 concentrates on the unitary approach to DMs advocated in Culioli’s Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations. Subsection 1.2.4 sheds light on the specificity of DMs of saying as reflexive markers commenting on speaker commitment. Concluding remarks on enunciative approaches to DMs are provided in Sect. 1.2.5.

1.1

Defining DMs in the Pragmatic Tradition

1.1.1 Historical Landmarks: The Rise of a “Non-syntactic” Functional Class Historically speaking, the class of DMs was first defined in the 1980s within pragmatic studies that took an interest in items such as well or I mean used in oral interaction in English, as in Schiffrin’s (1987) pioneering study. Originally, “discourse” thus referred to oral interaction and responded to the crucial need to set up a new referential frame that went beyond sentences or clauses and could accommodate linguistic markers that were hard to analyse through well-established syntactic categories (adverb, conjunct, etc.). Ranger (2018: 23) notes that the term “discourse” may refer either to an extra-sentential level of analysis, or to language use (“discourse” being opposed to abstract language structures). In original pragmatics-based works, it corresponds to the former definition with an additional emphasis on dialogical spoken interaction. In enunciative approaches, discourse more simply refers to any language activity and does not have a specific meaning in terms of genre (see Sect. 1.2). The emergence of this research field may be seen as an important epistemological turn in linguistics, as it opened up new research paths in areas that had been overlooked by the dominant linguistic theories of the time, i.e. structuralism and generative grammar (Celle and Huart 2007: 1–2). Coining a new term—“discourse marker”—was a way to expose the inadequacy of syntax to account for such linguistic items. The class of DMs is thus intrinsically “non-syntactic”, and this has two major consequences. First, from a semasiological viewpoint, the “non-syntactic” approach explains the heterogeneity of the members of this class (Dostie

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and Pusch 2007; Lewis 2006; Beeching 2016), which gathers very different markers that developed through a decategorisation/recategorisation process (i.e. adverbs, interjections, clauses that came to be recategorised as DMs). The four DMs compared in the present study went through that very process: they started out as full clauses and gradually acquired a new status as DMs, possibly as “comment clauses” (Brinton 2008). I shall leave this question open for now: the syntactic behaviour of the four DMs of saying under scrutiny and their possible recategorisation as specific DMs called “comment clauses” (or “reduced parenthetical clauses” in other theoretical categorisations, see Schneider 2007) will be discussed in relation to the corpus findings in Chapters 4 and 5. It should be stressed that there exists a variety of terms to refer to these specific markers: DMs, but also pragmatic markers, pragmatic particles, etc. (Beeching 2016: 3). These various terms are not neutral and tend to reflect specific theoretical positions. For instance, the term “fillers” implies that these markers are devoid of any meaning, a belief that is nowadays criticised by most researchers, hence the decline of the term itself in the scholarly literature (Dostie and Putsch 2007: 6). “Discourse marker” is undoubtedly the most widespread and theoretically neutral term (Paillard 2017). Secondly, the “non-syntactic” nature of this new linguistic class has led researchers to resort to other types of analysis, mainly pragmatic within the English-speaking research community. It should be noted, however, that some linguists have attempted to establish purely syntactic criteria to define DMs, especially in terms of initial position, optionality and loose connection with the rest of the clause (Schourup 1999: 230–232; Brinton 2008: 1). As stressed by Fischer (2006), such attempts have failed, since there is no consensus whatsoever regarding syntactic criteria. For instance, recent studies (Beeching and Detges 2014; Hancil et al. 2015) devoted to the syntactic position of DMs contradict Schourup’s claim (1999) that DMs systematically appear initially. Actually, there exist several syntactic definitions of DMs, each definition ultimately depending on the type of items analysed and on the researchers’ theoretical conception of what DMs are and are not. This lack of consensus might have led researchers to focus on other, non-syntactic dimensions of DMs. Recent approaches (Aijmer 2013; Beeching 2016; Ranger 2018) take a different view and

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claim that, notwithstanding the absence of consensual syntactic criteria defining the class as a whole, individual DMs should be studied from a syntactic viewpoint. The aforementioned authors therefore argue that it is crucial to examine the syntactic behaviour of a given DM—especially as regards syntactic position—in order to correlate syntactic behaviour with semantic-pragmatic features. Given the heterogeneity of DMs mentioned above, it seems impossible to define a unique syntactic behaviour common to all DMs. It may however be possible to analyse the syntactic features of individual members of the class. Let us now turn to the functional approach advocated by pragmatic studies, which tend to background semantic issues in the study of DMs.

1.1.2 A (Multi)Functional Approach Rather Than a Semantic One Schiffrin’s (1987) pragmatic approach to DMs initiated a very influential tradition that is still dominant in this research field. Her influence is best seen in the adoption of the term “discourse marker” by most researchers, even in the theories of “énonciation” (albeit with a slightly different meaning, see Paillard 2017; Ranger 2018 and the discussion in Sect. 1.2). As opposed to “pragmatic marker” used for instance by Aijmer (2013) and Beeching (2016), “discourse maker” is less theoretically oriented, which may explain its success. In line with classic pragmatic works (Austin 1962; Searle 1969, 1975), Schiffrin’s approach is by definition more functional than purely semantic and is interested in what DMs “do” in discourse. Therefore, pragmatic analyses aim to identify the diverse contextual discourse functions of the DMs under scrutiny, which may for instance play a role in turn-taking or as boosting devices, without necessarily defining a common semantic denominator to the different functions. Generally speaking, pragmatic case studies of DMs (such as Aijmer 2013; Beeching 2016; Brinton 2008; Fraser 1999; Traugott 2010) assume that each DM has a “core meaning” or “meaning potential” which gives rise to various pragmatic functions depending on the context. This “core meaning” is not discussed at great

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length, since what matters are the discourse functions of a given DM. As explained by Celle and Huart (2007: 3), the main theoretical tenet underlying such studies is that “a central meaning traceable to etymological origins has given rise to related meanings which have come to be associated through usage, but […] the unifying factor behind a given discourse particle is functional, rather than semantic”. This general picture must not hide the existence of different theoretical movements or schools within pragmatic studies. For instance, pragmatic analyses carried out within Relevance Theory (Blakemore 2002; Jucker et al. 2003) are critically less semantics-oriented than the ones just mentioned. In Relevance Theory, DMs are equated with “signals” (Aijmer 2013: 9–11) produced by the speaker and designed to help the addressee make the right inferences about the speaker’s intended message. This communication model is inherited from Grice (1957, 1975)1 and has a strong cognitive orientation that does not foreground semantic issues but cognitive-based inferential processes. This cognitive model seems harder to reconcile with enunciative approaches than the publications previously mentioned (Aijmer, Beeching, Traugott, etc.), which make no cognitive claims regarding the addressee’s inferential processing. Slightly different theoretical orientations also emerge in relation to the various pragmatic functions DMs may develop.

1.1.3 Different Types of Functions: Structural Ones, but Not Only 1.1.3.1 From Structural to Attitudinal Functions Schiffrin’s groundbreaking book highlighted the “connective” and indexical function of DMs in oral interaction, focusing on the structuring role of you know, well, I mean. For Diewald (2013), this structural approach to DMs in relation to spoken communication has given rise to a specific “school” in the literature on DMs. In this “school”, represented by Diewald herself or by Riou (2015: 118–130),

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discourse markers are defined as indexical elements relating items of discourse to other items of discourse. Their indigenous functional domain is the expression of those types of connections and interrelations that are essential to and distinctive of spoken dialogic communication. They point to organizational and structural features as well as to chunks of the nonlinguistic situation and environment; they take care of the thematic structure, and they control the turn-taking system and other aspects of speech management. (Diewald 2013: 26)

This definition strictly equates “discourse” with oral interaction and is rejected by proponents of another “school”, including Fraser (1999). In Fraser’s definition, DMs are units connecting two textual segments in spoken or written data and are limited to a set of markers consisting of conjuncts, adverbs and prepositional phrases (and, or, but, so, in fact, etc.). It is worth noting that for other scholars, this set of markers actually corresponds to “connectives” and is seen either as a specific subclass of DMs (Fischer 2006) or as an entirely distinct class (Dostie 2004; Pennec 2018). Both Diewald’s and Fraser’s definitions rely on a very strict view of DMs, for different reasons. Diewald’s definition restricts DMs to oral interaction, while Fraser’s limits them to well-established syntactic categories, ruling out interjections (e.g. oh) and clausal DMs (e.g. I think) from the class. Problematically enough, the four DMs examined in the present book do not seem to fit either definition: they are clausal DMs that do not exclusively occur in dialogical oral contexts. My own definition of DMs is less restrictive in order to accommodate a wider set of markers and textual genres (see Chapter 2). Despite undeniable divergences, it must be borne in mind that both Diewald’s and Fraser’s schools bring to the fore the structural function of DMs, either as speech management tools or as text-structuring devices. By contrast, other scholarly publications advocate a slightly different view in terms of discourse functions, highlighting the intrinsic duality of DMs instead of foregrounding a purely structural role. Let us examine the two following definitions: pragmatic markers are distributed around two functional poles. On the one hand, speakers in interaction need to manage turns and implement repair.

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On the other hand, they need to ensure that they do not offend by carefully managing the strength of their assertions. (Beeching 2016: 22) The main function of DMs is to relate an utterance to the situation of discourse, more specifically to speaker-hearer interaction, speaker attitudes, and/or the organization of texts. (Heine 2013: 1211)

Both Beeching’s and Heine’s characterisations above insist on the twofold role of DMs, which are viewed as both structural items and attitudinal devices marking speaker stance. The attitudinal pole encompasses subjective as well as intersubjective speaker stance and may account for different discourse functions often listed in pragmatic studies, such as hedging, boosting and downtoning (Kaltenböck 2010 on I think). Moreover, this attitudinal pole is reminiscent of the way enunciative approaches conceptualise DMs as traces of speaker subjectivity, as shown in Sect. 1.2 below. It is interesting to note, for instance, that some recent pragmatic publications (Aijmer 2013; Beeching 2017) resort to the notion of “reflexivity”, which is central to theories of “énonciation”, to account for the distinctive features of DMs: Pragmatic markers are ‘surface phenomena’. On a deeper level they are reflexive i.e. they ‘mirror’ the speaker’s mental processes as envisaged in the ‘fabric of talk-in-interaction’ commenting on what goes on in the speaker’s mind (Redeker 2006). (Aijmer 2013: 4)

In this line of reasoning, DMs reveal the speaker’s “metapragmatic awareness” (Aijmer 2013)—like other phenomena such as pauses, hesitations or false starts—that is to say the speaker’s acute awareness that discourse is an ongoing construct and may be commented upon as it unfolds. As will be argued in Chapter 2, reflexivity, and more particularly reflexivity linked to commitment issues, is indeed an essential characteristic of DMs of saying. In relation to the role played by DMs in coding speaker stance, one notion in particular is worth examining: “mitigation”, as theorised by Caffi (1999).

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1.1.3.2 Focus on “Mitigation” As Caffi (1999) points out, the notion of “mitigation” is borrowed from Latin rhetoric and is synonymous with “downgrading”. Although not new,2 it is redefined by Caffi from a pragmatic perspective as an integrative notion that may make sense of many linguistic phenomena: “it is a superordinate organizing concept to which it is possible to ascribe different functions performed by heterogeneous linguistic means that are labeled variously in pragmatic research” (Caffi 1999: 882). Based on a corpus of therapeutic sessions in Italian, the author suggests distinguishing between three different types of mitigation, which are not mutually exclusive (one given marker may express several types at once): bushes, hedges and shields. “Bushes” are markers—not necessarily DMs, since diminutives may also be included in this first category—which mitigate the propositional content and affect precision. Typical examples are “vague expressions” (Jucker et al. 2003) such as sort of/kind of. “Hedges” bear on the illocutionary force of the utterance and may account for markers downgrading the speaker’s certainty from an epistemic perspective (such as I think, I guess). Lastly, “shields” designate markers or constructions that mitigate utterances by “displacing” or blurring the origin of utterance and/or the moment of utterance, as is the case of impersonal constructions and passive utterances. The notion of mitigation, which has been extensively used by Schneider (2007, 2013) in his study of some “parenthetical” DMs in Romance languages, seems particularly relevant for the markers of saying I examine in the present book and has been used in a previous publication (Lansari 2017).3 On purely morphological grounds, on va dire, shall we say, j’allais dire and I was going to may indeed be analysed as “shields”: the pronouns are not first personal singular, which necessarily blurs the origin of utterance (especially on, as Chapter 4 will show), and the verbal forms involving exponents of futurity suggest that the moment of commitment has been temporally “displaced”. As a matter of fact, Caffi classifies two Italian DMs of saying among shields: cosí dire and diciamo cos…, which she, respectively, translates as so to speak and let’s say. In Chapter 2, I shall claim that mitigation as defined here does constitute a relevant frame of analysis for my markers: it is indeed compatible with the enunciative approach adopted in the present study, since it relates the role

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of DMs to speaker stance. Chapters 4 and 5 will nonetheless show that the “displacement” hypothesis formulated by Caffi is not entirely satisfactory to account for the DMs under discussion from a semantic viewpoint. Before moving to a general presentation of enunciative approaches to DMs, I shall now focus on how pragmatic studies examine the diachronic processes leading to the formation of DMs.

1.1.4 DMs and Language Change: Pragmaticalisation or Something Else? Interestingly, the research field of discourse marking tends to blur the wellestablished boundary between diachronic analysis and synchronic analysis. As already noted, the class of DMs gathers items originally belonging to other grammatical classes (interjections, clauses, etc.), which have developed into DMs through complex decategorisation/recategorisation processes. Consequently, any research on DMs has to discuss the nature of these processes, even works which do not have a truly diachronic scope. For Dostie (2004), these processes are indeed at the core of the definition of DMs: among the criteria she uses to define the class of DMs is the fact that they have undergone decategorisation/recategorisation.4 The exact nature of the diachronic changes involved here remains a controversial issue in the literature, and pragmatics-oriented studies do not all posit the same general process. It is nonetheless possible to outline general tendencies: most of these studies define this process as grammaticalisation or pragmaticalisation. Very few postulate that other processes may be at stake (see below). Traditionally, grammaticalisation is used to make sense of the development of grammatical units out of lexical ones (Heine 1993; Hopper and Traugott 1993). Recent works, however, put forward broader definitions of grammaticalisation, which may also account for the passage from grammatical units to even more grammatical units: Grammaticalization is the change whereby in certain linguistic contexts speakers use parts of a construction with a grammatical function. Over time the resulting grammatical item may become more grammatical by acquiring

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more grammatical functions and expanding its host-classes. (Brinton and Traugott 2005: 99)

Grammaticalisation is in essence a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be defined by one criterion but involves a constellation of criteria: semantic change, decategorisation/recategorisation, fixedness, freezing of form, cliticisation, etc. In this light, the rise of the four DMs of saying under investigation may be considered a case of grammaticalisation. It involves core features of grammaticalisation: • Semantic change, from temporal (future or future-in-the-past) meaning to discourse use; • Recategorisation from finite clauses with matrix verbs to “comment clauses” or “reduced parenthetical clauses”; • A certain degree of freezing, since the use as DM is only possible with specific grammatical persons and verb tenses5 ; • Loss of compositionality, insofar as it is no longer relevant to analyse them as the sum of their components. Other linguists nonetheless claim that the rise of DMs corresponds to a case of pragmaticalisation, a term first introduced by Erman and Kotsinas (1993), further developed by Aijmer (1997) and used by other scholars (Dostie 2004; Beeching 2016) as the diachronic process leading from lexical or grammatical forms to pragmatic makers. For the aforementioned authors, pragmaticalisation thus stands as a distinct process from grammaticalisation. Relying on an exhaustive overview of the literature, Degand and Evers-Vermeul (2015) show that the link between pragmaticalisation and grammaticalisation may be conceptualised in three different ways: 1. Grammaticalisation is sufficient to account for the development of DMs and pragmaticalisation is superfluous. 2. Pragmaticalisation is only a subcategory of grammaticalisation. 3. Pragmaticalisation and grammaticalisation are distinct diachronic processes, and it is pragmaticalisation which best explains the rise of DMs. This claim is based on the assumption that grammatical units and

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pragmatic ones should be clearly distinguished (Aijmer 1997; Beeching 2016; Erman and Kotsinas 1993; Dostie 2004). Conceptions 2 and 3 are actually hard to distinguish. For instance, Degand and Evers-Vermeul (2015) claim that the pragmaticalisation model put forward by Dostie (2004: 27–34) in the wake of Erman and Kotsinas belongs to conception 3. Indeed, Dostie posits a strict separation between grammatical units and pragmatic ones, which leads her to set apart grammaticalisation and pragmaticalisation. In the introduction to her book, however, she defines pragmaticalisation as a “specific case” (ibid.: 11) of grammaticalisation, which logically makes her a proponent of conception 2. So, conceptions 2 and 3 are very closely related and it may be more relevant to emphasise what is common to them both, i.e. the belief that DMs form a specific functional class whose development needs to be accounted for by a specific process, namely pragmaticalisation. A specific case of pragmaticalisation is of great interest for the four DMs of saying under scrutiny: the tendency for clausal units—especially with first-person subjects—to evolve into what linguists variously call “comment clauses” (Brinton 2008), “reduced parenthetical clauses” (Schneider 2007) or “clausal DMs” (“marqueurs discursifs propositionnels” in French, Andersen 1996, 2007). In the chapters devoted to the corpus findings (Chapters 4 and 5), I shall pay great attention to the criteria defining this process in order to assess the degree of pragmaticalisation of each DM. Within pragmaticalisation and/or grammaticalisation studies, more specific hypotheses relate these processes to social and/or intersubjective factors. For instance, Beeching (2016: 23–25) assumes that pragmaticalisation is more particularly linked to politeness issues: politeness should be considered the main force propelling diachronic change as far as DMs are concerned. She thus equates pragmaticalisation with what she calls “politeness-induced semantic change” (henceforth PISC). This hypothesis builds on the pioneering works of Brown and Levinson (1978/1987) and Goffman (1967) on politeness and “face”. The different mitigation functions that DMs are liable to acquire (as hedges or downtoners) allegedly develop because the speaker wants/needs to be polite or for face-saving reasons (to save his/her own face or the co-speaker’s face). PISC is very close to the notion of “intersubjectification” developed by Traugott (2010) and

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used by many researchers (e.g. Hancil 2015). Both PISC and intersubjectification try to link the rise of DMs to expressive factors: the development of DMs corresponds to the speakers’ specific expressive needs, in relation to intersubjective dimensions. As such, PISC and intersubjectification do not compete with pragmaticalisation/grammaticalisation, since they do not intervene at the same level: the latter mainly seek to circumscribe the morphosyntactic changes at stake in the rise of DMs, whereas the former deal with the speakers’ expressive tools. Within a slightly different theoretical framework, recent publications have suggested re-examining the notion of grammaticalisation (in its broad sense, including pragmaticalisation) in the light of Construction Grammar (henceforth CxG), thus positing processes called “constructionalization” and “constructional change” (Traugott and Trousdale 2016) to account for diachronic changes. Broadly speaking, CxG is a usage-based cognitive theory that posits that the basic linguistic units are “constructions”, defined as abstract conventionalised form-meaning pairings (see Goldberg 2006 for a presentation). Originally, this theory was mostly interested in classic grammatical phenomena occurring at the sentence level such as the passive voice or resultative structures, less so in DMs, which inherently escape traditional grammatical classification. Some works, however, have highlighted the relevance of CxG to make sense of interactional linguistic phenomena such as DMs (Fried and Östman 2005; Aijmer 2016). “Constructional change” deals with the semantic-pragmatic and/or syntactic evolution of a given construction, while “constructionalization” accounts for the rise of an entirely new construction whereby a new form is associated with a new meaning (as in the case of anyway which developed as a DM out of any + way, Aijmer 2016). Despite real theoretical differences, the aforementioned approaches all claim that a universal process defined by a set of parameters (semantic change, decategorisation/recategorisation, freezing, etc.) may account for the development of all DMs. Interestingly, Degand and Evers-Vermeul (2015) show that not all linguists share this belief. Some argue that it is not relevant to posit a universal process and assume on the contrary that the diachronic changes at stake are DM-specific. In this line of reasoning, recent publications develop a specific hypothesis for “parenthetical” DMs, which are items defined by precise syntactic

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characteristics—mainly autonomy with respect to the rest of the clause.6 Building on the existence of such “autonomous” items syntactically speaking, Heine et al. (2013) suggest distinguishing between Thetical Grammar and Sentence Grammar. Sentence Grammar corresponds to the traditional grammar accounting for syntactic phenomena at the sentence level. Thetical Grammar, by contrast, deals with “parentheticals”—called “theticals” in the approach developed by Heine et al.—which are by definition extrasentential elements. Proponents of this theory argue that parentheticals develop through a process called “cooptation” and defined as follows: a packaging strategy whereby a clause, a phrase, a word, or any unit is taken out of Sentence Grammar and is deployed for use as a unit of Thetical Grammar, more precisely, as a thetical – it turns into what, following Haegeman (1991), one may call a syntactic ‘orphan’. (Heine et al. 2015: 114–115)

Heine et al. (2015: 120–123) insist on the rapidity of cooptation, which is not a progressive process as opposed to grammaticalisation: cooptation is instantaneous and occurs as soon as any given item comes to be analysed as a thetical. It does not exclude, however, the typical phenomena involved in grammaticalisation (extension, semantic bleaching, decategorisation and erosion according to Heine et al. 2015) but only at a later stage. To sum up, it is clear that this hypothesis may only account for the development of specific DMs characterised by syntactic autonomy, thus leaving aside many other DMs and “connectives”. To conclude on diachrony, let us say that most publications claim that DMs develop through a pragmaticalisation process defined as a subcategory of grammaticalisation and characterised by a number of changes affecting semantics, pragmatics and syntax: semantic-pragmatic change, recategorisation, freezing, etc. Although the scope of the present study is not diachronic, I shall adopt the same line of reasoning and use pragmaticalisation parameters to assess the degrees of pragmaticalisation of the four DMs under scrutiny. I indeed believe that the term “pragmaticalisation” gives more credit to the specific features of the markers under discussion than the more general term “grammaticalisation”. Moreover, grammaticalisation studies often assume semantic bleaching or “desemantisation”, thus restricting semantics to truth conditional meaning (Heine 1993),

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whereas pragmaticalisation is clearly associated with semantic change— what Dostie (2004) calls “resemantisation”—and takes into account the non-truth conditional meaning of DMs. The issue of pragmaticalisation will also be addressed from an enunciative perspective in Subsection 1.2.3 below.

1.1.5 Summary on Pragmatics and DMs The preceding pages have shown that DMs as a specific class emerged in the 1980s within pragmatic studies that were mainly interested in dialogic spoken communication. The definition of this class is based on functional criteria, not on semantic ones: generally speaking, DMs are seen as indexical cues with structural functions (as text-structuring devices or speech management tools). A number of prominent works in the field nonetheless highlight the attitudinal role DMs may play: they may also index speaker stance. Syntactically speaking, there is no consensual definition, as DMs constitute an open-ended class grouping together very heterogeneous linguistic items. Still, most scholars tend to consider prototypical DMs as short, loosely connected elements in initial position, which de facto excludes connectives (such as because) from the class. Another striking element about this class is its diachronic dimension: most DMs originally belong to well-established syntactic categories (prepositional phrases, adverbs, conjunctions, full matrix clauses, etc.), which entails defining a diachronic process underlying the rise of DMs. The majority of scholars claim that this process is pragmaticalisation defined as a distinct process from grammaticalisation. I shall now confront this pragmatic conception of DMs with the definition put forward in the enunciative tradition.7

1.2

Defining DMs from an Enunciative Perspective

Offering a complete presentation of “énonciation” as a linguistic theory would be beyond the scope of the present study, all the more since “énon-

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ciation”—like pragmatics—does not constitute a homogeneous linguistic theory but has given birth to a variety of schools with slightly different theoretical orientations. Instead, I succinctly lay out the most crucial tenets of “énonciation”—and more particularly of the enunciative theory known as “Théorie des Opérations Enonciatives” developed by Culioli (1990, 1999a, b)—in order to point out the main convergences and divergences between such theories and pragmatics. My presentation of Culioli’s theory is mostly based on Ranger (2018). For an epistemological perspective on theories of “énonciation”, I refer to Fuchs and Le Goffic (1992) and Johansson and Suomela-Salmi (2008), works that both highlight similarities between “énonciation” and pragmatics.

1.2.1 “Enonciation”: A Speaker-Centred Theory Roughly speaking, “énonciation” started out with the works of Guillaume (1929) and Bally (1926), but it was Benveniste (1974)8 who first coined the term “énonciation”, which he defined as “putting language to work through an individual act of utilization” (ibid.: 80). Although he did not set up a full-fledged theory of “énonciation” himself, his publications inspired many French-speaking linguists who took to theorising “énonciation”, the most prominent ones being Culioli (1990, 1999a, b) and Ducrot (1985). Interestingly, Fuchs and Le Goffic (1992: 129–142) classifies Ducrot’s approach within pragmatics, not “énonciation”. Ducrot’s theory of “argumentation” is actually based on a syncretism between the two schools, but his theory is more speaker-centred than purely functional. Like pragmatics, “énonciation” aims to study language use in a precise context of production and may be seen as a counter-reaction to structuralism and generative grammar, which focus more on abstract language structures than on actual language use. Their object of study and theoretical foundations, however, are not strictly identical. As already expressed, pragmatics is interested in what speakers “do” with language and how they “use” language to act on the world and/or the addressee. Enonciation, on the other hand, seeks to examine the traces left by the “énonciateur”—in his/her utterances—originally through the study of deictics or phenomena of tense/aspect/modality (see Benveniste 1974: 79–88)—and

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makes no claim concerning the speaker’s initial intention. “Enonciateur” is clearly distinct from “speaker” in the frameworks presented here: the term “énonciateur” seeks to account for the fact that the mental operations do not originate in the physical person who is talking but in the abstract entity committed to the propositional content. The distinction may seem irrelevant a priori, but it is in fact crucial to understand some linguistic phenomena, such as reported speech, where the speaker merely repeats discourse chunks without being responsible for them. For clarity’s sake, however, I shall use the term “speaker” throughout the book, “énonciateur” being rather difficult to translate into English.9 As aptly summarised by Johansson and Suomela-Salmi (2008), “énonciation” is therefore a speaker-centred theory rather than a theory of language action. For some of the proponents of “énonciation”, especially for linguists adopting Culioli’s “Théorie des Opérations Enonciatives”—which may be translated as Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations (henceforth TEPO) following Ranger (2018)—the enunciative conception of language is incompatible with pragmatics. Indeed, pragmatics is sometimes severely criticised in the TEPO for allegedly advocating a “utilitarian” view of language. For instance, Franckel (2016: 312) radically opposes the two traditions and claims that in “énonciation”, “subjects are not external to language: the object of study is not subjects using forms, but forms marking and constructing the presence of subjects and the relationships between these subjects” (translation mine). In my opinion, pragmatics does not genuinely reduce language to a mere “tool” by which speakers intentionally use language to act on others. It studies how language may be used in such a way, but also posits complex processes of negotiation and co-construction of meaning (especially in works interested in attitudinal stance, such as publications by Aijmer, Beeching or Traugott). The theoretical opposition between the two linguistic traditions is best encapsulated in the definition of the term “discourse marker” itself, as explained below.

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1.2.2 Discourse Markers…of Operations As Ranger (2018: 23) shows, the term “discourse marker” refers in theories of “énonciation”—and more particularly in the TEPO—to a specific theoretical principle: DMs—like any other linguistic item—“mark” or reflect subjective operations originated in the speaker’s choices. The linguistic analysis aims to uncover those mental operations, which are very abstract in nature and may be formalised via abstract symbols. For an exhaustive presentation of these operations, I refer to Ranger (2018). I shall myself only concentrate on crucial points of comparison between the TEPO and pragmatics. DMs are intrinsically seen in the TEPO as attitudinal markers reflecting speaker stance, at the subjective and intersubjective levels. In other words, DMs cannot be reduced to management tools with merely structuring roles in communication. On the contrary, they always encode subjectivity. This is also true for “connectives” such as mais (but ) or parce que (because) analysed within Ducrot’s theory of “argumentation”. Like in pragmatics, the indexical nature of DMs is foregrounded but their indexicality is redefined in terms of speaker-related operations (see below). In fact, few “énonciation”-based publications attempt to define DMs as a category: most enunciative works deal with specific case studies and do not seek to define criteria common to all DMs. As Ranger explains (2018: 64), this usual focus on specific items may be related to the theoretical premises of the TEPO: “the model advocates a bottom-up approach where linguistic markers – all linguistic items are seen as ‘markers’ – signal underlying operations. There is no a priori reason therefore to exclude certain phenomena on the grounds of purportedly pre-established categories”. So, the goal of the linguistic analysis is to uncover these underlying operations, not to categorise markers as such. It follows from this operation-oriented approach that categorisation is not really an issue in the TEPO. The theory clearly advocates a transcategorial approach to linguistic markers: “the approach […] is transcategorial, if not a-categorial, refusing on principle the relevance of pre-existing categorizations” (Ranger 2018: 41–42). These theoretical tenets have two important consequences. First, they entail that the definition of DMs in the framework under dis-

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cussion here is neither functional nor syntactic: it may be seen as semantic, with the proviso that semantics should be “operational” in nature. Secondly, it means that the definition does not concern DMs as such—which are language-specific elements belonging to various syntactic classes—but rather “discourse marking” as a cross-linguistic grammatical category. The definition proposed by Ranger for “discourse marking” is as follows: The grammatical category of discourse marking refers to an operation of utterance regulation which indexically targets an operation or operations constitutive of the event of the utterance itself. (ibid.: 66, emphasis mine)

Central to this definition is the notion of “utterance regulation” involving indexicality. Interestingly, the quotation above shows that indexicality is considered as crucial to discourse marking in both the TEPO and pragmatic frameworks examined in Sect. 1.1: DMs are reflexive markers pointing to the ongoing discourse. “Utterance regulation” is more theoretically oriented and refers to the fact that in enunciative frameworks discourse—simply defined as any language activity—is inherently seen as co-constructed by, and negotiated between, speaker and co-speaker, which implies complex adjustment and/or stabilisation processes (Ranger 2018: 23). Depending on the operations targeted by regulation, these processes may be related to intersubjective matters (the speaker regulates discourse by choosing less offensive terms, for instance), or they may be linked to referential issues (the need for regulation may arise out of the speaker’s own dissatisfaction with his/her words). Chapters 4 and 5 will indeed show that the DMs of saying under scrutiny play a major regulation role in discourse and that this regulation activity may affect different dimensions. In the pragmatics tradition, regulation is not explicitly considered central to DMs, but it is worth noting that, in my view, several pragmatic notions are strongly connected to “énonciation”-based regulation. The first notion worth mentioning is “vagueness”, used within Relevance Theory by Jucker et al. (2003) to make sense of “vague expressions” such as sort of/kind of. In an article dedicated to spontaneous spoken interaction, the authors note the recurrence of sort of/kind of (along with expressions such as what-do-you-call-it ), which is for them symptomatic of inherent language difficulties in terms of categorisation:

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Speakers do not just evoke referents; they also try to characterise events and experiences by assigning them to conceptual categories. In some cases, speakers may believe that a conventional category sufficiently describes the experience. But in other cases speakers may instead be forced to use a category that is limited in its ability to characterise the experience, and they may want to convey a sense of that limitation to the addressee. English provides a number of linguistic devices for doing so. (Jucker et al. 2003: 1746)

This quotation clearly shows that the expressions under discussion play a role in categorisation issues: the speaker does not fully manage to assign his/her experiences to conceptual categories and therefore has to resort to vague expressions. In the framework adopted by Ranger, such phenomena would undoubtedly fall under the umbrella of “regulation”: sort of/kind of reveal language instability and the speaker’s attempt to stabilise language activity. Another case in point is the notion of “repair” originally coined by Schegloff et al. (1977) within Conversation Analysis (see Kitzinger 2013 for a general presentation of the notion). Here is the definition given by Ferenþík (2005): Repair as a particularly effective interactional device is used by the interactants to put the interaction back ‘on the right track’. [It may be used] in attending to some aspects of the on-going interaction, such as negotiation of ‘epistemic stances’, the management of turn-taking and membership categorization. Repair sequences are seen to demonstrate participants’ orientation to politeness considerations of interaction by attending to their positive and/or negative face wants.

This quotation makes it clear that, like utterance regulation, repair has a twofold referential and intersubjective dimension, since it may play a role in assigning category membership and/or in face-saving strategies. Let us examine examples from my data (frTenTen12 and enTenTen13) with j’allais dire and I was going to say 10 : (1) C’est un muscle qui a la nécessité, j’allais dire le DEVOIR de la matière loi de construction […].

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(1 ) It’s a muscle which has the necessity, I was going to say [j’allais dire] the DUTY of materiality as a construction law. (2) There is nothing new in sequels, of course; they are generally safe investments for an industry increasingly adverse (I was going to say “creatively bankrupt”) to anything new and untried.

In both instances, the DMs seem to implement repair. In example (1), the noun necessity initially chosen finally appears to be less adequate that the noun devoir, written in upper case,11 which functions as a corrective term. In example (2), the adjectival phrase creatively bankrupt may likewise constitute a corrective reformulation of increasingly adverse. We are presumably dealing here with cases of “self-initiated repair” (as opposed to “other-initiated repair”), whereby the speaker corrects his/her own discourse. On the other hand, the corrective dimension of the reformulation process at stake here is questionable: in both cases, the first term is not genuinely “wrong”, but merely felt as less adequate than the second by the speaker. Actually, the term “repair” itself is theoretically loaded and possibly too restrictive, since it seems to imply that communication is by definition felicitous and needs to be put “back ‘on the right track’” whenever it ceases to be so. On the contrary, we have seen that the TEPO strongly stresses the idea that communication is inherently unstable, that is to say infelicitous in essence.12 In that perspective, communication does not have to be put back on the “right” track, insofar as it relies on complex unconscious processes, not on clear intentions on the speaker’s part. Interestingly, repair is closely connected to the Latin notion of “correctio” used in rhetoric and analysed by Steuckardt (2015). Steuckardt aptly points out that DMs such as pour ainsi dire (so to speak) used to be classified within the subset of “correctifs” in French linguistics before being reclassified as “modalisateurs” (i.e. mitigators). This terminological change undoubtedly reflects a change in the conception of the phenomenon at stake: in French linguistics, the analysis is no longer based on a normative view of communication but integrates enunciative approaches to modality.

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Moreover, the notion of repair as developed in Conversation Analysis does not account for the possibly argumentative dimension of these so-called repair strategies. As put forward by Steuckardt (2009), reformulations may be used polemically and do not systemically aim to correct discourse for the co-speaker’s sake. So, although loosely connected to the notion of “regulation”, vagueness and repair, which are sometimes used in pragmatic works, are not relevant to account for the complexity and multiplicity of discourse marking. The former seems too restricted as it only makes sense of a few specific markers, while the latter relies on a communication model that does not leave sufficient room for complex intersubjective strategies. In conclusion, the definition of discourse marking put forward by Ranger (2018) in terms of regulation allows for an integrative approach of the phenomena at stake: as opposed to “vagueness”, for instance, it is not restricted to a small set of markers but may be used to account for potentially all DMs. It is also based on a communication model that makes sense of misunderstandings and polemical statements, without reducing communication to a process that has to be smoothed out. Regulation, however, does not solve the categorisation problem raised by DMs from a syntactic perspective. As laid out by Ranger, the definition does not address this issue at all: what is at stake is not DMs but discourse marking. I shall elaborate on this issue in Chapter 2. Suffice it to say for now that I believe that this operational definition of discourse marking is crucial at the semantic level, but it should—at a later stage of analysis—be combined with other elements, especially with a syntactic approach shedding light on the recategorisation processes underlying the DMs under scrutiny. Let us now examine the methodological implications of the operationbased model advocated in the TEPO.

1.2.3 Methodology: From Operations to the Definition of a “Schematic Form” As expressed above, Culioli’s TEPO analyses linguistic items as marking abstract speaker-related operations. The next crucial point concerns how these operations interact. In fact, the TEPO assumes that one given

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linguistic item marks one and only one set or association of operations. Such a constellation of operations, referred to as an “invariant”, is not context-dependent and subsumes the diverse pragmatic functions arising out of specific contexts. This “invariant” may be seen as a unifying semantic factor abstract enough to account for the diversity of pragmatic functions one given DM may develop. In other words, Culioli’s model seems more holistic than pragmatic approaches: the latter aim to identify a range of discourse functions, while the former views such functions as the starting point of the analysis, which eventually seeks to define a more abstract invariant common to all the discourse functions. It goes to show that “énonciation” does not reject pragmatics per se. What is questionable for proponents of this theory is defining pragmatics as the ultimate explanatory principle of language communication. As Ranger (2018: iv) puts it, in the TEPO, “pragmatic potentials are in a large measure built into the semantics of the linguistic items”. To convey this idea, theoreticians of the TEPO rely on the notion of “pragmatique intégrée”, which may be translated as “embedded pragmatics” (Culioli and Normand 2005: 107; Mélis 2012). In publications within the TEPO, any linguistic item is assigned one “invariant” (defined as a constellation of abstract operations) only. This “invariant” is usually formalised using more or less abstract representations (depending on the authors) and called the “schematic form”. To clarify the nature of this “schematic form”, let us focus on DM mind you analysed in Ranger (2015). The discourse use of mind you may be illustrated by example (3) below: (3) A : Did you fight this time? B : No I was only garrison artillery on guns. Mind you we used to fire guns. [FYE]

Based on such utterances, Ranger assumes that “in a sequence of the general form ‘p mind you q , mind you indicates that q operates a retroactive adjustment relative to the inferences which the utterance of p might give rise to”. This rather abstract definition is, in Ranger’s view, the schematic form to be associated with DM mind you. According to this schematic

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form, speaker B’s initial assertion in example (3) above might lead speaker A to assume that she/he did not fire guns. To avoid this possible inference on speaker A’s part, speaker B introduces an important caveat via mind you. We are therefore dealing with a pre-emptive regulation strategy. Ranger claims that this schematic form then gives rise to various argumentative uses of the corrective or concessive type, depending on the context. The preceding lines clearly show that, in comparison with the multifunctional approach advocated in pragmatics, the TEPO relies on a unitary approach to meaning. As laid out by Ranger (2018: 43–57), this does not really entail that the model put forward by the TEPO is a monosemous one in the classical sense of the word: monosemy is associated with meaning stability, whereas the TEPO insists on the lability of linguistic representations. In other words, the “schematic form” assigned to a given marker is considered highly malleable, which explains that it may give rise to various uses or functions depending on the context. Another important dimension of this “invariant” should be stressed: its definition ultimately relies on semantic parameters that are often compositional in nature. Going back to Ranger’s characterisation of DM mind you, it is crucial to understand that the schematic form posited is actually related to the semantics of the lexical verb mind itself. Ranger suggests that the discourse use of mind you derives from an earlier inverted imperative use of the verb mind. This enables him “to link the discourse function of mind you with other uses of mind as a ‘lexical verb’, by proposing a general schematic form for mind as the imposition of a phenomenon b on the attention of a subject a. Contextual parameters then enable us to derive various local values for mind from this abstract schema” (Ranger 2015). In this line of reasoning, mind you as DM is inherently linked to the verb mind and the schematic form must accommodate the original components of mind you (inverted imperative form, semantic of the verb mind, pronoun, etc.) within a compositional approach. Ranger’s suggestion is therefore based on a model advocating continuity between original use and discourse use, without any meaningful caesura. To take an example closer to the DMs of saying examined in the present book, let us now turn to Khachaturyan’s (2007) study of French and Russian DMs of saying. In a similar fashion to Ranger, Khachaturyan relates the differences between the French and Russian DMs that she compares

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(disons and pour ainsi dire in French; skažem and ta skazat’ in Russian) to the semantics of the speech verbs they contain. It is worth noting however that Khachaturyan relies on less abstract semantic characterisations than Ranger. She claims that the French verb dire is speaker-centred, insofar as in all its uses it is based on an exteriorisation process whereby the speaker tries to express his/her representation of the world. Khachaturyan’s contention is largely based on the etymology of the verb dire, which is related to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “disclose, expose” (see also Franckel 2015, 2016). By contrast, the closest equivalent to dire in Russian—the verb skazat’ —has a clearer intersubjective dimension and seems rather similar to tell in English. Accordingly, Khachaturyan concludes that disons and pour ainsi dire highlight categorisation issues (the speaker is concerned with how to express what she/he has in mind), while their Russian counterparts are involved in dialogical contexts where the speaker looks for what to say to his/her co-speaker. More generally speaking, the role played by the semantics of dire in DMs of saying in French has been highlighted by many publications (Péroz 2013; Saunier 2012; Franckel 2015, 2016; Gómez-Jordana Ferary and Anscombre 2015). I shall go back to the semantics of dire/ say in Subsection 1.2.4 below, in my discussion of enunciative works on DMs of saying. In that respect, it is striking to note the absence of similar semantic discussions about say in pragmatic studies of English DMs of saying. Let us focus for instance on Brinton’s (2008) study of “comment clauses” involving the verb say (I say, I’d say, etc.). Although she dedicates a whole chapter to such clauses (ibid.: chapter 4, pp. 73–100), she does not examine the semantics of say, which she merely describes as a “communication verb”. Nor does she try to relate her functional analysis of the comment clauses under scrutiny to the semantics of the speech verb. Instead, in line with the multifunctional approach put forward in pragmatics, she lists the various discourse functions of the units under scrutiny. This stark contrast between the two traditions shows once more that they do not share the same theoretical assumptions and goals. The two case studies briefly mentioned above (mind you and the comparison of DMs of saying in French and Russian) reveal that the model posited in the TEPO is hardly compatible with the notion of pragmaticalisation/grammaticalisation upon which pragmatic studies rely. If original

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use and discourse use may be unified through a unique schematic form, then there is no need to assume a complex diachronic change ultimately leading to a clear-cut separation between the two uses. Very logically, some proponents of the TEPO fiercely reject the notion of pragmaticalisation/grammaticalisation, as evidenced in the quotation below: We refuse to posit any ‘pragmaticalisation process’ […]. On the contrary, we claim that [in disons, dis, dites] the semantics of the verb dire is fully relevant. (Franckel 2016: 132, translation mine)

As already clear from the discussion on diachronic issues in relation to DMs (Subsection 1.1.4 above), my own position is more nuanced. Although it seems highly relevant from a semantic viewpoint to aim to define continuity between original use and discourse use, it is in my view too extreme to reject pragmaticalisation as such. DMs do function as entrenched units in their own right, with specific distributional properties, and the existence of semantic-pragmatic changes (from futurity marking to discourse marking in the DMs under scrutiny) cannot be denied. I shall further clarify my position on this issue in Chapter 2. To summarise the preceding passages, it is important to keep in mind that the specific unitary approach put forward in the TEPO stands in sharp contrast to the multifunctionality of DMs in pragmatic approaches. In the TEPO, any given DM is associated with one “schematic form”— based on abstract operations—unifying all its contextual uses as DM and beyond. The TEPO puts forward a compositional analysis of DMs, which implies defining a “schematic form” common to all uses, whether discursive or not. This theoretical position is not compatible with the notion of pragmaticalisation, which implies a clear-cut dichotomy between nondiscourse uses and discourse ones, but it does not disqualify a pragmatic perspective on discourse uses. Indeed, the “schematic form” that underlies any given marker in the theory examined is construed as highly malleable, and this malleability gives rise to various pragmatic functions depending on the contextual environment. I shall now turn to enunciative works that focus more specifically on DMs of saying.

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1.2.4 Discourse Markers of Saying, Metalinguistic Reflexivity and “modalisation du dire” As already noted, the pragmatic tradition initiated by Schiffrin (1987) has never paid great attention to DMs based on a verbum dicendi, probably because the focus of analysis was on more frequent DMs with clearer connective functions and less easily identifiable semantic content (such as well ). In the enunciative tradition, on the other hand, DMs with the verb dire have received a lot of scholarly attention, in relation to the notion of metalinguistic reflexivity. This contrast between the two linguistic traditions is actually meaningful. Epistemologically speaking, it is striking to note that reflexivity has been called upon in pragmatic works only recently and rather marginally (Aijmer 2013; Beeching 2017). By contrast, it has always played a crucial role in enunciative theories, not specifically in relation to DMs but more generally in connection to human language communication. In an article devoted to the relationship between language and society, Benveniste (1974) highlighted the uniqueness of human language communication when compared to other semiotic systems: human language communication is the only semiotic system characterised by metalinguistic reflexivity, i.e. the ability to use language to comment on language. Culioli (1967) similarly pointed out that metalinguistic reflexivity is a unique feature of human language. The emphasis laid on this reflexive dimension is linked to the communication model underlying “énonciation”. In this theoretical framework, language communication is not a straightforward process whereby a speaker intentionally conveys a message to the addressee in order to act on them and/or on the world. Language communication is on the contrary seen as a complex, dynamic intersubjective construct where meaning is constantly negotiated between speakers.13 Instability is thus at the core of communication: speakers choose specific linguistic markers but as discourse unfolds they may comment on, suppress or replace them in order to adjust more adequately to the co-speaker’s expectations and/or to the reality they try to express. False starts, hesitations, DMs such as bon, well with seemingly poor semantic content cannot be considered communication failures but constitute relevant symptoms of language instability that are worth analysing.

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Such adjustment phenomena—which Ranger (2018) calls “regulation” processes as stated above—have received much attention since the 1980s in slightly different theoretical approaches. Among these approaches are the TEPO of course14 but also the research group specialising in spoken French “Recherches sur le français parlé” (Blanche-Benveniste 1984, 1989), Anscombre’s work on “polyphony” (Anscombre et al. 2014)15 and Authier-Revuz’s (1995) influential study of “non-coincidence” markers— including DMs of saying such as pour ainsi dire (so to speak), disons (let’s say), etc. I would like to pay special attention to Authier-Revuz’s theoretical model accounting for markers of saying, since it is particularly relevant for the four DMs under investigation here. In comparison with Ranger’s approach, the perspective developed by Authier-Revuz does not focus on categorisation issues as regards discourse marking: the markers she seeks to analyse also include rather long phrases and expressions (such as soit dit en passant ) that are traditionally excluded from the class of DMs.16 The range of markers she examines is therefore even broader and syntactically more heterogeneous than what is usually considered DMs. In keeping with the enunciative focus on speaker stance and modality, Authier-Revuz makes use of the umbrella term “modalisation du dire” to make sense of such markers (DMs and/or expressions). This notion, used by many researchers working on DMs of saying in French (Abouda and Skrovec 2014; Labeau 2012; Lansari 2010a, b, 2018; Steuckardt 2014, 2016), is hard to translate into English but roughly corresponds to metalinguistic reflexivity: the markers under scrutiny indicate that speakers question, and comment on, the accuracy of their own linguistic choices. It should also be stressed that Authier-Revuz proposes a specific treatment of reflexive markers explicitly containing verba dicendi. Within “modalisation du dire”, she assumes that markers of saying more particularly express “meta-‘énonciation’”, as opposed to “meta-discourse”. In other words, items like plutôt/rather that may be used to reflexively comment on discourse are simply meta-discursive, referring to communicational matters in general,17 whereas markers of saying are specifically linked to the enunciative act. At this point, it is necessary to further clarify what the term “modalisation” refers to, in relation to the notion of modality. First, it must be

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borne in mind that, historically speaking, “modalisation du dire” is linked to the semiotic works of Rey-Debove (1978) based on a Saussurean theory of signs (Saussure 1995): “modalisation du dire” is tantamount to “autonymic” modalisation, autonyms being linguistic items that have the ability to comment on themselves, in a reflexive movement. Here is the definition put forward by Authier-Revuz (2003): “autonymic behaviour is characterised by the capacity to treat signs as objects” (“ce qui spécifie le fait autonymique, c’est de mettre en jeu des signes pris comme objets”). This means that, in “modalisation du dire”, what is said—a specific linguistic choice—is suddenly not taken for granted anymore but considered a linguistic sign that can be commented upon and assessed for its adequacy or inadequacy (in terms of reference, register, etc.18 ). Secondly, let us note that the term “modalisation” might be misleading, since it seems to suggest that the “modalisation” markers under discussion add some kind of modality to the utterance. Fully understanding “modalisation du dire” in the model presented here actually requires examining modality within enunciative approaches.The type of modality at stake here does not correspond to the traditional categories of possibility and necessity inherited from logicians’ works on modality. It refers to the first type of modality defined by Culioli: assertion (or “commitment modality” in more recent works, Celle 2008, 2009; Lansari 2008). In Culioli’s typology of modalities, four types of modality may be distinguished: assertion, epistemic modality, appreciative modality, root modality (Culioli 1990). The last three types refer to well-known subcategories of modality, expressed by language-specific markers (modal verbs and auxiliaries, adjectives, etc.), while the first one, which deals with speaker commitment, is usually not considered a type of modality since it is not necessarily made explicit by dedicated markers. Following Ranger’s (2018: 34) translation of Culioli’s definition, assertion may be defined as follows: “Assertion can be seen as an operation whereby a speaker moves from a pre-assertive plane p/non-p, to subjective commitment to a polar value, either p or non-p”. Assertion therefore activates two distinct elements. It requires a subjective origin of commitment (the “énonciateur”), and it is based on a selection process of one propositional content (p) over others (non-p). As will be made clear in the following chapter, I assume that these two

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elements are crucial to the semantic characterisation of the four DMs of saying under discussion. So, in enunciative approaches, asserting—that is to say committing oneself to the propositional content—is in itself a kind of modality. It is indeed the most basic modal operation performed by the “énonciateur”. It should be made clear here that this theoretical position is not specific to the TEPO, but is common to all enunciative frameworks. These frameworks all recommend rejecting the traditional dichotomy between dictum and modus and claim that, even in the absence of modus (explicit modal marking), the speaker is already committed to the propositional content (Rossari et al. 2004: 9). This entails that an utterance like he’s hungry is intrinsically modal. As already stated, assertion does not rely on identifiable linguistic markers and is often implicit (unlike the other three types of modality distinguished by Culioli). This in turn implies that, rather than adding modality—as would be the case of the epistemic adverb probably in he’s probably hungry for instance— markers of “modalisation du dire” comment on commitment towards specific linguistic choices, indicating that commitment is in some way problematic. Let us focus on some examples taken from my data: (4) et il me semble qu’il y a des nouvelles technologies qui ont développé, on va dire, une information beaucoup plus transversale ou horizontale avec les blogs sur internet notamment. (4 ) and it seems to me that there are new technologies that have developed let’s say [on va dire] much more transversal or horizontal information techniques especially with blogs on the internet. (5) Le remède européen n’est pas forcément applicable au mauricien cas par cas . Changer la mentalité des mauriciens dans son ensemble et ce dès leur plus jeune âge . Alors , même malades, ils auraient un comportement j’allais dire , responsable et humain . (5 ) The European solution cannot necessarily be applied to Mauritius. Changing the Mauricians’ way of thinking as a whole starting very early. Then, even if ill, they would have a behaviour, well, let’s say [j’allais dire] a responsible and human behaviour.

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(6) I’m personally really excited to see this narrative play out because – I was going to say it’s ruining middle America by exposing them to the darkness. Do you think it has that element? (7) We had parties. Often. Party people can be, shall we say, clumsy. It took us about three weeks to put a scratch like a canyon across the table. I still don’t know who was responsible, but it didn’t matter.

In examples (4) to (7), the presence of the DMs of saying makes the utterance less assertive and speaker commitment more opaque: it is difficult to know whether or not the speaker takes responsibility for his/her linguistic choices (e.g. the adjective clumsy in example (7)). Suppressing the DMs yields strict assertions presenting commitment as unproblematic and the linguistic formulations as taken for granted: (4 ) et il me semble qu’il y a des nouvelles technologies qui ont développé ø une information beaucoup plus transversale ou horizontale avec les blogs sur internet notamment. (5 ) Alors , même malades , ils auraient un comportement ø responsable et humain . (6 ) I’m personally really excited to see this narrative play out because ø it’s ruining middle America by exposing them to the darkness. Do you think it has that element? (7 ) We had parties. Often. Party people can be ø clumsy. It took us about three weeks to put a scratch like a canyon across the table. I still don’t know who was responsible, but it didn’t matter.

The deletion exemplified here should not be interpreted as a syntactic test proving specific syntactic properties, but only as a manipulation uncovering potentially relevant semantic features. In other contexts, the DMs cannot be suppressed (either for syntactic reasons or for semantic-pragmatic ones) and optionality cannot be taken as a defining criterion of discourse marking. Optionality is discussed in the sections dedicated to the syntactic behaviour of the DMs in Chapters 4 and 5.

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The manipulations above show that, due to the verb dire, markers of saying reveal how complex commitment is. Although Authier-Revuz herself does not elaborate on the topic, it is here highly relevant to focus on the etymology of the verb dire. As pointed out by Franckel (2015: 96), dire goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root deik, dik, “which refers to the act of showing, designating, exposing, calling attention to” (translation mine). In other words, using dire is tantamount to a public declaration. This leads Franckel to argue that in contemporary French dire is semantically linked to operations of revelation leading from the invisible to the visible: “The interplay between visibility and invisibility explains the fact that assertions introduced by dire are never equivalent to simple assertions” (translation mine). To illustrate this claim, he mentions two pairs of sentences: a. voici ce qui s’est passé / je vais te dire ce qui s’est passé b. il va y arriver / je dis qu’il va y arriver. These two pairs do not contain DMs but they help understand what the presence of dire may entail. In pair (a), the sentence with dire more clearly corresponds to an important announcement than its counterpart without the speech verb. In pair (b), the presence of je dis in the second sentence makes it sound like a personal bet reassuring (or possibly threatening) the co-speaker, whereas il va y arriver corresponds to a more neutral prediction. In the same vein, we have seen above that suppressing the DMs of saying I examine (whenever possible syntactically speaking) gives rise to assertions presenting commitment as unproblematic. Consequently, dire in the DMs under discussion plays a crucial role in revealing what is at stake in commitment: its presence alone suggests that assertion is a complex modal operation that may be subjected to negotiations, changes of mind, hesitations, etc. The verb say in English has a different etymology: according to Goossens (1982), say is based on a Proto-Indo-European root meaning utter. The verb utter also relies on an exteriorisation process and I would contend that the argumentation developed by Franckel could also apply to the verb say.

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1.2.5 Summary and Discussion on “énonciation” and DMs of Saying The aim of the section dedicated to enunciative approaches was not to describe specific theories in detail. Although I paid special attention to the TEPO, which has probably been the most influential theory within the enunciative movement, I more generally tried to highlight the main points distinguishing enunciative approaches from pragmatic ones as far as DMs are concerned. As a speaker-centred approach to language, “énonciation” views DMs as items reflecting speaker stance. As such, DMs are intrinsically subjective units and their study does not aim to examine the functions they develop in discourse but to uncover what kind of subjectivity they encode. In the TEPO, the emphasis is more particularly laid on the subjective operations underlying DMs and a recent publication (Ranger 2018) suggests redefining discourse marking as a complex regulation operation. Such a conception of discourse marking is in my view compatible with the approach adopted in pragmatic studies highlighting the attitudinal function of DMs (see works by Aijmer or Beeching). Of course, some theoretical divergences do remain. Enunciative approaches seek to define for each DM one abstract factor unifying its various pragmatic uses (the “schematic form”), while pragmatic approaches assume that DMs are intrinsically multifunctional units. Some enunciative works—especially within the TEPO—go one step further and claim that the “schematic form” should also apply to the original uses of the DM under scrutiny, thus hypothesising strong continuity between original uses and discourse ones. On the contrary, most pragmatic studies rely on pragmaticalisation, which theoretically posits a rather clear-cut division between pragmaticalised items and non-pragmaticalised ones. Outside the TEPO, other enunciative publications have focused more specifically on DMs and expressions of saying via the notion of “modalisation du dire” originally developed by Authier-Revuz (1995). This notion, which I suggest translating more simply by “metalinguistic reflexivity”, is crucial for the study of DMs of saying. Within the approach mentioned, such DMs are treated as “meta-enunciative” markers: they do not merely comment on discourse broadly speaking, but on commitment. The kind of commitment at stake deals with the speaker’s linguistic choices, according

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to Authier-Revuz. In line with this suggestion, I shall claim in Chapter 2 that the four DMs under discussion in the present book tend to rely— in most of their occurrences—on what I call a “commitment paradox”: they comment on commitment, which has the rather paradoxical effect of making it more opaque and less straightforward, as suggested by Vion (2003, 2011). Despite its relevance, Authier-Revuz’s approach raises one major issue for the analysis conducted here. What is questionable is her seemingly homogeneous conception of markers of saying. She takes for granted some kind of form-meaning correspondence between the presence of the verb dire and the role played by the markers under discussion in marking linguistic inadequacy or dissatisfaction. The possible existence of a subset of DMs of saying has actually been hotly debated in recent publications (Gómez-Jordana Ferary and Anscombre 2015; Paillard 2017). The main theoretical questions raised are as follows: Is the verb dire in such DMs sufficient to posit the existence of a subset of DMs sharing the same semantic-pragmatic? Is it justified to posit such an a priori form-meaning motivation potentially restricting the DMs under discussion to one meaning (or function)? As regards DMs of saying in French, the debate is best summarised in the quotation below, taken from Gómez-Jordana Ferary and Anscombre (2015: 6–7): Are we dealing with the same verb dire in all these phrases – in comme on dit, si j’ose dire or in c’est-à-dire – or are there grammaticalisation processes involved here? Is it possible to posit a category of ‘markers with dire’, i.e. a homogeneous class sharing the same properties? If so, what would these properties be, beyond the presence of the same verb? Who says something and to whom is it said? Who is the origin of speech? What is the speaker’s stance in all these markers, both with respect to the original enunciative source and to the information conveyed? Is it possible to build a methodological frame for these markers that might be transferable for the study of other types of markers? (translation mine)

So, even if formal similarities seem to justify a comparison between these markers, the presence of the same sign may not constitute the ultimate criterion to define a subclass of DMs and must not influence the results

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of a contextual analysis, especially in a usage-based approach to language. Based on previous publications, Gómez-Jordana Ferary and J.-C. Anscombre (2015: 6) actually suggest that these markers, which they call very neutrally “markers with dire” (“marqueurs en dire” in French), are not as homogeneous as envisioned a priori and may be related to very diverse linguistic categories and phenomena: modality, but also more precisely evidentiality19 or polyphony. If we adopt a cross-linguistic perspective, the picture is even more complicated: To what extent are dire and say comparable? In the absence of a large-scale comparative study in the scholarly literature, I shall here only point out the most obvious similarities and differences between the two verbs. Dire and say are each the most common speech verbs in French and English (Gómez-Jordana Ferary and Anscombre 2015; Nita 2006), and they are both very neutral semantically speaking, in comparison with other speech verbs (Rouanne 2014: 89). There exist, however, two major discrepancies between them. First, say is much more frequent than dire in reported speech. English massively uses say to introduce reported speech, whereas French resorts instead to a great variety of verbs (expliquer, déclarer, ajouter ) (Nita 2006). Conversely, say is probably less frequent than dire in other contexts, where it competes with tell, depending on whether the co-speaker is foregrounded or not. It is therefore clearly irrelevant to posit strict equivalence between dire and say. Despite similar uses,20 their comparability remains limited and is in no way sufficient to found a crosslinguistic class or subclass of DMs with the exact same semantic-pragmatic meanings or uses. This goes to show that any comparison between markers of saying should not rely on morphosyntactic similarities only: in my view, these similarities do call for a comparative study (whether in one language only or cross-linguistically), but the comparison must be based on the convergences and divergences observed in the corpus data.21 The four DMs compared here share one pragmatic use, as they may all express metalinguistic comment triggered by some kind of dissatisfaction towards linguistic choices, as in the examples (4) to (7) already mentioned:

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(4) et il me semble qu’il y a des nouvelles technologies qui ont développé, on va dire, une information beaucoup plus transversale ou horizontale avec les blogs sur internet notamment. (5) Le remède européen n’est pas forcément applicable au mauricien cas par cas . Changer la mentalité des mauriciens dans son ensemble et ce dès leur plus jeune âge . Alors , même malades , ils auraient un comportement j’allais dire , responsable et humain . (6) I’m personally really excited to see this narrative play out because – I was going to say it’s ruining middle America by exposing them to the darkness. Do you think it has that element? (7) We had parties. Often. Party people can be, shall we say, clumsy. It took us about three weeks to put a scratch like a canyon across the table. I still don’t know who was responsible, but it didn’t matter.

In such instances, the DMs clearly function as metalinguistic markers: the speaker cannot or does not want to take full responsibility for his/her own linguistic choices—for various referential and/or intersubjective reasons. Despite this shared pragmatic function, the data reveals interesting differences. The most salient observation is that some of the four markers examined seem to have developed other functions, which are not metalinguistic strictly speaking. Let us have a look at three examples: (8) Working with Alex is always a treat because of our long relationship and what our chemistry brings.

Troy: I was going to say, the chemistry is definitely tangible. Anyone who really listens can hear it.

Kim: Thank you.

(9)

Pour ma part, j’ai un parti-pris d’exploiter toujours au maximum l’acoustique naturelle d’une pièce… le fait d’insonoriser, autrement dit de limiter l’émission des ondes sonores hors de la pièce, c’est une opération souvent coûteuse et qui a tendance à détériorer l’acoustique d’une pièce….

sujet à suivre

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ouaip j’allais dire, dans ton cas, insonoriser est surtout une nécessité, pas une volonté première… trouver un appart c’est pas forcément mieux, puisque tu auras des voisins et tout ce que ça engendre (9 ) As far as I’m concerned I always choose to exploit the natural acoustics of a room as much as possible. Soundproofing – that is to say reducing the emission of sound waves out of the room – is often an expensive task that tends to downgrade the room’s acoustics… To be continued Yep I was going to say [j’allais dire], in your case, soundproofing is a necessity, not a choice…finding a flat is not necessarily better, since you’re going to have neighbours and all that comes with it (10)

Anyways, I like to point back to the stats to kind of show what players should be spending most of their time on. Does that make sense?

Andy Zodin: Absolutely. I was going to say, you use the word errormanagement and that was going to be my next point. If you talk to the greatest golfers in the world, they all talk about at one point or another […].

In these three utterances, I was going to say and j’allais dire do not comment on the choice of words. They seem to take on different roles, either expressing shared commitment in response to the co-speaker’s initial commitment in examples (8) and (9), or helping the speaker monitor discourse and shift to a different topic in example (10). An analysis in terms of linguistic non-adequacy within the theoretical framework of “modalisation du dire” would therefore be too restrictive and could not account for some of the occurrences found in the data. The presence of a speech verb is clearly not a sufficient criterion to posit a homogeneous class of markers dedicated to marking linguistic inadequacy. As the examples above indicate, the semantics of dire and say may also lend themselves to uses that go beyond metalinguistic comments, whether these are structural uses (as in example (10)) or dialogical ones (in examples (8) and (9)). I shall suggest

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in Chapters 4 and 5 that these different functions may nonetheless be related to one another in terms of commitment.

Notes 1. See Brisard (2000) for a presentation of Grice’s pragmatic approach. Grice’s model differs from Searle’s and Austin’s in that it more specifically insists on the inferential role played by the addressee in communication. 2. Schneider (2013) calls attention to the fact that Benveniste (1966), a linguist considered a pioneering figure of “énonciation” (see the rest of this chapter), uses the phrase “assertion mitigée” (mitigated assertion) to tackle the phenomena at stake. 3. As will be explained in the following subsection, the French enunciative tradition relies on the notion of “modalisation du dire” to make sense of mitigators based on dire. That notion being difficult to translate into English, I have chosen to use the term “mitigation” in my 2017 publication on DMs of saying (Lansari 2017). 4. It should be noted that Dostie (2004) excludes from the class items known as “connectives” (such as because). 5. According to Brinton (2008: 1), freezing of comment clauses in the first person singular associated with the present tense is the most common case. For j’allais dire and on va dire, Bres and Labeau (2018) point out that freezing may not be complete, insofar as je vais dire and on allait dire are also attested in spoken French—albeit much less frequently. These markers have been left aside for the present study, but future research may shed light on their differences with j’allais dire and on va dire. 6. The notion of “parenthetical” was originally defined by Urmson (1952) and has since been developed in many publications (Kaltenböck 2007; Schneider 2007; Schneider et al. 2015). 7. It should also be noted that another school of pragmatics has developed in Geneva, Switzerland, with the works of Roulet et al. (1985) and his disciples (e.g. Moeschler 2011; Rossari 1997). However, this school is more influenced by Saussure and Ducrot than by the philosophers of language Austin and Searle. 8. The exact reference is his 1970 article entitled “L’appareil formel de l’énonciation”. 9. For a similar position, see Ranger (2018: note 14, p. 80).

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10. For the French occurrences, I have chosen to provide readers with an English translation. For readability’s sake, I have translated the DMs as idiomatically as possible, but the translation proposed for the DM should not be interpreted as equivalence. To avoid this interpretation of my translations, I have left the original DM in brackets. 11. The upper case letters here correspond to an expressive device typical of computer-mediated communication: these letters draw the co-speaker’s attention to the metalinguistic comment introduced by j’allais dire. See Chapter 3 for a discussion of these specific signs in the web data investigated in the present book. 12. A famous aphorism by Culioli encapsulates this conception of communication: “understanding is a special case of misunderstanding” (« la compréhension est un cas particulier du malentendu », Culioli 1990: 39). 13. For a more detailed presentation of the dynamics of meaning in the TEPO, see Ranger (2018: 35). 14. Within the TEPO, Paillard (2009, 2011, 2017) has developed a specific model for “mots du dire” (mostly in Russian and Khmer) based on a very high level of abstraction. This level of abstraction makes it difficult to present within a short overview of linguistic approaches, which explains why I only briefly mention it. See Ranger (2018) for a detailed presentation. 15. The theory of polyphony developed by Anscombre and his disciples builds on Bakhtine’s (1929/1970) analysis of literary works. Polyphony, which assumes that several voices or viewpoints are co-present within discourse, has also given rise to another linguistic school: the Scapoline (Nølke 2017). 16. Gómez-Jordana Ferary and Anscombre (2015: 8) rightly note the abundance of DMs based on dire in French. Rouanne and Anscombre (2016: 365–369) actually list more than 100 markers involving dire in contemporary French, but some of these markers are more akin to expressions (Marque-Pucheu 2010) than to DMs, for instance je ne te le dirai pas deux fois (I shan’t tell you twice). 17. A representative example would be the following: He would drop her, of course, sooner or later - or rather, he would engineer it so that she dropped him. (Misfortunes of Nigel, F. Pitt-Kethley, 1991, BNC; Pennec 2018). Or rather does not question, or reflect on, the enunciative act in itself, but indicates that the speaker is monitoring speech in another direction. 18. In her seminal book, Authier-Revuz (1995) distinguishes between 4 types of inadequacy (“non-coincidence”): inadequacy between speaker and co-

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speaker; inadequacy of discourse to itself; inadequacy between words and the world; and inadequacy of words to themselves. 19. For instance, Gómez-Jordana Ferary (2015) shows that comme qui dirait, comme dirait l’autre, comme tu dis are best captured in evidential terms. Steuckardt (2014) similarly examines on va dire within an evidential perspective. 20. Studies on dire (Franckel 2015; Khachaturyan 2007, 2011) and say (Goossens 1982) highlight interesting similarities between the two verbs: they may both express “linguistic action” (Goossens 1982), that is to say actual speech production (in which case they correspond to utter ) or linguistic communication, when they introduce reported speech. They may also have more cognitive uses as opinion verbs, in which case they are close to think/hypothesise. 21. For a similar approach, see Lansari (2008, 2009) on the exponents of futurity aller + inf. and be going to: the presence of a motion verb in both constructions is an interesting starting point for the comparison, but the corpus study reveals many differences in the real usage of the two markers.

References Abouda, L., & Skrovec, M. (2014). « Du mouvement au figement: pragmaticalisation de la forme on va dire. Etude micro-diachronique sur un corpus oral ». Colloque international « Langage et Analogie. Figement. Polysémie », Septembre 2014. Grenade, Espagne. Aijmer, K. (1997). I think—An English modal particle. In T. Swan & O. J. Westvik (Eds.), Modality in Germanic languages. Historical and comparative perspectives (pp. 1–47). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Aijmer, K. (2013). Understanding pragmatic markers: A variational pragmatic approach. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Aijmer, K. (2016). Pragmatic markers as constructions: The case of anyway. In G. Kaltenböck, E. Keizer, & A. Lohmann (Eds.), Outside the clause: Form and function of extra-clausal constituents (pp. 29–58). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Andersen, H. L. (1996). « Verbes parenthétiques comme marqueurs discursifs ». In C. Muller (Ed.), Dépendance et intégration syntaxique: Subordination, coordination, connexion (pp. 307–315). Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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Andersen, H. L. (2007). Marqueurs discursifs propositionnels. Langue française, 154 (2), 13–28. Anscombre, J.-Cl., Opperman-Marsaux, E., & Rodriguez Somolinos, A. (Eds.). (2014). Médiativité, polyphonie et modalité en français: études synchroniques et diachroniques. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Authier-Revuz, J. (1995). Ces mots qui ne vont pas de soi. Boucles réflexives et non-coïncidences du dire (Vols. 1 & 2). Paris: Larousse. Authier-Revuz, J. (2003). Avant-propos. In J. Authier-Revuz, M. Doury, & S. Reboul-Touré (Eds.), Parler des mots – Le fait autonymique en discours (pp. 7–17). Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Bakhtine, M. (1929/1970). Problèmes de la poétique de Dostoïevski (G. Verret, Trans.). Lausanne: Editions l’Age d’homme. Bally, C. (1926). Le langage et la vie. Paris: Payot. Beeching, K. (2016). Pragmatic markers in British English: Meaning in social interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beeching, K. (2017). Reflexivity and discourse-pragmatic variation and change. In H. Tyne, M. Bilger, P. Cappeau, & E. Guerin (Eds.), La variation en question(s). Hommages à Françoise Gadet (pp. 157–179). Bruxelles: Peter Lang. Beeching, K., & Detges, U. (2014). Discourse functions at the right and left periphery: Crosslinguistic investigations of language use and language change. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Benveniste, E. (1966). Problèmes de linguistique générale (Vol. 1). Paris: Gallimard. Benveniste, E. (1974). Problèmes de linguistique générale (Vol. 2). Paris: Gallimard. Blakemore, D. (2002). Relevance and linguistic meaning: The semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blanche-Benveniste, C. (1984). La Dénomination dans le français parlé: Une interprétation pour les ‘répétitions’ et les ‘hésitations’. Recherches Sur Le Français Parlé, 6, 109–130. Blanche-Benveniste, C. (1989). Constructions verbales ‘en incise’ et rection faible des verbes. Recherches Sur Le Français Parlé, 9, 53–74. Bres, J., & Labeau, E. (2018). Des constructions de aller et de venir grammaticalisés en auxiliaires. Syntaxe et Sémantique, 19, 49–86. Brinton, L. J. (2005). Processes underlying the development of pragmatic markers: The case of (I) say. In J. Skaffari, et al. (Eds.), Opening windows on texts and discourses (pp. 279–299). New York and Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Brinton, L. J. (2008). The comment clause in English: Syntactic origins and pragmatic developments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Erman, B., & Kotsinas, U.-B. (1993). Pragmaticalization: The case of ba and you know. Studier i modem sprevetenskap, 76–93. New series 10, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Fischer, K. (2006). Towards an understanding of the spectrum of approaches to discourse particles: Introduction to the volume. In K. Fischer (Ed.), Approaches to discourse particles (pp. 1–20). Oxford and Amsterdam: Elsevier. Ferenþík, M. (2005). Organization of repair in talk-in-interaction and politeness theory and practice. In English studies: Proceedings from the eighth conference of British, American and Canadian studies (pp. 69–78). Brno: Masarykova univerzita. Franckel, J.-J. (2015). Dire. Langue Française, 186 (2), 87–102. Franckel, J.-J. (2016). Formes impératives de dire: disons, dis, dites et leurs variantes. In L. Rouanne & J.-Cl. Anscombre (Eds.), Histoires de dire. Petit glossaire des marqueurs formés sur le verbe dire (pp. 131–154). Bern: Peter Lang. Fraser, B. (1999). What are discourse markers? Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 219–236. Fried, M., & Östman, J.-A. (2005). Grammar and spoken language: The case of pragmatic markers. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 1752–1778. Fuchs, C., & Le Goffic, P. (1992). Les linguistiques contemporaines. Repères théoriques. Paris: Hachette Supérieur. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Anchor/Doubleday. Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gómez-Jordana Ferary, S. (2015). Dans la famille des comme on dit, qui dit quoi? Polyphonie et médiativité chez comme qui dirait, comme disait l’autre, comme tu dis. Langue Française, 186 (2) (Dire et ses marqueurs), 65–86. Gómez-Jordana Ferary, S., & Anscombre, J.-Cl. (2015). Introduction: Dire et ses marqueurs. Langue Française, 186 (Dire et ses marqueurs), 5–12. Goossens, L. (1982). Say: Focus on the message. In R. Driven, L. Goossens, Y. Putseys, & E. Vorlat (Eds.), The scene of linguistic action and its perspectivization by SPEAK, TALK, SAY and TELL (pp. 85–132). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review, 66, 377–388. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press. Guillaume, G. (1929). Temps et verbe. Théorie des aspects, des modes et des temps followed by L’architectonique du temps dans les langues classiques. Paris: Honoré Champion. Hancil, S. (2015). The grammaticalization of final but: From conjunction to final particle. In S. Hancil, A. Haselow, & M. Post (Eds.), Final particles (pp. 197–217). Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.

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Hancil, S., Haselow, A., & Post, M. (Eds.). (2015). Final Particles. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Heine, B. (1993). Auxiliaries. Cognitive forces and grammaticalization. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heine, B. (2013). On discourse markers: Grammaticalization, pragmaticalization or something else? Linguistics, 51(6), 1205–1247. Heine, B., Kaltenböck, G., & Kuteva, T. (2015). Some observations on the evolution of final particle. In S. Hancil, A. Haselow, & M. Post (Eds.), Final particles (pp. 111–140). Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Heine, B., Kaltenböck, G., Kuteva, T., & Long, H. (2013). An outline of discourse grammar. In S. Bischoff & C. Jany (Eds.), Functional approaches to language (pp. 175–233). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/ 9783110285321.155. Hopper, P. J., & Traugott, E. C. (1993). Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johansson, M., & Suomela-Salmi, E. (2008). Énonciation: French pragmatic approach(es). In Handbook of pragmatics online (Vols. 12, pp. 1–38). https:// benjamins.com/online/hop2/articles/eno1. Jucker, A. H., Smith, S. W., & Lüdge, T. (2003). Interactive aspects of vagueness in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 35, 1737–1769. Kaltenböck, G. (2007). Spoken parenthetical clauses in English: A taxonomy. In N. Dehé & Y. Kavalova (Eds.), Parentheticals (pp. 25–52). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kaltenböck, G. (2010). Pragmatic functions of parenthetical I think. In W. Mihatsch, S. Schneider, & G. Kaltenböck (Eds.), New approaches to hfobjectifs, stratégiesedging (pp. 237–266). Brill: Leiden. Khachaturyan, E. (2007). Les marqueurs de reformulation formés à partir du verbe dire. In M.-C. Le Bot (Ed.), Actes du Colloque international « Voies de la reformulation: contraintes – objectifs, stratégies ». Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Khachaturyan, E. (2011). Disons et pour ainsi dire, deux marqueurs de la nonprise en charge? In P. Dendale & D. Coltier (Eds.), La prise en charge énonciative. Etudes théoriques et empiriques (pp. 163–181). Bruxelles: De Boeck. Kitzinger, C. (2013). Repair. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 229–256). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Labeau, E. (2012). Une façon d’indiquer la « non-coincidence entre les mots et les choses », on va dire.… SHS Web of Conferences (Vol 1, pp. 573–582). Lansari, L. (2008). Commitment: A parameter for the contrastive analysis of be going to and aller + inf. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 22, Commitment, 179–196.

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Lansari, L. (2009). The be going to periphrasis in if-clauses: A comparison with the aller + infinitive periphrasis in French. Languages in Contrast, 9 (2), 202–224. Lansari, L. (2010a). « On va dire: vers un emploi modalisant d’aller + inf. ». In E. Moliné & C. Vetters (Eds.), Temps, aspect et modalité en français. Cahiers Chronos (Vol. 21, pp. 119–139). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Lansari, L. (2010b). « On va dire: modalisation du dire et denomination. ». In P. Frath, L. Lansari, & J. Pauchard (Eds.), Res Per Nomen II—Langue, référence et anthropologie (pp. 277–295). Reims: EPURE. Lansari, L. (2017). I was going to say/j’allais dire as discourse markers in contemporary English and French. Languages in Contrast, 17 (2), 205–228. Lansari, L. (2018). « J’allais dire: de la périphrase verbale au marqueur discursif ». In G. Dostie & F. Lefeuvre (Eds.), Lexique, grammaire, discours: les marqueurs discursifs (pp. 433–452). Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. (« Travaux de stylistique et de linguistique françaises »). Lewis, D. M. (2006). Discourse markers in English: A discourse-pragmatic view. In K. Fischer (Ed.), Approaches to discourse particles (pp. 43–59). Oxford and Amsterdam: Elsevier. Marque-Pucheu, C. (2010). Exhaustivité et représentativité des expressions comportant dire dans Locutions en français de J. Dubois et F. Dubois-Charlier. Langages 2010/3, 179–180, 259–276. https://doi.org/10.3917/lang.179.0259. Mélis, G. (2012). Les enjeux de la notion d’ajustement: pour une pragmatique intégrée radicale. In C. Filippi-Deswelle (Ed.), L’ajustement dans la TOE d’Antoine Culioli (pp. 63–80). Moeschler, J. (2011). Causal, inferential and temporal connectives: Why parce que is the only causal connective in French. In S. Hancil (Ed.), Marqueurs discursifs et subjectivité (pp. 97–114). Rouen: Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre. Nita, R. (2006). Discours rapporté, repérages et organisation textuelle: étude contrastive anglais-français-roumain (PhD dissertation). University of Poitiers, France. Nølke, H. (2017). Linguistic polyphony: The Scandinavian approach, ScaPoLine. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Paillard, D. (2009). Prise en charge, commitment ou scène énonciative. Langue Française, 162(2), 109–128. Paillard, D. (2011). Marqueurs discursifs et scène énonciative. In S. Hancil (Ed.), Marqueurs discursifs et subjectivité (pp. 13–39). Rouen: Presses Universitaires de Rouen. Paillard, D. (2017). Comparaison des marqueurs discursifs: introduction. Langages n°207. In C. Bonnot & D. Paillard (Eds.), Comparaison des marqueurs discursifs (pp. 5–16).

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Pennec, B. (2018). Discourse readjustment(s) in contemporary English, translated from the French by K. Docwra & B. Pennec (378pp.). London: Wiley- ISTE. Péroz, P. (2013). C’est juste pour dire: Variation sémantique et régularité des opérations linguistiques dans le cas du verbe dire. Pratiques, 159/160. Ranger, G. (2015). Mind you, an enunciative description. Anglophonia. https:// journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/534. Ranger, G. (2018). Discourse markers. An enunciative approach. London: Palgrave. Rey-Debove, J. (1978). Le métalangage. Etude linguistique du discours sur le langage. Paris: Le Robert. Riou, M. (2015). The grammar of topic transition in American English conversation. Topic transition design and management in typical and atypical conversations (schizophrenia) (PhD dissertation). University Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, University Paris Diderot (Paris 7). Rossari, C. (1997). Les opérations de reformulation: analyse du processus et des marques dans une perspective contrastive français-italien. Bern: Peter Lang. Deuxième édition. Rossari, C., Beaulieu Masson, A., Cojocariu, C., & Razgouliaeva, A. (2004). Autour des connecteurs. Réflexions sur l’énonciation et la portée. Bern: Peter Lang. Rouanne, L. (2014). De la médiativité à la modalisation: si on peut dire comme marqueur d’un méta-discours. In J.-Cl. Anscombre, E. Opperman-Marsaux, & A. Rodriguez Somolinos (Eds.), Médiativité, polyphonie et modalité en français: études synchroniques et diachroniques (pp. 85–99). Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Rouanne, L., & Anscombre, J.-Cl. (Eds.). (2016). Histoires de dire. Petit glossaire des marqueurs formés sur le verbe dire. Bern: Peter Lang. Roulet, E., et al. (1985). L’articulation du discours en français contemporain. Bern: Peter Lang. Saunier, E. (2012). Disons: un impératif de dire? Remarques sur les propriétés du marqueur et son comportement dans les reformulations. L’Information Grammaticale, 132, 25–34. Saussure, F. (1995). Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. Schegloff, E., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53, 361–382. Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, S. (2007). Reduced parenthetical clauses as mitigators: A corpus study of spoken French, Italian and Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schneider, S. (2013). Clauses parenthétiques réduites et type d’interaction verbale. Quelques considerations. In H. Chuquet, R. Nita, & F. Valetopou-

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2 Defining a Theoretical and Methodological Framework for DMs of “Saying”

As shown in Chapter 1, DMs have been extensively studied in the last 30 years, in both English and French linguistics, from various theoretical and methodological perspectives. The present study adopts a French–English contrastive approach to four DMs that have been largely overlooked in the literature: on va dire and j’allais dire in French, compared to shall we say and I was going to say in English. It should be noted that I only focus on I was going to say, not on I was gonna say: although related, the two forms most certainly have different distributional properties, as is the case of be going to and gonna (Berglund 2000). I was gonna say will be the object of future research. The DMs chosen here are clausal units containing an exponent of futurity and the prototypical speech verb in English and French (say/ dire). Despite obvious common points, I assume that they display subtle differences in terms of language use (frequency, preferred collocations, syntactic behaviour), differences that are worth investigating more closely. Section 2.1 explains the choice of the four DMs under discussion and shows that they all rely on a “commitment paradox”: the speaker says—that is to say, publicly declares—something, while expressing that his/her commitment to the propositional content is problematic. Despite this common feature, a usage-based analysis is necessary to assess the divergences between the four markers. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 present the © The Author(s) 2020 L. Lansari, A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24896-3_2

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theoretical and methodological issues raised by the comparative analysis conducted here and the solutions I wish to put forward. In Sect. 2.2, I lay out the main theoretical tools used for the analysis. I rely on an enunciative approach that seeks to assign a unique characterisation to each of the DM under scrutiny, but the approach adopted in this book departs from Culioli’s Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations (Culioli 1990, 1999a, b) on a number of points: the characterisation delineated for each DM takes into account abstract operations but also involves other parameters, for reasons explained in Sect. 2.2.1. Moreover, I develop a non-compositional approach to DMs that is compatible with the notion of pragmaticalisation (2.2.2). Section 2.3 deals with the corpus data and the methodology. Based on comparable data drawn from web corpora (of the TenTen family) presented in Sect. 2.3.1, the linguistic analysis is a multi-dimensional one correlating various semantic, pragmatic and syntactic criteria that have been annotated manually (Sect. 2.3.2). The goal of the comparative analysis is clearly twofold. On the empirical level, it aims to describe as fully as possible four DMs that have rarely been studied before. Theoretically and methodologically speaking, I wish to offer an original framework based on a multi-level analysis of the corpus data and on an enunciative approach that does not restrict DMs to their pragmatic functions. Let us first focus on the specific properties of the DMs of saying under discussion.

2.1

DMs of Saying: To Say or Not to Say?

The four DMs under scrutiny display formal and functional similarities. They all contain a speech verb or verbum dicendi to use the Latin term— dire in French and say in English, which may be considered the most prototypical speech verbs in either language (Goossens 1982; Nita 2006; Rouanne 2014)—and an exponent of futurity (the French periphrasis aller + infinitive, the semi-modal be going to, the modal auxiliary shall ). They are all fairly rare in contemporary French and English (Lansari 2017),1 especially in comparison with better-described DMs such as disons (Saunier 2012), je veux dire (Teston-Bonnard 2008) or other DMs which

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do not contain verbs of saying (enfin, Beeching 2011, you know, I think, Ranger 2018, I mean, Aijmer 2013 inter alia). On va dire, j’allais dire and I was going to say are in fact “emergent” (Siouffi et al. 2016) markers which have developed only recently and are still circumscribed to rather informal registers (Lansari 2010a, b, 2017; Steuckardt 2014, 2016). Shall we say has been attested since 1822 in British English according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but its frequency of use remains low (see Chapter 4). This low frequency may explain why this set of markers has attracted so little attention in the literature so far. Contrary to more common DMs that have obvious “speech management” (Diewald 2013) functions (topic shifting, etc.)—such as well, for instance—the four DMs under scrutiny are less bleached semantically speaking and clearly have to do with speaker commitment due to the presence of say/ dire, as established in Chapter 1. I hypothesise more particularly that they rely on what might be called a “commitment paradox”: the speaker uses them to say something, i.e. to publicly declare his/her commitment, but their use has the effect of highlighting that commitment is problematic. Like DMs in general, they are metalinguistic “reflexive” markers commenting on the “fabric of talk” (Aijmer 2013; Beeching 2017). Their metalinguistic reflexivity bears more specifically on commitment as developed in Chapter 1 (1.2): it is the speaker’s commitment that is being commented upon in the case of DMs of saying. Prototypically, the presence of these markers makes the utterance less assertive and speaker commitment more opaque, as illustrated by the examples below taken from the TenTen French and English corpora: (1) et il me semble qu’il y a des nouvelles technologies qui ont développé, on va dire, une information beaucoup plus transversale ou horizontale avec les blogs sur internet notamment. (1 ) and it seems to me that there are new technologies that have developed let’s say [on va dire] much more transversal or horizontal information techniques especially with blogs on the internet. (2) Le remède européen n’est pas forcément applicable au mauricien cas par cas . Changer la mentalité des mauriciens dans son ensemble et ce dès leur

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plus jeune âge . Alors , même malades , ils auraient un comportement j’allais dire , responsable et humain . (2 ) The European solution cannot necessarily be applied to Mauritius. Changing the Mauricians’ way of thinking as a whole starting very early. Then, even if ill, they would have a [j’allais dire] responsible and human behaviour, let’s say. (3) I’m personally really excited to see this narrative play out because – I was going to say it’s ruining middle America by exposing them to the darkness. Do you think it has that element? (4) We had parties. Often. Party people can be, shall we say, clumsy. It took us about three weeks to put a scratch like a canyon across the table. I still don’t know who was responsible, but it didn’t matter.

This “commitment paradox” raises the following questions: What is being said exactly? Is the speaker taking full responsibility for his/her discourse? Does she/he still want to say or not say what is being said? The examples above clearly show that futurity (or future-in-the-past in the case of j’allais dire and I was going to say) is no longer at stake. If futurity ceases to be relevant, how do we make sense of these markers semantically and pragmatically speaking: What is left of their original semantic content? What structural and/or attitudinal role do they play in the utterance? The answers to these questions will be progressively provided in the chapters dedicated to the corpus findings. Despite this common “commitment paradox”, the four DMs under scrutiny are not strictly equivalent. For instance, replacing on va dire by j’allais dire in example (1) leads to a slightly different interpretation in terms of speaker commitment: (1a) et il me semble qu’il y a des nouvelles technologies qui ont développé, j’allais dire, une information beaucoup plus transversale ou horizontale avec les blogs sur internet notamment.

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On va dire lays emphasis on the existence of a consensus (shared commitment) between speaker and co-speaker,2 whereas j’allais dire gives an overtone of personal hesitation to the utterance. Moreover, as suggested in Chapter 1, some DMs may have developed specific uses with no comparable equivalents in other DMs. In particular, I was going to say seems to have acquired unique structural and dialogical functions that do not deal with metalinguistic comment but draw attention to other issues. Such functions are illustrated by the occurrences below: (5) Working with Alex is always a treat because of our long relationship and what our chemistry brings.

Troy: I was going to say, the chemistry is definitely tangible. Anyone who really listens can hear it.

Kim: Thank you.

(6)

Anyways, I like to point back to the stats to kind of show what players should be spending most of their time on. Does that make sense?

Andy Zodin: Absolutely. I was going to say, you use the word errormanagement and that was going to be my next point. If you talk to the greatest golfers in the world, they all talk about at one point or another […].

In example (5), I was going to say is clearly anaphoric: the speaker indicates that she/he shares the same opinion as the co-speaker on the topic under discussion. In example (6), the DM is used as an indexical cue pointing forward to another topic (see and that was going to be my next point ). No such uses are found with on va dire and shall we say. J’allais dire may be used in contexts similar to (5), but seemingly less frequently (see Chapter 5). Such uses also highlight problems with commitment, though not in terms of metalinguistic comment as argued in Chapter 5. This entails that the morphosyntactic similarities between the markers compared here do not guarantee any strict semantic or functional equivalence in terms of language use. Therefore, the choice of these precise DMs is not based on any predefined translational equivalence but on the assumption that morphosyntactic similarities may lead to relevant

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convergences in language use. The stake of the study is precisely to test such an assumption against the corpus findings. In order to gain a fuller picture of the linguistic characteristics of the DMs under discussion, it is therefore necessary to carry out a usage-based and multi-dimensional analysis taking into account semantic and pragmatic factors, but also syntactic ones. The DMs compared here have developed out of full clauses (with the verb dire/ say followed by a que- or that /ø complementiser, e.g. j’allais dire que, I was going to say that, etc.) and may have acquired a specific syntactic status as “comment clauses” (Brinton 2008), “extra-clausal constituents” (Kaltenböck et al. 2016) or “reduced parenthetical clauses” (Schneider 2007, 2013). Assigning a precise syntactic status to each DM—examining its preferred position and scope over its host—is also one of the aims of the present book. To carry out such an analysis, several important theoretical and methodological issues are to be addressed. I shall start with a presentation of my theoretical framework, which is broadly speaking based on Culioli’s Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations (TEPO), although it departs from it on a number of points.

2.2

An Original Enunciative Framework

As explained in Chapter 1, enunciative approaches to DMs posit that each DM has its own “invariant value” based on a set of abstract operations. It follows that the diverse pragmatic functions that may be observed in context are considered contextual effects. In contrast to approaches that see DMs as intrinsically multifunctional items, my own approach therefore seeks to assign one unique characterisation to each of the DMs under discussion. However, contrary to recent “énonciation”-based publications (Paillard 2009; Ranger 2018) advocating a characterisation based on the “invariant” (under the name “schematic form”), I assume a slightly different position. In my view, this invariant, based on enunciative operations, is not sufficient to characterise the global linguistic behaviour of the DMs under study: pragmatic functions, syntactic behaviour and collocation patterns also need to be part of our description of the global behaviour of these DMs. In my own model, I first suggest defining, for each DM,

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an operation-based semantic characterisation dealing with commitment. Given the level of abstraction of the characterisation contemplated, it may be impossible to assign one specific characterisation for each DM. This is why I then propose to combine this characterisation with other parameters (pragmatic, syntactic, etc.) to define what I call the “discursive profile” of each DM. I shall start in Subsection 2.2.1 by explaining the semantic characterisation advocated here. In the next section (2.2.2), I shall elaborate on the notion of “discursive profile”, which is central to my conception of discourse marking.

2.2.1 Semantic Characterisation: An Operation-Based Characterisation In relation to the theoretical position defended here, it seems necessary to justify the relevance of defining an operation-based semantic characterisation for each DM, in contrast with the multifunctionality usually posited in pragmatics. The theoretical issue raised here may be formulated as follows: Why adopt a unitary approach based on abstract operations for a given DM instead of the multifunctional characterisation usually found in pragmatic studies? The criticism that often arises regarding the definition of an invariant value deals with the level of abstraction involved: What may be the interest of defining such an abstract value disconnected from contextual uses? The main answer is that trying to define a core semantic value based on abstract operations for each DM may help differentiate DMs with close pragmatic functions that could otherwise be seen as roughly equivalent. For instance, on va dire, j’allais dire, shall we say and I was going to say are all liable to stand as “repair” devices3 as exemplified in the following examples taken from the TenTen corpora: (7) Exactement, encore hier je me suis “engueulé” (le mot est un peu fort, mais bon on a bien débattu on va dire) avec un mec à ce sujet, GD a encore beaucoup de choses à nous faire découvrir comme tu dis, ils nous réservent beaucoup de surprises.

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(7 ) Exactly, just yesterday I had a “row” (the word is a bit strong, but I mean we had a discussion [on va dire]) with a guy about it, GD still has many things to show us as you say, we’re in for a lot of surprises. (8) Le mois de Ramadhan se vit, ou se fait ressentir, j’allais dire, dans l’humilité et l’intimité la plus totale. (8 ) the month of Ramadhan has to be lived, or rather felt [j’allais dire] in the utmost modesty and intimacy. (9) So, it’s a very…some fields look just downright pathetic right now. I can tell growers, give it a little time, these temperatures are going to warm up here, and once we do get a little roots under it, that plant’s going to take off, and this color is going to change, but it is just distressing. I was going to say, just wait, it’s going to grow out of it. (10) So, the older we get (or shall we say, the more maturity we have), the more we tend to do hings based upon what we have experienced in the past. That’s fine when it comes to not making the same mistake.

In each of the occurrences above, two words or phrases are competing and one is used to “repair” or rather reformulate the other. Identifying this function in a list of discourse functions is of course relevant, but in a comparative perspective, it may not bring to light the distinctive features of the reformulation strategy expressed by each DM. The corpus findings will actually show that this function is deployed very differently for each DM under discussion. A connected issue that needs to be addressed at this point regards formalisation. As previously stated, the invariant posited in the TEPO is formalised under the label “schematic form” and involves abstract symbols. Although the semantic characterisation I seek to define is not strictly equivalent to the “schematic form”—as it does not characterise the whole behaviour of the DMs under scrutiny—it does rely on abstract operations as well. I am aware that resorting to abstraction runs the risk of being too opaque for readers who are not familiar with this theory. The use of abstract symbols implies mastering the symbolic system in use within the theory and is necessarily less immediately understandable than metalanguage.

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On the other hand, abstraction avoids the ambiguities and approximations that may occur in metalanguage.4 The question that naturally arises next is: What are the abstract symbols upon which the semantic characterisation may rely? For the DMs of saying under scrutiny, which raise crucial issues in relation to commitment, I assume that the semantic characterisation should be based on the definition of commitment. As defined by Culioli, commitment is part and parcel of assertion, asserting being the most basic modality in Culioli’s model (see Chapter 1): “Assertion can be seen as an operation whereby a speaker moves from a pre-assertive plane p/non-p, to subjective commitment to a polar value, either p or non-p” (emphasis mine, translation by Ranger 2018). The previous section dedicated to “commitment paradox” has made it clear that the four DMs are not used to assert: on the contrary, they mitigate commitment or highlight a problem with commitment. The quotation above shows that commitment relies on two major elements that are involved in the kind of utterance regulation underlying the DMs under scrutiny. The first one concerns the subjective origin committing to the ongoing discourse and the question that arises is: Does the DM present commitment (even if commitment is mitigated) in relation to the speaker alone, relatively to both speaker and co-speaker, or even relatively to a more diffuse origin (the vox populi, for instance)? The second element deals with the value (the propositional content) for which the speaker takes responsibility (even minimal or incomplete responsibility): Do the DMs of saying clearly indicate that p is chosen or do they treat non-p (or p5 ) as a possibility? Let us go back to example (8) to illustrate this idea: (8) Le mois de Ramadhan se vit, ou se fait ressentir, j’allais dire, dans l’humilité et l’intimité la plus totale. (8 ) the month of Ramadhan has to be lived, or rather felt [j’allais dire] in the utmost modesty and intimacy.

“se vit” corresponds to p as it is initially presented as the choice made by the speaker. The discourse chunk between commas actually corresponds to p : p is a competing linguistic choice that the speaker eventually

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introduces. Chapter 5 will show that with j’allais dire, p and p are almost always simultaneously present in the utterance. This fact will be interpreted as a central characteristic of j’allais dire in relation to utterance regulation. Actually, each DM may have its own way of relating p to p : some systematically associate different formulations, thus exposing the inherently unstable dynamics of language, whereas others comment on linguistic choices in a more stable way. So, the semantic characterisation I wish to define is based on the two basic dimensions involved in assertion: the origin of commitment and the p/p relationship. There is no assertion strictly speaking with the four DMs examined, but they still present commitment (though mitigated or problematic) as emanating from someone and as regarding a particular propositional content. The semantic characterisation posited here may be viewed as an ad hoc model that might not be used for other DMs. I am well aware of this limitation, but in my view, DMs of saying raise specific issues in relation to commitment that have not been fully explored in the scholarly literature. At this point, another question needs answering: How do we ascribe these two operations to the DMs under discussion? Of course, it cannot be done automatically on the whole corpus and instead requires conducting a fine-grained contextual analysis of the utterances. That is why I shall rely on a sample for each DM. Samples of 150 occurrences were thus randomly selected and closely examined to elucidate, for each occurrence, the origin of commitment and the ways p and p are related. Chapter 3 will actually show that it may not be possible to distinguish between the four DMs on the basis of this semantic characterisation only. Instead, the semantic analysis suggests pairing off the DMs under scrutiny: two different semantic characterisations may be defined, one common to both on va dire and shall we say, and the other common to both j’allais dire and I was going to say. Now that I have clarified how I intend to assign an operation-based semantic characterisation to each DM, I shall move on to the second point, which concerns the limits of this semantic characterisation. In the theoretical model I develop, assigning one unique characterisation to each DM is a complex process that entails defining a semantic value based on enunciative operations (origin of commitment, p/p relation), but which

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also encompasses pragmatic, syntactic and discursive features. All these elements are necessary to define what I call a “discursive profile” unique to each DM.

2.2.2 Definition of the “Discursive Profile” One of the criticisms often formulated towards operation-based characterisations within enunciative models is that they are excessively abstract. I assume that such characterisations are essential but not sufficient, at least for the DMs under discussion. Even if the pragmatic functions one given DM is likely to develop are context-dependent, it is highly relevant for our understanding of this specific DM to know that it tends to be associated with a particular function, which is not necessarily the case for other DMs. For instance, as regards on va dire and shall we say, it is crucial to the comparison between the two DMs to know that the former may acquire exemplification functions whereas the latter cannot, like in example (11) below: (11) Je me souviens qu’il y a eu un sujet concernant des vêtements qui désignerai le rang social d’un personnage, bah dans un sens ça y ressemblerai sauf que cet uniforme ne prendrais pas de cases dans l’inventaire allez on va dire comme spiderman quand il passe du déguisement rouge au déguisement noir. (11 ) I remember there was a discussion about how clothes indicate the social position of a character, well in a way that’s about it except that this uniform wouldn’t count in the inventory ok let’s say [on va dire] like Spiderman when he changes out of his red outfit into the black one.

In this instance, on va dire introduces an example to illustrate what is being said and could be paraphrased by for example. Shall we say has no such use and in my translation I propose to translate on va dire by let’s say, whose exemplification function is well attested (Brinton 2005).6 I therefore propose to integrate pragmatic tendencies within the characterisation of each DM. This theoretical position entails that, in my view, pragmatics and “énonciation” are in some way reconcilable: my

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own approach to DMs seeks to put forward an enunciative approach in terms of semantic characterisation while paying attention to the varied and complex pragmatic strategies underlying the use of the DMs of saying under scrutiny (face-saving pre-emptive strategies, irony, etc.). So, all the occurrences of the four samples are also examined in terms of pragmatic functions and pragmatic strategies: the set of operations defined above in relation to assertion (commitment modality and p/p relation) gives rise to various functions depending on the context. Some of these functions are common to all DMs, while others are marker-specific. Similarly, syntactic behaviours and collocation patterns are crucial to our understanding of the DMs. To integrate these multi-level parameters, I defined a manual annotation grid: each relevant discourse use was analysed using this grid, which will be presented in more details in Sect. 2.3 below. Ranger’s (2018) approach pays great attention to these aspects in his analysis of the corpus data, but does not genuinely integrate them within the invariant values he seeks to define theoretically speaking. My position is that syntactic and collocational parameters—along with pragmatic functions as mentioned above—are also part and parcel of the characterisation of DMs. To sum up my theoretical model, let us say that each DM is characterised by a complex constellation of parameters I propose to call its “discursive profile”. It encompasses abstract enunciative operations, pragmatic, syntactic and collocational factors. I now turn to the last theoretical aspect that has to be addressed: How to conceptualise the link between original uses and discourse uses of DMs within my model?

2.2.3 “Enonciation” and Pragmaticalisation? One last specific theoretical point that needs to be settled concerns the relationships between the original full matrix clauses containing exponents of futurity (j’allais dire que…, I was going to say that …) and the DMs under scrutiny. As detailed in Chapter 1, most works on DMs posit a pragmaticalisation process leading from full clausal status to DM status. In enunciative approaches, the concept of pragmaticalisation is nonetheless

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severely criticised, because it relies on a strict opposition between grammar and pragmatics (Franckel 2016). Enunciative theories do not posit such a clear-cut dichotomy and analyse DMs as compositional units deriving their “invariant” from the semantics of each of their components (Ranger 2018; Saunier 2012; Khachaturyan 2011). The emphasis put on semantics in enunciative theories is in my view very appealing as it may shed light on the semantic links between the DMs and the string of markers they derive from, thus possibly explaining why a particular string of markers has given rise to a DM. Yet it cannot fully account for the fact that in contemporary French and English, the markers under scrutiny cease to function as exponents of futurity—at least in some of their uses—and are then best analysed as pragmaticalised, entrenched markers in their own right. I argue that a strict compositional approach is not relevant for the DMs under discussion. Instead, I adopt a semantic approach accounting for the links between the initial full clauses and the resulting DMs, while treating the latter as (more or less) pragmaticalised units in their own right, with specific usage-based properties. In the chapters dedicated to the corpus findings, I contend that the way each DM constructs commitment and relates p to p can be somehow related to the semantics of the original string of markers (exponents of futurity, tenses, pronouns). In that respect, my theoretical position may be interpreted as intermediate between the standard pragmatic view on diachrony and enunciative compositional approaches. The main theoretical tenets used for the study will be summarised in the next subsection.

2.2.4 Summary of the Theoretical Model I hope to have shown that my theoretical model builds on major enunciative principles, while proposing substantial modifications to enrich the analysis and take into account parameters that are often neglected in enunciative approaches. Like mainstream enunciative publications, the present book relies on a unitary view of DMs: the aim of the study is not to list the various pragmatic functions observed in the data, but to assign to each DM one characterisation unifying the different contextual uses. The

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characterisation I wish to propose relies on abstract enunciative operations, but only to some extent: in my view, pragmatic, syntactic and collocational features also help define a specific “discursive profile” for each DM. It is this theoretical position that has led me to design a multi-dimensional annotation grid for the analysis of the data. As regards categorisation issues, I fully subscribe to the enunciative definition of discourse marking. I therefore consider DMs to reflect speaker stance, not as functional tools dealing with “speech management”. More specifically, following Ranger’s (2018) definition, I view linguistic items involved in discourse marking as indexical cues signalling an operation of utterance regulation. For the four DMs of saying under study, I assume that this regulation operation bears on commitment: the speaker comments on commitment, specifying the origin of commitment and discussing the propositional content endorsed (therefore potentially introducing other propositional contents). Instead of clarifying commitment, this mitigates and opacifies commitment within what I have called a “commitment paradox”: it may be difficult to know whether the speaker eventually endorses a specific propositional content. In this line of reasoning, DMs do not constitute a syntactic closed class: any marker may play a role in discourse marking, irrespective of its syntactic category. This allows for an inclusive and gradual approach to DMs and means that emergent markers escaping traditional classification may easily be included (such as lol, Uygur-Distexhe 2014). I argue, however, that a syntactic analysis of attested or potential DMs is crucial to our understanding of discourse marking. The impossibility of circumscribing a closed class of DMs on purely syntactic grounds does not entail that we should treat them as mere semantic or pragmatic items and overlook their syntactic behaviour (e.g. in terms of scope, position or degree of autonomy). One specific tenet of enunciative works on DMs has been discussed at great length in the previous subsection: compositionality and as a consequence rejection of the notion of pragmaticalisation. In my view, there are of course strong semantic links between the original use and the discourse use of a given DM. DMs must however be seen as pragmaticalised markers in their own right: the semantic links must allow for some sort of discontinuity, since the DMs acquire new discourse-marking status,

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in correlation with new syntactic and collocational features. Contrary to some enunciative studies, I therefore rely on pragmaticalisation to account for the development of DMs. To sum up, the theoretical framework developed here may be seen as an intermediate model between mainstream enunciative studies and pragmatic ones. The general position held in this book is thus highly compatible with one particular pragmatic trend: the one developed by Aijmer and Beeching, which focuses on the attitudinal dimension of DMs and views communication as a complex and dynamic intersubjective construct. Let us now move on to the presentation of the corpus data and of the methodology.

2.3

Corpus Data and Methodology

I shall start by briefly explaining the choice of a comparable English–French web corpus and summarise its linguistic characteristics, some of them in relation to computer-mediated communication (Subsection 2.3.1). Subsection 2.3.2 is dedicated to highlighting the methodological problems posed by the analysis carried out here. These problems mainly have to do with the identification of the discourse uses. I shall lay out the solution I wish to propose, which relies on the semantic-pragmatic analysis of a sample of 150 tokens for each DM. In Subsection 2.3.3, I explain the tools used for the subsequent analysis of the relevant data.

2.3.1 A Comparable Web-Based Corpus: The TenTen Family Contrary to recent contrastive works on DMs that resort to parallel corpora (Aijmer 2015; Beeching 2016a; Lamiroy and Vanderbauwhede 2016), the present study is based on a comparable corpus. This choice does not stem from a mistrust for translation, which has proved very useful to uncover relevant features of DMs.7 It is more simply due to the absence of relevant translations for the four DMs I compare: these DMs are rather infrequent and mainly circumscribed to informal registers, which explains why the

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available English/French parallel corpora do not yield enough occurrences. Using a comparable corpus proved to be the only way to have access to sufficient contrastive data. The corpus investigated here is a web corpus available online through SketchEngine (https://www.sketchengine.co.uk) and belonging to the TenTen family. Building an ad hoc comparable corpus using the wellknown reference corpora for each language (BNC, COCA for English, Frantext for French8 ) was initially contemplated, but this approach raised many problems in terms of comparability. In fact, there are many easily accessible corpora for English with both written and spoken data (BNC, COCA, etc.), but for French, the resources are scarcer, especially for spoken French: the reference corpus for French is Frantext, which mostly includes literary texts. This discrepancy as regards corpora makes cross-linguistic comparison particularly difficult (Lansari 2017). On the contrary, the size of the TenTen corpora means that they yield many occurrences of emergent and/or rare DMs. The TenTen family groups together large-size corpora extracted from the web in various original languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, etc.). These corpora contain about 10 billion words each (even more for the English corpus, see below). The English corpus was originally designed in 2012 and updated in 2013, hence its name “enTenTen13”, while the French one was set up in 2012 and accordingly called “frTenTen12”.9 Quantitatively speaking, the two corpora are not strictly comparable: the English one contains 19 billion words, whereas the French one comprises 9 billion words. This discrepancy in word number has to be taken into account for the quantitative analysis. In terms of variety, enTenTen13 represents four different varieties of English—British English, American English, Canadian English and Australian English—but British English is more fully represented in terms of word number. The interface created by SketchEngine makes it possible to access as much context as needed, which is very convenient for the fine-grained analysis conducted here. As regards genres, the TenTen family corpora are very heterogeneous: they include different types of web data (forums, blogs, more traditional texts such as newspaper articles, etc.). This means that the corpora contain both non-interactional genres and interactional genres belonging to computer-mediated communication (henceforth CMC). I contend that

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the web as corpus may give rise to particular uses of DMs, especially in CMC. It is therefore necessary to bear in mind the specific properties of CMC in order to see how they may interact with our DMs. I shall thus briefly outline the main characteristics of CMC that may be of use for the analysis of the corpora. First, CMC is characterised by linguistic simplification: its orthography, syntax and punctuation are less normalised than in written genres (Murray 2000). For this reason, I have reproduced all the examples as they are, without correcting them at all. Second, CMC entails a speaker/co-speaker proximity that may be even stronger than in face-to-face communication (Janssen et al. 2014). However, comparing CMC with face-to-face interaction may not be entirely relevant, since CMC does not contain non-verbal features inherent in face-to-face interaction: prosody, gestures, facial expressions, etc. (Derks et al. 2008). Consequently, speakers may resort to other means of expressing non-verbal cues. Derks et al. (2008) claim that emojis and emoticons mimic facial expressions to convey emotions—for instance, ☺ expresses joy. Within an enunciative framework, Halté (2016) argues that these elements may be viewed as modal markers constituting a genuine semiotic system. Other typical CMC signs may well play the same role: repeated punctuation signs (especially exclamation marks !!!! or question marks ????), acronyms or abbreviations such LOL10 or JDCJDR (standing for the possibly emergent DM je dis ça, je dis rien in French) may be viewed as marking the speaker’s emotional and/or epistemic stance. The interaction between these items and the four DMs under discussion will be paid special attention during the corpus analysis. The literature on CMC also puts forward an essential feature of these signs: their expressivity. Expressivity has been a well-known function of language since Jakobson’s (1960) work, but it should be borne in mind that the notion had also been extensively explored by a precursor of “énonciation”, Bally (1926), in terms of “affective syntax”. Broadly speaking, expressivity refers to the speaker’s emotional stance, which may be real or feigned within self-presentation strategies (Caffi and Jeanney 1994; Legallois 2012; Legallois and François 2012; Celle et al. 2017). The use of the various items mentioned above may then be considered a genuine and spontaneous emotional outburst or a strategy whereby the speaker knowingly stages his/her emotions for

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the sake of his/her interlocutors. The corpus findings indicate that some of the DMs under scrutiny, especially on va dire, are particularly liable to play a prominent role in such expressive strategies (see Chapter 4 on on va dire). The next subsection outlines the methodology used for the analysis of the samples.

2.3.2 Methodology: Samples for a Qualitative Analysis The two corpora were investigated at two levels. To give a quantitative overview of the DMs’ frequency and most frequent collocations, I used the whole corpora. The normalised frequencies per million words (pmw) are provided in Table 2.1. Table 2.1 clearly indicates that on va dire is the most frequent DM. This finding may be related to the genre itself: as established by previous studies (Steuckardt 2016), on va dire is associated with non-literary genres, probably because it is based on an exponent of futurity (aller + infinitive, e.g. je vais faire) that is less formal than the morphological future (e.g. je ferai). One should be cautious, however, since the frequency of on va dire appears rather low in comparison with that of disons 11 : disons has a pmw frequency of 23, meaning that it is 7 times more frequent than on va dire. In English, the low frequency of use of I was going to say and shall we say must be compared to that of I mean, which has a normalised frequency of 40.1 occurrences pmw. These figures suggest that the DMs of saying under study play a rather marginal role within the class of DMs (on purely quantitative grounds), which undoubtedly explains why they have not received much scholarly attention, especially in English. Table 2.1 Normalised frequencies in enTenTen13 and frTenTen12 (pmw) On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

3.72 0.60 0.50 0.25

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It must be borne in mind, however, that the figures given in Table 2.1 can only be indicative. Indeed, not all the tokens automatically retrieved via SketchEngine correspond to discursive uses. Some of them are nondiscursive, grammatical uses where the verb forms retain their futurity (or future-in-the-past) meaning. In the following examples, on va dire and shall we say clearly refer to the future, whereas j’allais dire and I was going to say unmistakeably have a future-in-the-past meaning: (12) as tu déja des idées pour la chorale ? moi j’en ai mais si je parle de la chorale alors on va dire que j’ai plagié(encore une fois :( ) j’aimerais ton avis. (12 ) do you already have ideas for the choir? I do but if I mention the choir then people will say I have plagiarised them (once again :( ) I’d like to have your advice. (13) Then asked Nathaniel: “Master, shall we give no place to justice? The law of Moses says, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth . ‘ What shall we say ? ” And Jesus answered: “You shall return good for evil”. (14) Finalement…qu’est-ce que j’allais dire déjà ? ma pensée est en train de m’échapper… (14 ) Finally… what was I going to say? I can’t remember what I had in mind… (15) I’m pretty sure there was something else I was going to say … oh well, next time maybe!

The presence of such instances in the corpora examined renders an automated annotation rather irrelevant. Conversely, manually discarding all the non-discursive uses in order to annotate the discursive ones would be infeasible given the size of the corpora. Methodologically speaking, the study conducted here actually represents a major challenge, since it entails discriminating between non-discursive (grammatical) uses where future or future-in-the-past meaning is still relevant and discursive uses. This is all the more difficult since the passage from non-discursive to discursive uses has to take into account the gradual recategorisation of the markers into DMs and the possible overlap between the former and the latter—a phe-

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nomenon known as “layering” in grammaticalisation/pragmaticalisation studies. To sum up, the analysis involves discriminating between closely related meanings and, therefore, establishing rather fine-grained distinctions. To carry out the fine-grained analysis needed, I chose to make use of a sample of 150 occurrences for each DM: the four samples were retrieved randomly using the “sample” function of SketchEngine and coded using a manual annotation grid combining semantic-pragmatic, syntactic and collocational criteria (as detailed below). Given the number of occurrences explored, my scope is clearly more qualitative than quantitative and the study does not aim at representativeness. I merely claim that the data provides us with tendencies in language use. From a methodological viewpoint, the main research question deals with the identification of the DMs themselves: How do we go about identifying the discursive uses of j’allais dire, I was going to say etc., independently of their uses as exponents of futurity? How do the DMs under discussion fit into the class of DMs?

2.3.2.1 Identifying DMs: A Semantic-Pragmatic Approach As evidenced in Chapter 1, DMs form a rather elusive class of markers syntactically speaking (Fischer 2006; Celle and Huart 2007; Dostie and Pusch 2007; Ranger 2018), and there is no real consensus regarding their syntactic behaviour, which largely depends on the theoretical frames adopted and on the types of textual genres and markers examined (Fischer 2006; Ranger 2018). The absence of a precise syntactic status explains why identifying DMs often relies on semantic-pragmatic features that may be negative in essence (Pusch 2007)—such as lack of compositionality and semantic bleaching. In the case of the four markers examined here, their emergence as DMs seems to correlate semantically with loss of future meaning. The criterion used for the selection of the relevant discursive occurrences is thus negative and is based on a semantic-pragmatic analysis: occurrences where the string of markers retains its original future meaning are to be discarded, on the basis of my interpretation. On the syntactic level, I chose to exclude markers occurring in relative clauses (e.g. what I was going to

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say/ce que j’allais dire/c’est ce qu’on va dire) and markers followed by the pronouns ça/cela and that (j’allais dire ça, on va dire ça, I was going to say that, etc.). In these cases, we may not be dealing with j’allais dire, I was going to say, etc. as DMs but with other DMs or partly fixed expressions: for instance, on va dire ça may function as a phraseological unit in its own right.12 I am well aware that this choice is questionable, since it discards interesting discourse uses that are worth analysing. I believe, however, that it is necessary to circumscribe my research object as precisely as possible. One important choice also had to be made regarding the occurrences where the markers introduce a que- /that-clause. The absence of conjunction (absence of explicit marking between the DM and the rest of the sentence) is taken as a major criterion for the identification of clausal DMs known as “parentheticals” (Schneider 2007), but because of the pre-eminence given to the semantic-pragmatic identification of discourse uses, it does not seem relevant to exclude such occurrences from the study a priori. This criterion, which Schneider (2007) uses for Romance languages, is actually controversial for English, where the absence of that in the subordinate clause may not be evidence of a parenthetical use. It thus seemed safer not to resort to that criterion in the identification phase. The prevalence of the semantic-pragmatic criterion over syntactic considerations may lend itself to criticism, since the data collected turns out to be rather heterogeneous syntactically speaking (gathering occurrences where the DMs seem autonomous as well as occurrences where they still function as full matrix clauses introducing subordinate clauses). On the other hand, it may help maintain the different levels of analysis separate and assess more clearly the parts played by semantic-pragmatic factors on the one hand and by syntactic factors on the other. Chapters 4 and 5 will actually show that the initial choice of selecting data on semantic-pragmatic grounds is justified a posteriori by the syntactic analysis, since the data selected displays strong semantic-pragmatic/syntactic correlations. Another drawback of my selection method is its interpretative dimension: assigning a future or discursive meaning to the tokens ultimately relies on my own interpretation of the data (in the absence of a co-annotator). The task at hand is all the more difficult since the question raised is not obligatorily a binary one: as already mentioned, the development of discourse

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functions is progressive and some occurrences may correspond to intermediate stages between futurity meaning and discourse marking. Although necessarily subjective, my interpretation of the data will always be made explicit for clarity’s sake: for each DM, I shall distinguish between several types of semantic-pragmatic uses and explain, for each of these types, which ones were excluded and why. I shall first examine the different types of uses established for on va dire and shall we say.

2.3.2.2 Focus on on va dire and Shall We Say The aller + inf. periphrasis (Lansari 2008, 2009) may express futurity in two different ways: it may be clearly epistemic (in the sense of Coates 1983) and express an evidence-based prediction (e.g. il va pleuvoir / it’s going to rain), or it may involve root modality, foregrounding speaker intention (e.g. Je vais faire la vaisselle / I’m going to do the washing-up). In the case of the modal auxiliary shall, futurity always involves root modality, but not speaker intention: shall is associated with deontic modality and is based on the “non-autonomy” of the referent of the syntactic subject (Palmer 1979: 112). In association with the we pronoun in questions (e.g. shall we go? ), the speaker entirely relies on the co-speaker (possible gloss: do you want us to go? ), even when we is inclusive (speaker + co-speaker). Let us first examine the different types of occurrences retrieved for on va dire. On va dire In order to select the occurrences where on va dire functions as DM, it is necessary to eliminate the cases where the string of markers remains analysable compositionally and where aller + infinitive still expresses prediction. This has led me to discard the two following cases: 1. Utterances where the sequence on va dire refers to a future event predicted by the speaker and where the on pronoun includes I and corresponds to we, as in example (16) below: (16) J’ai annoncé hier après-midi qu’il y aurait une commission pluraliste, mais enfin, maintenant, on va dire une commission des socialistes, qui

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travaillerait et que rendrait compte de ses travaux pour améliorer la transparence et notre fonctionnement, le rendre plus démocratique. (16 ) Yesterday afternoon I announced there would be a pluralist commission, but well, now we are going to call it a socialist commission, which will work and report on its activities to increase transparency and make our work more democratic.

In such utterances, on va dire corresponds to from now on, you and I are going to, etc. 2. Utterances where the on pronoun refers to a group of people excluding the speaker, this group representing the vox populi according to Kuyumcuyan (2008). On va dire may still be analysed compositionally: on refers to people and aller + infinitive expresses evidence-based futurity. Here is a representative example: (17) as tu déjà des idées pour la chorale ? moi j’en ai mais si je parle de la chorale alors on va dire que j’ai plagié(encore une fois :( ) j’aimerais ton avis. (17 ) do you already have ideas for the choir? I do but if I mention the choir then people will say I have plagiarised them (once again :( ) I’d like to have your advice.

Kuyumcuyan (2008) rightly argues that this type of utterance plays an argumentative role in discourse. It does not seem legitimate, however, to view the on va dire sequence as a DM here, insofar as a compositional analysis is still adequate and no specific pragmatic function (be it structural or attitudinal) is foregrounded. Moreover, at the syntactic level, this sequence is always fixed in initial position, followed by a que-clause. Post-position does not make sense: (17a) * si je parle de la chorale alors j’ai plagié on va dire.

By contrast, DM on va dire is characterised by syntactic mobility (see Chapter 4).

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So, contrary to Kuyumcuyan (2008) and Steuckardt (2016), I will not examine this type of utterance and will instead only focus on the tokens where on va dire cannot be analysed compositionally and where on includes I, as in the following example: (18) Ma balance fait toujours des siennes mais bon on va dire que je fini par m’y habituer! Lol (18 ) My scale is still playing tricks on me but well let’s say [on va dire] I am used to it now! Lol

Let us now move on to the identification process for shall we say. Shall we say For shall we say, identifying the relevant discursive uses proved easier. The only case that was discarded deals with utterances where the sequence shall we say is fully interrogative: (19) I do not mean a stick equal to a stick, or a stone to a stone, or anything of the kind, but something beyond all these, the Equal itself (auto to ison). Shall we say that this exists or not?

As was to be expected, some occurrences are ambiguous at first sight. Let us examine (20) below: (20) You’ve been living the way of incoming, well, shall we say, lust and greed? I should say, ‘coveting’, and use a little nicer word, perhaps. But sin is the transgression of the law.

In this example, shall we say seems to be used to comment reflexively on the speaker’s linguistic choice, but a compositional analysis is clearly relevant: the speaker addresses his/her co-speaker (see you’ve been living etc.) and genuinely asks whether lust and greed are adequate terms. The speaker introduces a new formulation (see coveting ) and the contrast between we (in shall we say) and I (in I should say) eventually makes us understand that shall we say is truly interrogative and corresponds to: what do you think we should say?. Such utterances were therefore excluded from the

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analysis, but independently of the presence or absence of a question mark: the use of punctuation marks is rather erratic in web corpora, so I relied exclusively on the semantic-pragmatic interpretation of the utterances. Actually, some examples containing a question mark were included, as is the case of example (21) below: (21) All thematic issues aside, I think that the writing is very, er, uneven, shall we say ? Overwhelmingly episodic, not terribly consistent, and largely as dimensionless as the characters.

In this utterance, the speaker does not really ask a question: when faced with linguistic difficulties, she/he feigns to ask for advice but the co-speaker is not even mentioned. Trousdale and Gisborne (2008: 126) likewise distinguish between two uses of shall we say: one use where “shall we say apparently functions more like a discourse marker than an actual interrogative” and another one where shall we say “has some interrogative flavour”. I believe that, despite the question mark, shall we say ceases to function as an interrogative in such instances and is recategorised as a DM. Let us now turn our attention to the other two DMs of saying under discussion, j’allais dire and I was going to say.

2.3.2.3 Focus on j’allais dire and I Was Going to Say Selecting the discourse uses of j’allais dire and I was going to say within the samples turned out to be a daunting enterprise, especially since some uses may be considered cases of overlap between future meaning and discourse marking. Before focusing on these tricky cases, it is first necessary to shed light on the grammatical uses of aller + infinitive and be going to in the past tense. When aller + infinitive and be going to are in the past tense, they may express futurity in two different ways (just as when they are in the present tense). They may express evidence-based future-in-the-past (e.g. I saw that she was going to cry) or express past intention (e.g. she said she was going to quit smoking ). Additionally, future-in-the-past may give rise to a specific use—which does not exist in the present tense—sometimes referred to

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as “avertive” meaning (Kuteva 1998; Martin 2005) and illustrated by example (22) below: (22) Il allait s’éloigner de la galerie quand se profila au bout de la rue une silhouette. (J. Echenoz, Je m’en vais, 1999). (22 ) He was going to walk away from the gallery when a figure appeared.

In this example, the future event is only contemplated but does not actually occur, either because the circumstances prevented its actualisation or because the referent of the syntactic subject changed his/her mind. In the identification phase of the discursive occurrences, the three types of instances involving futurity (evidence-based futurity, speaker past intention and avertive meaning) must logically be discarded. The analysis of the two samples retrieved for j’allais dire, and I was going to say nonetheless shows that discriminating between future meaning and discourse use is more complex than initially envisioned. The samples yield five different cases that all require close examination: a. The markers appear in first-person narratives where the speaker intends to say something but the intended words are never uttered. The interpretation is then clearly avertive, and such instances were discarded without further hesitation: (23) I was going to say, “But is this the Thames?” but held my peace in wonder, and turned my bewildered eyes eastward to look at the bridge again, and thence to the shores of the London river; and surely there was enough to astonish me. (24) Je ne savais plus réellement quoi faire, les deux soucis de ma vie actuelle étaient réunis, pour la première fois. « Je… » , j’allais dire que je me sentais un peu mieux quand Alex répondit à ma place et s’interposa entre Clay et moi. (24 ) I was at my wits’ ends. The two problems of my life were reunited for the first time. “I…”, I was going to say I was feeling a little bit better when Alex answered in my stead and stood between Clay and me.

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In the two examples quoted, the context makes it clear that the contemplated event did not take place (see the but-clause in example (23) and the quand-clause in example (24)). b. The markers appear in dialogical contexts where they express an initial opinion presented as inadequate: (25) Bon beh j’allais dire que j’étais la seule à sortir et en plein milieu de la semaine en plus, ou sinon la seule à l’admettre mais je vois que Cinnamon tient le front aussi, alors…Que vous dire ? (25 ) Ok well I was going to say that I was the only one going out tonight, during the week mind you, well at least the only one owning up to it but I see Cinnamon is right on too, so…What is left to say? (26) At first I was going to say maybe he should’ve gotten a second chance. But it looks like it was right of you not to give him one, he clearly didn’t deserve it.

In such cases, the markers retain their original meaning (past intention): they simply mark that what the speakers wanted to say (and did say, in a way) is not relevant anymore, and they ought to give it up. It is interesting to note that the verbs dire/ say are more akin to opinion verbs here (I was going to say could be glossed by I initially thought ). This indicates that j’allais dire and I was going to say are not used to comment reflexively on what is said, but more simply to express initial opinions. Such cases were discarded from the analysis. c. The markers appear in dialogical contexts where they re-introduce an initial choice of words that the speaker finally deems inadequate. The markers retain their original intentional meaning, but at the same time, they constitute a metalinguistic comment, as evidenced by the two utterances below: (27) Let me know if you want to swap any seeds or anything. If you can keep the slugs off and give them enough water, courgettes grow very easily. (I was going to say they grow themselves, but all plants do that!)

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(28) Alooooors Pour Izaiah je suis d’accord, il vaut mieux le laisser de côté vu qu’une relation (j’allais dire « liaison » mais c’est un peu tendancieux, quand même) ne semble pas vraiment logique. (28 ) Soooo for Izaiah I agree, it’s best to leave him aside given that a relationship (I was going to say [j’allais dire] “affair” but it’s not really neutral, is it?) does not really seem logical.

In these two examples, I was going to say and j’allais dire introduce another linguistic choice (grow themselves instead of grow in example (27), liaison instead of relation in example (28)), thus revealing the speaker’s metalinguistic awareness. So, although they do express past intention, I have chosen to include such cases in the analysis. In Chapter 5, I shall argue that they represent intermediate cases between grammatical use and discourse function and correspond to false reformulation strategies: the speaker pretends to repair his/her preceding choice, but finally sticks to it (see the mais-/but-clauses eventually ruling out the second formulation). d. The markers function as genuine reformulation devices. The original intentional meaning is no longer relevant, as shown below: (29) We’re a culture that prioritizes being busy over relationships, over being valuable. We’re just busy, busy, busy. I was going to say we’re a culture of whiners, and I think that, me being included, I think that plays into Todd’s point is it’s so much easier to whine about being a victim than it is to take personal responsibility […]. (30) Une succession de coups de force, de fraude et de falsification organisés dans l’impunité la plus totale, j’allais dire la plus durable et la plus chronique. (30 ) A succession of forceful fraud and falsification actions organised in the utmost impunity, I was going to say [j’allais dire] in the most lasting and rampant impunity.

In such cases, I was going to say and j’allais dire are very close to wellknown DMs such as let’s say or disons. They were therefore included in the analysis.

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e. The markers appear in dialogical contexts where they retain their original intentional meaning, while at the same time taking on specific structural discourse functions, namely topic shifting and affiliation marking. Affiliation marking is common to both j’allais dire and I was going to say: (31) Working with Alex is always a treat because of our long relationship and what our chemistry brings.

Troy: I was going to say, the chemistry is definitely tangible. Anyone who really listens can hear it.

Kim: Thank you.

(32)

Pour ma part, j’ai un parti-pris d’exploiter toujours au maximum l’acoustique naturelle d’une pièce… le fait d’insonoriser, autrement dit de limiter l’émission des ondes sonores hors de la pièce, c’est une opération souvent coûteuse et qui a tendance à détériorer l’acoustique d’une pièce….

sujet à suivre

ouaip j’allais dire, dans ton cas, insonoriser est surtout une nécessité, pas une volonté première… trouver un appart c’est pas forcément mieux, puisque tu auras des voisins et tout ce que ça engendre (32 ) As far as I’m concerned I always chose to exploit as much as possible the natural acoustics of a room. Soundproofing – that is to say reducing the emission of sound waves out of the room – is often an expensive task which tends to downgrade the room’s acoustics… To be continued Yep I was going to say [j’allais dire], in your case, soundproofing is a necessity, not a choice…finding a flat is not necessarily better, since you’re going to have neighbours and all that comes with it

Topic shifting, however, is only attested for I was going to say 13 : (33)

Anyways, I like to point back to the stats to kind of show what players should be spending most of their time on. Does that make sense?

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Andy Zodin: Absolutely. I was going to say, you use the word errormanagement and that was going to be my next point. If you talk to the greatest golfers in the world, they all talk about at one point or another […].

In these occurrences, j’allais dire and I was going to say still mark reflexivity, indicating speaker intention to plan discourse differently (in the case of topic shifting) or voicing shared commitment (in the case of affiliation). It must be noted that such uses are not very frequent in the TenTen data examined, especially topic shifting. It is therefore necessary to rely on other data to complete the analysis conducted here. In Chapter 5, I propose a detailed investigation of I was going to say as topic shifter and affiliation marker in the spoken part of the COCA corpus. To sum up, cases a and b were excluded from the analysis, whereas cases c–e were considered discourse uses of j’allais dire and I was going to say. Case c is undoubtedly the most problematic case, as it seems to constitute an intermediate category between grammatical use (past intention) and discourse function. The preceding pages have revealed how complex the identification and selection of the relevant discourse uses are, more particularly so for j’allais dire and I was going to say. In the absence of clear syntactic criteria, identifying discourse uses necessarily relies on a subjective semantic-pragmatic interpretation of the occurrences. I have not simplified the data and intentionally presented all the difficulties that arose during the identification phase. Although fastidious for the reader, this long presentation of the methodological issues is a necessary step to understand how I selected the data. I shall now turn to the first results concerning the discourse uses in the four samples examined.

2.3.2.4 Discourse Uses in the Four Samples: First Results On the basis of the selection process detailed above, Table 2.2 presents the ratio of the discourse functions in each of the samples. The figures in Table 2.2 show that the ratio of discourse uses vs. grammatical uses is stronger for on va dire and shall we say. I was going to say

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Table 2.2 Ratio of discourse uses Grammatical uses

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

Discourse uses

Total

Tokens ( n)

%

Tokens ( n)

%

16 32 66 103

10.7 21.3 44 68.7

134 118 84 47

89.3 78.7 56 31.3

150 150 150 150

exhibits the lowest ratio. This seems to suggest that on va dire and shall we say have achieved a higher degree of pragmaticalisation than the other two DMs. This implies that automated searches for collocation patterns on the whole corpora make more sense for on va dire and shall we say than for the other two DMs: if discourse uses represent around 80% of the total tokens, then automated searches have some relevance (see Chapter 4). This is not the case for the other two DMs. The figures presented in Table 2.2 are nonetheless to be taken with caution. First, it must be borne in mind that only I was going to say was searched within enTenTen13, to the exclusion of I was gonna say. The inclusion of I was gonna say might have led to different results. Moreover, the samples retrieved do not have the same representativeness in the corpora. As previously stated, the English corpus used (enTenTen13) comprises 19 billion words, whereas the French one (frTenTen12) contains 9 billion words. I am thus aware that, statistically speaking, the results presented here may not be very relevant. It is nonetheless interesting to note that, on the basis provided by the samples, I was going to functions less frequently as a DM in the data under scrutiny. The genre of the data may also have an impact on the results: in the spoken part of the COCA corpus, the ratio of discourse uses of I was going to say is higher (see Chapter 5). From a more qualitative perspective, one important aspect has emerged from the data: a strong correlation between the semantic-pragmatic level and the syntactic one. As specified in the previous subsection, the selection of the relevant occurrences was processed on purely semantic-pragmatic grounds. This selection, however, seems to correlate with syntactic parameters: in the grammatical uses manually discarded from the analysis, the

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say/dire verbs always govern their objects. The verbs may be followed by a clause (introduced by ø/that in English, by que in French) or by a noun phrase which may be pre-posed (as in the relative structures what/the thing I was going to say, what shall we say, ce que j’allais dire, ce qu’on va dire). In either case, the sequence under study (on va dire, j’allais dire, etc.) and the governed object are tightly connected. Grammatical use of the markers is thus syntactically characterised by strict verb-object dependency. In the cases identified as discourse uses, the situation is less homogeneous syntactically speaking: the verbs sometimes seem to continue to govern their objects, but sometimes they clearly do not. This may suggest that the DMs have acquired a certain degree of autonomy with respect to the rest of the clause. This result goes to show that the semantic-pragmatic change from futurity to discourse marking is correlated to syntactic changes. The syntactic phenomenon mentioned here, i.e. the possibility for the DM to acquire an autonomous status with respect to the object of say/ dire, has actually been pointed out by several works on “parentheticals” (Kaltenböck 2007; Schneider 2007) or “comment clauses” (Brinton 2008) in the English-speaking tradition. This issue is tackled a bit differently in the French linguistic tradition, through the notion of “weak government” (“rection faible” in French, Blanche-Benveniste 1989; Apothéloz 2003; Kahane and Pietrandrea 2009). I shall come back to the syntactic behaviour of the DMs under discussion in the chapters devoted to the corpus findings. So, although semantic-pragmatic in essence, the selection method chosen is not at all incompatible with syntactic considerations and paves the way for the analysis of relevant correlations between the different linguistic levels. I shall now turn to the last methodological dimension that needs to be tackled: the annotation grid that was used to analyse the discursive occurrences.

2.3.3 Presentation of the Annotation Grid The specific parameters I have chosen to annotate are not random choices, but are inherently linked to my theoretical framework, presented in Sect. 2.1. Some of these parameters are directly based on the literature

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on DMs; others are more data-driven and stem from personal observations made during the selection process. This exploratory approach seems justified, for at least three reasons. First, the type of data investigated (web data) calls for specific tools of analysis that have not been tested for well-established written and spoken data. Second, the multi-dimensional analysis conducted here involves parameters that are rarely associated in the literature: most studies tend to concentrate on one or two particular linguistic dimensions only, which explains why integrative models are rare. Thirdly, the fact that it is difficult to identify discourse uses seems hard to reconcile with corpus linguistics methods, which makes it necessary to rely on a complex manual annotation system. On better-described DMs (such as anyway, for instance), an automated analysis of the collocations would have been easier to conduct. For all these reasons, I have set up my own annotation grid, combining various levels of analysis—semantic, pragmatic, syntactic and collocational—in order to define the discursive profile of each DM. Semantic level: operation-based semantic characterisation First, at the semantic level, the characterisation I wish to define implies coding two elements (see Sect. 2.1): the origin of commitment, and the relationship between p—the propositional content—and p —which represents alternative linguistic choices. Pragmatic level: discourse function(s) Pragmatically, it is necessary to examine the exact discourse function(s) of each DM. The data shows that three main functions are to be distinguished: metalinguistic comment (mostly dealing with the speaker’s choice of words), topic shifting and affiliation. From a theoretical viewpoint, this threefold distinction raises a major question: How do these three functions relate to each other? Do they constitute contextual effects derived from the invariant or do they correspond to three distinct pragmaticalisation paths? Possible answers to these questions will be provided in the next two chapters.

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Syntactic level At the syntactic level, five different parameters were coded, as explained below: • Scope of the DM and definition of its “host” This first criterion deals with a well-known syntactic notion: scope. The criterion seeks to identify what is said, that is to say the element over which the DM has scope, which is sometimes called “host” (Schneider 2007) or “anchor” (Kahane and Pietrandrea 2009). The precise goal is to identify the syntactic category of the host, which may be a noun phrase, an adjectival phrase, a whole clause, etc. Ambiguous cases may arise— especially when the DM is not in initial position—but the context helps to disambiguate scope. Let us take an example: (34) Déjà, je ne vous répondrai pas sur le solfège mais sur la formation musicale. Parce que de la même manière que l’éducation nationale a changé ses méthodes d’apprentissage, entre il y a quelques années où c’était encore une méthode qui était encore assez rigoureuse et l’apprentissage beaucoup plus libre, et beaucoup plus ludique j’allais dire de maintenant, du travail des instit, la formation musicale elle aussi a changé, pas du tout au tout, mais enfin elle a considérablement évoluée. (34 ) First, I will not answer you on the solfege issue but on musical education. Because in the same way national education has changed its teaching methods – compare the situation a few years ago where the method was still stern with the freer, more fun I was going to say [j’allais dire] teachers’ methods of nowadays – musical education has also changed, not radically, but well it has considerably evolved.

A priori, j’allais dire may have scope over the adjective ludique or over the prepositional phrase de maintenant. The context, however, makes it clear that the DM has scope over ludique here: the adjective libre in the preceding context shows that the speaker is struggling to find the best possible way to describe the learning processes under discussion.

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• Position of the DM with respect to its host The second syntactic criterion deals with position. Recent publications have emphasised the importance of syntactic position in the study of DMs (Aijmer 2013; Beeching 2016b; Ranger 2018). This criterion concerns the position of the DM with respect to its host, i.e. the element over which it has scope. The DM may appear before the host: (35) Tes désaccords – j’allais dire fréquents mais je crois que systématiques serait plus exact – avec Eviv ne m’ont jamais semblé dériver vers la haine obsessionnelle. (35 ) Your disagreements – I was going to say [j’allais dire] frequent but I guess systematic would be more accurate – with Eviv have never in my view seemed to steer towards obsessive hatred.

Or it may occur after it as in example (34) already mentioned: (34) l’apprentissage beaucoup plus libre, et beaucoup plus ludique j’allais dire de maintenant

For this parameter, the annotation grid only takes into account these two positions and does not specifically code cases where the DMs occur in medial position, that is to say in a position where they interrupt a tight syntactic relationship, as in example (36) below: (36) Robbins tries less to understand Vos’ history and cultural background than to make a blunt allegorical example of the character and draw comparisons between all that Vos represents and an American administration with which the actor is, um, shall we say, dissatisfied.

In this occurrence, shall we say interrupts the syntactic relationship between copula and predicative adjective. This position may be considered medial, but in the annotation grid used here, I shall more simply code it as initial, since shall we say occurs before its host (the adjective dissatisfied ). The ability of the four DMs under scrutiny to appear medially will nonetheless be closely examined in the next chapters, as it may be linked

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to their recategorisation into the specific subclass of “reduced parenthetical clauses” (Schneider 2007). • Position of the DM at the sentence level The third criterion is also related to position, but at the sentence level, where it is also necessary to examine whether DMs tend to occur initially, medially or finally. Such a criterion might prove very useful in relation to topic shifting. • Position in turn-taking Fourthly, shedding light on the position of the DMs under discussion in the turn-taking system is also crucial. Indeed, the role played by DMs in managing turns and sequentially organising discourse has been foregrounded within Conversation Analysis (Stivers 2012 for a presentation of the theory) or even in recent pragmatic studies (Aijmer 2016). Three positions are distinguished in the annotation grid: turn-initial, turnmedial and turn-final position. To the best of my knowledge, the next and last syntactic parameter, which tries to assess the degree of autonomy of the DMs, has not been used as such in previous studies. • Degree of autonomy As already mentioned, this issue is presented as crucial in works on “parentheticals” and is often assessed using an optionality or deletion test (Schneider 2007). Deleting the DMs, however, is not always reliable and poses semantic problems.14 More generally speaking, syntactic tests need to be discussed at greater length, whereas the annotation task does not rely on a full-fledged analysis but more simply requires annotating signs of autonomy. In spoken English and French, several publications have noted that DMs tend to function as autonomous items prosodically speaking (Avanzi 2009). In the web data used here, it is of course impossible to carry out such a prosodic analysis. What seems possible, however, is to evaluate the degree of autonomy of the DMs on the basis of the typographic signs

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(full stops, commas, dashes, etc.) preceding and/or following them. I am well aware that punctuation signs may correspond to rather erratic and inconsistent choices on the speakers’ part, but they may also been seen as symptoms of interesting syntactic phenomena. As regards the preceding context, the degree of autonomy is considered low if no such punctuation sign occurs before the DMs and high otherwise. In relation to the following context, the degree of autonomy is similarly deemed low when the DMs are directly followed by a linguistic element and high when punctuation signs (or parenthetical units) interrupt the verb-object relationship. Let us focus on two examples: (36) Robbins tries less to understand Vos’ history and cultural background than to make a blunt allegorical example of the character and draw comparisons between all that Vos represents and an American administration with which the actor is, um, shall we say, dissatisfied. (37) après elle a beau être en colère tout ça mais bon elle se rend compte que utiliser les enfants c’est vraiment pffffffff je sais même pas comment dire tiens !!!! On va dire nul pour rester polie !!!!! (37 ) OK she might be angry and stuff but well surely she realises using children is really pfffffff I don’t even know what to say you know!!!! To be polite let’s say [on va dire] it sucks!!!!!

In example (36), shall we say appears between two commas and seems therefore to have acquired a high degree of autonomy, be it with the preceding context or the following one. In example (37), on va dire occurs after repeated exclamation marks, but directly introduces the syntactic object of dire (the adjective nul ). The DM is thus rather autonomous with respect to the preceding context but not in relation to the following one. I wish to make clear that the criterion under discussion is based on the observation of typographic signs and does not pre-determine any theoretical syntactic analysis. When I discuss further the syntactic classification of the DMs in Chapters 4 and 5, I shall actually show that the term “autonomy” is inappropriate to account for their complex syntactic status.

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Finally, let us examine the parameters that were coded at the collocational level. Collocational level As far as collocations are concerned, three data-driven parameters were included within the annotation grid. Taking sentences as units, I annotated the co-occurrence of the DMs under discussion with opposition markers (e.g. mais/ but ), CMC signs (emojis, repeated exclamation marks, etc., see Sect. 2.3) and low commitment markers (epistemic markers stricto sensu such as know, believe, perhaps, but also degree markers like rather, a little indicating low speaker commitment). Representative examples may be found below: (35) Tes désaccords – j’allais dire fréquents mais je crois que systématiques serait plus exact – avec Eviv ne m’ont jamais semblé dériver vers la haine obsessionnelle. (37) après elle a beau être en colère tout ça mais bon elle se rend compte que utiliser les enfants c’est vraiment pffffffff je sais même pas comment dire tiens !!!! On va dire nul pour rester polie !!!!! (38) For example, the Catholics meant the “separated brethren” thing to be ecumenical and cordial, but I find it terribly…I was going to say offensive but that’s not the right word…smug.

It should be added that the annotation process does not preclude further qualitative analysis. For instance, as far as opposition markers are concerned, a fine-grained analysis is still needed to pinpoint the exact role of opposition markers in the speaker’s argumentation: in some cases, mais/but- clauses are part of concessive strategies, while in others they simply introduce a different viewpoint within the argumentation. One last parameter was taken into account: the co-occurrence of the four DMs with another DM (bon, well, um, etc.), in the N-1 and N-2 slots. Here is one example involving shall we say:

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(36) Robbins tries less to understand Vos’ history and cultural background than to make a blunt allegorical example of the character and draw comparisons between all that Vos represents and an American administration with which the actor is, um, shall we say, dissatisfied.

Here, shall we say is preceding by um, which highlights the speaker’s need for careful linguistic planning (Tottie 2011). Interestingly, the four DMs do not collocate with the same DMs and their respective collocational affinities are also part of their discursive profiles. For this parameter, the whole corpora were examined. The preceding subsection, devoted to the annotation grid, has shed light on the multi-dimensionality of the analysis conducted here. The exploratory approach underlying the definition of the parameters to be annotated seems justified by the lack of integrative models in the literature on DMs. In the next chapters, I shall examine how the different parameters interact, which will allow me to define a discursive profile for each of the DMs under scrutiny.

Notes 1. To the best of my knowledge, there is no study concerning shall we say. A brief investigation of the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) and the BNC (British National Corpus) shows that it is not very frequent. See Chapter 4. 2. The choice of the term “co-speaker” (and not “addressee”) is linked to the enunciative framework of the study: “co-speaker” better expresses one of the key tenets of “énonciation”, namely that discourse is co-constructed by discourse participants instead of being addressed to a passive addressee. 3. I use the term “repair” in brackets since, as explained in Chapter 1, it carries implications that are not compatible with the framework used here. 4. For a more detailed discussion of the advantages of formalisation, see Ranger (2018). 5. In the definition of assertion quoted, p is opposed to non-p. I personally use p as a shorter equivalent to non-p.

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6. I shall examine this exemplification use in greater detail in Chapter 4, where I propose a small-scale comparison with let’s say. 7. See Beeching (2016a: 87): “The interest in studying PMs [pragmatic markers] in translation is […] that the translation may provide some kind of window into their somewhat opaque meaning potential”. See also Aijmer (2015: 202) for a similar view. 8. All the corpora are referenced in the bibliography. 9. See Jakubíˇcek et al. (2013) for a presentation of the TenTen family. The year indicated—2012 for French, 2013 for English—does not mean that the corpus only contains data from that specific year. What it means is that the corpus was retrieved from the web that year. 10. Interestingly, Uygur-Distexhe (2014) classifies LOL within the category of DMs, which once more highlights the open-endedness of the category. 11. Based on different data, Schneider (2013) similarly observes that on va dire is rather infrequent in contemporary French in contrast with other DMs (disons, je dirais, etc.). 12. A propos on va dire ça and on va dire ça comme ça, Steuckardt (2016: 302) shows that they exhibit very specific features. Contrary to on va dire, they may be used to answer questions. The author also notes that they are not attested in Frantext. All this highlights distributional differences between them and the DM on va dire. 13. In French, j’allais dire does not seem to serve as topic shifter: the fixed phrase based on an interrogative form qu’est-ce que j’allais dire is more likely to develop that function. Future research on spoken French may clarify these issues, which are far now beyond the scope of the present study. 14. The issue of optionality will be more fully discussed in Chapters 4 and 5.

References Aijmer, K. (2013). Understanding pragmatic markers. A variational pragmatic approach. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Aijmer, K. (2015). Well in an English-Swedish and English-French contrastive perspective. In K. Beeching & H. Woodfield (Eds.), Researching sociopragmatic

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variability: Perspectives from variational, interlanguage and contrastive pragmatics (pp. 201–229). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Aijmer, K. (2016). Pragmatic markers as constructions. The case of anyway. In G. Kaltenböck, E. Keizer, & A. Lohmann (Eds.), Outside the clause: Form and function of extra-clausal constituents (pp. 29–58). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Apothéloz, D. (2003). La rection dite ‘faible’: grammaticalisation ou différentiel de grammaticité? Verbum, XXV (3), 241–262. Avanzi, M. (2009). La prosodie des verbes parenthétiques en français parlé. Linx [online]. http://journals.openedition.org/linx/1344; https://doi.org/10. 4000/linx.1344. Bally, C. (1926). Le langage et la vie. Paris: Payot. Beeching, K. (2011). The translation equivalence of bon, enfin, well and I mean. Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée, XVI (2), 91–105. Beeching, K. (2016a). Insights from contrastive linguistics: Translating sort of into French. In M. Boisseau, C. Chauvin, C. Delesse, & Y. Keromnes (Eds.), Linguistique et Traductologie: les enjeux d’une relation complexe (pp. 85–98). Arras: Artois Presses Université. Beeching, K. (2016b). Pragmatic markers in British English: Meaning in social interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beeching, K. (2017). Reflexivity and discourse-pragmatic variation and change. In H. Tyne, M. Bilger, P. Cappeau, & E. Guerin (Eds.), La variation en question(s). Hommages à Françoise Gadet (pp. 157–179). Bruxelles: Peter Lang. Berglund, Y. 2000. ‘You’re gonna, you’re not going to’: A corpus-based study of colligation and collocation patterns of the (BE ) going to construction in presentday spoken British English. In B. Lewandowska-Tomaszcyk & P. James Melia (Eds.), PLAC’99: Practical applications in language corpora (pp. 161–192). Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang. Blanche-Benveniste, C. (1989). Constructions verbales ‘en incise’ et rection faible des verbes. Recherches Sur Le Français Parlé, 9, 53–74. Brinton, L. J. (2005). Processes underlying the development of pragmatic markers. The case of (I) say. In J. Skaffari, et al. (Eds.), Opening windows on texts and discourses (pp. 279–299). New York and Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Brinton, L. J. (2008). The comment clause in English: Syntactic origins and pragmatic developments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caffi, C., & Jeanney, R. W. (1994). Toward a pragmatics of emotive communication. Journal of Pragmatics, 22(3–4), 325–373. Celle, A., & Huart, R. (2007). Connectives as discourse landmarks. In A. Celle & R. Huart (Eds.), Connectives as discourse landmarks (pp. 1–11). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Celle, A., Jugnet, A., Lansari, L., & L’Hôte, E. (2017). Expressing and describing surprise. In A. Celle & L. Lansari (Eds.), Expressing and describing surprise (pp. 215–244). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Coates, J. (1983). The semantics of the modal auxiliaries. London: Croom Helm. Culioli, A. (1990). Pour une linguistique de l’énonciation 1. Paris and Gap: Ophrys. Culioli, A. (1999a). Pour une linguistique de l’énonciation 2. Paris and Gap: Ophrys. Culioli, A. (1999b). Pour une linguistique de l’énonciation 3. Paris and Gap: Ophrys. Derks, D., Fischer, A., & Bos, A. (2008). The role of emotion in computermediated communication: A review. Computers in Human Behavior, 24 (3), 766–785. Diewald, G. (2013). Same same but different—Modal particles, discourse markers and the art (and purpose) of categorization. In L. Degand, B. Cornillie, & P. Pietrandrea (Eds.), Discourse markers and modal particles: Categorization and description (pp. 19–45). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Dostie, G., & Pusch, C. D. (2007). Présentation. Les marqueurs discursifs. Sens et Variation. Langue Française, 154 (Les marqueurs discursifs), 3–12. Fischer, K. (2006). Towards an understanding of the spectrum of approaches to discourse particles: Introduction to the volume. In K. Fischer (Ed.), Approaches to discourse particles (pp. 1–20). Oxford and Amsterdam: Elsevier. Franckel, J.-J. (2016). Formes impératives de dire: disons, dis, dites et leurs variantes. In L. Rouanne & J.-Cl. Anscombre (Eds.), Histoires de dire. Petit glossaire des marqueurs formés sur le verbe dire (pp. 131–154). Bern: Peter Lang. Goossens, L. (1982). Say: Focus on the message. In R. Driven, L. Goossens, Y. Putseys, & E. Vorlat (Eds.), The scene of linguistic action and its perspectivization by SPEAK, TALK, SAY and TELL (pp. 85–132). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Halté, P. (2016). Enjeux pragmatiques et sémiotiques de l’étude des émoticônes. Réseaux, 197–198, 227–252. Jakobson, R. (1960). Linguistics and poetics. In T. Sebeok (Ed.), Style in language (pp. 350–377). Cambridge: MIT Press. Jakubíˇcek, M., Kilgarriff, A., Kováˇr, V., Rychl P., & Suchomel, V. (2013). The TenTen Corpus Family. Lexical Computing Ltd., United Kingdom, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Janssen, J. H., Ijsselsteijn, W. A., & Westerink, J. H. D. M. (2014). How affective technologies can influence intimate interactions and improve social connectedness. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 72, 33–43.

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Kahane, S., & Pietrandrea, P. (2009). Les parenthétiques comme ‘Unités Illocutoires Associées’. Une perspective macrosyntaxique. Linx [online]. https:// doi.org/10.4000/linx.1334. Kaltenböck, G. (2007). Spoken parenthetical clauses in English: A taxonomy. In N. Dehé & Y. Kavalova (Eds.), Parentheticals (pp. 25–52). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kaltenböck, G., Keizer, E., & Lohmann, A. (2016). Extra-clausal constituents: An overview. In G. Kaltenböck, E. Keizer, & A. Lohmann (Eds.), Outside the clause: Form and function of extra-clausal constituents (pp. 1–26). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Khachaturyan, E. (2011). Disons et pour ainsi dire, deux marqueurs de la nonprise en charge? In P. Dendale & D. Coltier (Eds.), La prise en charge énonciative. Etudes théoriques et empiriques (pp. 163–181). Bruxelles: De Boeck. Kuteva, T. (1998). « On identifying an evasive gram: action narrowly averted ». Studies in Language, 22 n°1, 113–160. Kuyumcuyan, A. (2008). On va dire: enquête. In O. Bertrand, et al. (Eds.), Discours, diachronie, stylistique du français (pp. 175–192). Bern: Peter Lang. Lamiroy, B., & Vanderbauwhede, G. (2016). Les marqueurs de discours en effet, en fait, de fait, en réalité et leurs équivalents en néerlandais: indices de grammaticalisation. In L. Sarda, D. Vigier, & B. Combettes (Eds.), Connexion et indexation. Ces liens qui tissent le texte. Connection and Indexation in the creation of text (pp. 195–208). Lyon: ENS Editions. Lansari, L. (2008). « Commitment: A parameter for the contrastive analysis of be going to and aller + inf. ». Belgian Journal of Linguistics 22, Commitment, 179–196. Lansari, L. (2009). The be going to periphrasis in if-clauses: A comparison with the aller + infinitive periphrasis in French. Languages in Contrast, 9 (2), 202–224. Lansari, L. (2010a). On va dire: vers un emploi modalisant d’aller + inf. In E. Moliné & C. Vetters (Eds.), Temps, aspect et modalité en français. Cahiers Chronos (Vol. 21, pp. 119–139). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Lansari, L. (2010b). On va dire: modalisation du dire et denomination. In P. Frath, L. Lansari, & J. Pauchard (Eds.), Res Per Nomen II - Langue, référence et anthropologie (pp. 277–295). EPURE: Reims. Lansari, L. (2017). I was going to say/j’allais dire as discourse markers in contemporary English and French. Languages in Contrast, 17 (2), 205–228. Legallois, D. (2012). From grammaticalization to expressive constructions: The case of histoire de + inf. In M. Bouveret & D. Legallois (Eds.), Constructions in French (pp. 257–283). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Legallois, D., & François, J. (2012). Définition et illustration de la notion d’expressivité en linguistique. In N. Le Querler, F. Neveu, & E. Roussel (Eds.), Relations, Connexions, Dépendances: Hommage Au Professeur Claude Guimier (pp. 197–221). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Martin, F. (2005). « Les deux lectures de faillir + inf. et les verbes présupposant l’existence d’un événement ». In N. Le Querler & H. Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot (Eds.), Les périphrases verbales (pp. 455–474). Amsterdam: Philadelphia/John Benjamins. Murray, D. E. (2000). Protean communication: The language of computermediated communication. TESOL Quarterly, 34 (3), 397–423. Nita, R. (2006). Discours rapporté, repérages et organisation textuelle: étude contrastive anglais-français-roumain (PhD dissertation). University of Poitiers, France. Paillard, D. (2009). Prise en charge, commitment ou scène énonciative. Langue Française, 162(2), 109–128. Palmer, F. R. (1979). Modality and the English modals. London: Longman. Pusch, C. D. (2007). Faut dire: variation et sens d’un marqueur parenthétique entre connectivité et (inter)subjectivité. Langue Française, 154, 29–44. Ranger, G. (2018). Discourse markers: An enunciative approach. London: Palgrave. Rouanne, L. (2014). De la médiativité à la modalisation: si on peut dire comme marqueur d’un méta-discours. In J.-Cl. Anscombre, E. Oppermann-Marsaux, & A. Rodriguez Somolinos (Eds.), Médiativité, polyphonie et modalité en français: études synchroniques et diachroniques (pp. 85–99). Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Saunier, E. (2012). Disons: un impératif de dire? Remarques sur les propriétés du marqueur et son comportement dans les reformulations. L’Information Grammaticale, 132, 25–34. Schneider, S. (2007). Reduced parenthetical clauses as mitigators: A corpus study of spoken French, Italian and Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schneider, S. (2013). Clauses parenthétiques réduites et type d’interaction verbale. Quelques considerations. In H. Chuquet, R. Nita, & F. Valetopoulos (Eds.), Des sentiments au point de vue: études de linguistique contrastive (pp. 175–194). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Siouffi, G., Steuckardt, A., & Wionet, C. (2016). Les modalisateurs émergents en français contemporain: Présentation théorique et études de cas. Journal of French Language Studies, 26 (1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0959269515000472.

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Steuckardt, A. (2014). Polyphonie et médiativité dans un marqueur émergent: on va dire. In J.-Cl. Anscombre, E. Oppermann-Marsaux, & A. Rodriguez Somolinos (Eds.), Médiativité, polyphonie et modalité en français: études synchroniques et diachroniques (pp. 67–84). Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Steuckardt, A. (2016). A la recherche du consensus: on va dire, on va dire ça, on va dire ça comme ça. In L. Rouanne & J.-Cl. Anscombre (Eds.), Histoires de dire. Petit glossaire des marqueurs formés sur le verbe dire (pp. 293–313). Bern: Peter Lang. Stivers, T. (2012). Sequence organization. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 191–209). Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell. Teston-Bonnard, S. (2008). En français parlé, je veux dire est-il toujours une marque de reformulation?. In M.-C. Le Bot, M. Schuwer, & E. Richard (Eds.), La reformulation. Marqueurs linguistiques, stratégies énonciatives (pp. 51–67). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Tottie, G. (2011). Uh and Um as sociolinguistic markers in British English. In G. Gilquin & S. De Cock (Eds.), Errors and disfluencies in spoken corpora (pp. 173–197). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Trousdale, G., & Gisborne, N. (2008). Constructional approaches to English grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Uygur-Distexhe, D. (2014). Lol, mdr and ptdr. An inclusive and gradual approach to discourse markers. In L.-A. Cougnon & C. Fairon (Eds.), SMS communication: A linguistic approach (pp. 239–263). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

References of the Corpora British National Corpus (BNC). Oxford University Computing Services, 1995. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/. Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Mark Davies, Brigham Young University. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/. FRANTEXT. CNRS. Atilf. Université de Nancy 2. http://atilf.atilf.fr/frtpass.htm and http://atilf.atilf.fr/frtcatgpass.html. TenTen. Available on line via SketchEngine. https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/.

3 Overview of the Corpus Findings

This chapter presents the main corpus findings for the four DMs under scrutiny. This short chapter successively examines the results obtained for the different levels of analysis involved: semantic-pragmatic, syntactic and collocational levels. The overall results show that the four DMs have one pragmatic function in common—metalinguistic comment—which is not surprising for DMs of saying. J’allais dire and I was going to say have nonetheless acquired other functions worth examining. As far as commitment is concerned, the analysis reveals a clear dividing line between the two pairs of markers. On the one hand, on va dire and shall we say present commitment as intersubjective and try to stabilise discourse, most of the time mentioning only one linguistic choice (p). On the other hand, j’allais dire and I was going to say are associated with speaker commitment but discourse instability (two competing linguistic choices tend to coexist in the utterance, p and p ), thus setting up a different kind of discourse regulation. Within each pair of markers, divergences are nonetheless observed at the syntactic and collocational levels: they do not have scope over the same type of hosts, and they do not share the same syntactic positions or rely on the same collocation patterns. I shall start with examining the semantic and pragmatic parameters coded via the annotation grid (Sect. 3.1), focusing first on the two abstract © The Author(s) 2020 L. Lansari, A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24896-3_3

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semantic parameters dealing with commitment (origin of commitment, relationship between p and p ) and then on the pragmatic functions the four DMs are liable to exhibit. Section 3.2 is dedicated to the syntactic findings (in relation to scope, position and autonomy). Finally, Sect. 3.3 focuses on the collocation patterns, providing the results of the annotation grid for the co-occurrence of the DMs with epistemic and degree markers, opposition markers, Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) signs and with other DMs in the N-2 and N-1 slots.

3.1

Semantic-Pragmatic Level

As expressed in Chapter 2, the semantic analysis, based on the enunciative model, seeks to examine the type of commitment underlying the DMs under scrutiny. Commitment involves defining the origin of commitment and analysing the relationship between the propositional content p and alternative formulations (p ).

3.1.1 Origin of Commitment and Relationship p/p 3.1.1.1 Origin of Commitment Unsurprisingly, in terms of the origin of commitment j’allais dire and I was going to say exclusively mark speaker commitment and this parameter does not need annotating. In other words, the speaker presents him/herself as the sole origin of commitment, although the degree of commitment remains low or not straightforward (as stated in Chapter 2 via the notion of “commitment paradox”). Shall we say functions rather simply as well in that matter: as one might expect with the pronoun we, the DM entails intersubjective commitment whereby speaker and co-speaker are presented as equally responsible for the propositional content. Chapter 4 will nonetheless show that this allegedly shared commitment relies on a pre-emptive strategy on the speaker’s part: the speaker anticipates possible criticisms and uses the plural (we) to force

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the co-speaker—who never actually says anything in the occurrences under discussion—to share responsibility. The most complex DM as far as commitment is concerned is on va dire. Like shall we say, it is never based on subjective commitment and always involves both speaker and co-speaker (in an anticipative way), but it may give rise to strategies relying on irony and ambivalent viewpoints. This means that a fine-grained contextual analysis is needed to assess viewpoint in relation to on va dire. Let us now move on to the second criterion involved in commitment: the relationship between p and p .

3.1.1.2 P/p As specified in the definition of assertion presented in Chapter 1 (Sect. 1.2), assertion implies choosing one specific propositional content p, at the exclusion of other alternatives p . Coding whether the DMs under discussion involve one stable propositional content or provide the co-speaker with competing choices may shed light on the degree of discourse stabilisation constructed by each DM. Table 3.1 summarises the figures for each DM. Table 3.1 reveals a clear-cut dichotomy between the two pair of DMs: on the one hand, on va dire and shall we say tend to mention only p, while on the other with j’allais dire and I was going to say several formulations very frequently co-occur. It should be borne in mind that Table 3.1 provides the figures for all the discourse functions. Taking into account the metalinguistic function only leads to a sharper contrast, since I was going Table 3.1 p/p relationship

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

Coexistence p/p

Only p

33 19 53 19

101 99 31 28

24.6% 16.1% 63% 40.4%

Total 75.4% 83.9% 37% 59.6%

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to say in metalinguistic comment almost systematically associates p and non-p (see Chapter 5). In combination with the previously examined origin, this finding justifies my pairing off of the four DMs: on va dire and shall we say are compared in Chapter 4, while Chapter 5 focuses on the comparison between j’allais dire and I was going to say. Table 3.1 further indicates that the DMs under study do not regulate and stabilise discourse in the same way. I shall argue in Chapters 4 and 5 that the former pair is inherently linked to discourse stabilisation, as both of these DMs seek to achieve intersubjective consensus, while the latter often fails to stabilise discourse—which sometimes gives rise to overtones of hesitation. I shall now examine the varied pragmatic functions the four DMs are liable to exhibit.

3.1.2 Pragmatic Functions In the data examined, the DMs are prone to develop three distinct pragmatic functions. The most obvious one deals with “modalisation du dire” strictly speaking (Authier-Revuz 1995, see Chapter 2) and refers to metalinguistic comment. In the examples below, the four DMs under discussion indeed mark the speaker’s metalinguistic awareness and more particularly his/her difficulties in picking the most adequate word(s): (1) et il me semble qu’il y a des nouvelles technologies qui ont développé, on va dire, une information beaucoup plus transversale ou horizontale avec les blogs sur internet notamment. (1 ) and it seems to me that there are new technologies that have developed let’s say [on va dire] much more transversal or horizontal information techniques especially with blogs on the internet. (2) Le remède européen n’est pas forcément applicable au mauricien cas par cas . Changer la mentalité des mauriciens dans son ensemble et ce dès leur plus jeune âge . Alors , même malades , ils auraient un comportement j’allais dire , responsable et humain .

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(2 ) The European solution cannot necessarily be applied to Mauritius. Changing the Mauricians’ way of thinking as a whole starting very early. Then, even if ill, they would have a behaviour, well, let’s say [j’allais dire] a responsible and human behaviour. (3) I’m personally really excited to see this narrative play out because – I was going to say it’s ruining middle America by exposing them to the darkness. Do you think it has that element? (4) We had parties. Often. Party people can be, shall we say, clumsy. It took us about three weeks to put a scratch like a canyon across the table. I still don’t know who was responsible, but it didn’t matter.

This first function, common to the four DMs (and, of course, to many other DMs containing speech verbs), is labelled “metalinguistic comment” in the annotation grid used. This umbrella term, however, does not imply that the DMs are strictly equivalent and interchangeable in marking metalinguistic comment. Chapters 4 and 5 will shed light on how each DM expresses metalinguistic comment, which implies redefining several subcases within metalinguistic comment (depending on the nature of what is being commented upon). The other two functions are less frequent and cannot be analysed using the framework of “modalisation du dire”. As briefly mentioned in Chapter 2, the data reveals that j’allais dire and I was going to have acquired other types of functions, which have gone unnoticed in the literature on DMs of saying. Let us examine the following examples: (5) Working with Alex is always a treat because of our long relationship and what our chemistry brings.

Troy: I was going to say, the chemistry is definitely tangible. Anyone who really listens can hear it.

Kim: Thank you.

(6)

Pour ma part, j’ai un parti-pris d’exploiter toujours au maximum l’acoustique naturelle d’une pièce… le fait d’insonoriser, autrement dit de limiter l’émission des ondes sonores hors de la pièce, c’est une opération souvent coûteuse et qui a tendance à détériorer l’acoustique d’une pièce….

sujet à suivre

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ouaip j’allais dire, dans ton cas, insonoriser est surtout une nécessité, pas une volonté première… trouver un appart c’est pas forcément mieux, puisque tu auras des voisins et tout ce que ça engendre (6 ) As far as I’m concerned I’ve always tried to exploit the natural acoustics of a room as much as possible. Soundproofing – that is to say reducing the emission of sound waves out of the room – is often an expensive task that tends to downgrade the room’s acoustics… To be continued Yep I was going to say [j’allais dire], in your case, soundproofing is a necessity, not a choice…finding a flat is not necessarily better, since you’re going to have neighbours and all that comes with it (7)

Anyways, I like to point back to the stats to kind of show what players should be spending most of their time on. Does that make sense?

Andy Zodin: Absolutely. I was going to say, you use the word errormanagement and that was going to be my next point. If you talk to the greatest golfers in the world, they all talk about at one point or another […]

In these three examples, I was going to say and j’allais dire do not express metalinguistic comment, insofar as they are not used to reflect on specific linguistic choices. In examples (5) and (6), they occur in response to the co-speaker’s initial commitment and indicate that the speaker shares the same epistemic stance. A possible gloss would be I was going to say the same thing, and it is important to note the anaphoric dimension of these utterances (see the verbatim repetitions of the lexemes chemistry and insonoriser ). To the best of my knowledge, no similar function has been identified in the scholarly literature on DMs of saying. Within the theoretical framework known as Conversation Analysis (henceforth CA), this discourse function corresponds to “affiliation” (Stivers 2008; Lindström and Sorjonen 2013). Affiliation deals with how speakers explicitly manifest that they share the same epistemic and/or emotional stance as other discourse participants. Affiliation may be expressed by DMs, but not only: interjections, prosody and non-verbal cues (eye movements, gestures, etc.)

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may also play an important role in affiliation marking. Within CA, affiliation is construed as an intrinsically intersubjective notion and is considered an inherent characteristic of interaction and social relationships. In interaction, speakers naturally tend to affiliate with one another, insofar as affiliation is the expected social behaviour.1 The discourse function illustrated by examples (5) and (6) above is therefore labelled “affiliation” in my annotation grid. Chapter 5 will examine this use in relation to I was going to say. In example (7), I was going to say seems to mark a third function: it does not comment on a specific linguistic choice, nor does it express affiliation with the co-speaker. My hypothesis is that the DM is here used to help the speaker monitor discourse and shift to a different topic. I have chosen to label this third function “topic shifting”, in the wake of previous publications by different researchers (Fraser 2009; Riou 2015). Chapter 5 provides a full-fledged analysis of this function. To sum up on the various discourse functions found in the data, it is assumed that three functions are to be distinguished: metalinguistic comment, affiliation and topic shifting. Each occurrence within the samples retrieved in enTenTen13 and frTenTen12 has been analysed from a semantic-pragmatic viewpoint and classified within one of these three functions. The results are summarised in Table 3.2. Table 3.2 sheds light on a crucial difference between the two pairs of DMs: on va dire and shall we say are restricted to metalinguistic comment, whereas j’allais dire and I was going to say may also give rise to more structural and dialogical functions, via affiliation and topic shifting. Quantitatively speaking, these two functions are not very well represented Table 3.2 Pragmatic functions Pragmatic function

Metalinguistic Topic comment shifting

Affiliation Total

Nb

%

Nb

%

Nb

%

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

134 118 79 30

100 100 94 63.8

0 0 2 15

0 0 2.4 31.9

0 0 3 2

0 0 3.6 4.3

134 118 84 47

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but this may be linked to the genre of the data examined. For English, where spoken data is easy to access, I shall show in Chapter 5 that I was going to say is much more frequent as a token of affiliation and topic shifting in the spoken part of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). One specific theoretical issue arises in relation to the pragmatic functions delineated here: How do they relate to each other? Do they correspond to distinct paths of pragmaticalisation? I shall show in Chapter 5 that, despite different pragmatic roles, the three uses rely on similar abstract operations as far as commitment and utterance regulation are concerned. Let us now examine the results obtained at the syntactic level.

3.2

Syntactic Level

The annotation grid presented in this chapter has shown that five different syntactic parameters have been annotated: scope of the DMs (syntactic category of their host), position with respect to the host, position at the sentence level, position in turn-taking and degree of autonomy of the DMs (both from the left and from the right contexts, on the basis of typographic elements).

3.2.1 Scope As concerns scope, Tables 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 provide the syntactic categories of the host for each DM, in the decreasing order. The first obvious conclusion to be drawn from the tables above is that none of the four DMs is specialised in a specific type of host: each DM may have scope over a variety of hosts. Here are some examples: (8) Pour parler un peu de Valentine, c’est un Spectre que j’ai su apprécier grâce à son combat contre Yaya version anime. C’est physique on va dire, j’ai tout de suite accroché à son style et a son charisme. (8 ) to talk about Valentine, it’s a Spectre I came to appreciate thanks to her fight against Yaya in its animated version. It’s physical, shall we say [on va dire], I immediately liked her style and charisma.

3 Overview of the Corpus Findings

Table 3.3 Scope of shall we say Grammatical category Adjectival phrase Noun phrase Ø-clause Prepositional phrase Verb phrase Total

Tokens ( n)

%

50

42.4

47 10 7

39.7 8.5 6

4 118

3.4 100

Table 3.4 Scope of on va dire Syntactic category Que-clause Ø-clause Noun phrase Adjectival phrase Prepositional phrase Verb phrase Adverbial phrase Total

Tokens ( n)

%

67 15 22 16

50 11.2 16.4 12

6

4.5

5 3

3.7 2.2

134

100

Tokens ( n)

%

29 9 8

61.7 19.1 17

1 47

2.2 100

Table 3.5 Scope of I was going to say Syntactic category Clause Noun phrase Adjectival phrase Verb phrase Total

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Table 3.6 Scope of j’allais dire Syntactic category Noun phrase Prepositional phrase Adjectival phrase Clause Verb phrase Adverbial phrase Total

Tokens ( n)

%

28 17

33.3 20.2

15

17.9

14 6 4

16.7 7.1 4.8

84

100

(9) The original Jimmy Rushing rendition of Going to Chicago was actually quite risqué, as the lyrics refer to, shall we say, a “lady” of questionable character. (10) Si le Parti travailliste (Ptr) est toujours aussi vivant, aussi fort après autant d’années dans un monde qui, pourtant, est sans cesse en mutation, c’est qu’il a - j’allais dire un ADN particulier. (10 ) If the Labour Party is still so strong, so powerful after so many years in a world that is nonetheless always changing, it’s because it has I was going to say [j’allais dire] a specific DNA. (11) He was very quiet, grateful, gentle, and, I was going to say, docile. He is a fiery soldier […].

The hosts are the following: adjective physique in example (8), noun phrase a lady in example (9), noun phrase un ADN particulier in example (10) and adjective docile in example (11). The second remark pertains to the syntactic category labelled “clause”. It should be made clear that this label does not necessarily refer to que-/thatclauses but may also correspond to participial or infinitive clauses. In fact, que-/that- clauses only represent a small proportion of the clauses at stake. The four tables show that all these DMs may have scope over entire clauses. Quantitatively speaking, however, there are striking differences:

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on va dire and I was going to say are far more likely to have scope over entire clauses than shall we say and j’allais dire, which tend to have scope over noun phrases or adjectival phrases. Let us consider the following examples with on va dire and I was going to say: (12) Hey! T’es passée sous un rouleau compresseur ou tu fait partie d’un gang? Non parce que, pour être cabossée comme ça… M’enfin, on va dire que ça donne un style ! (12 ) Hey! Have you been run over by a road roller or are you a gang member? Because to look like that…Anyway, let’s say [on va dire] it’s stylish! (13) I’m personally really excited to see this narrative play out because – I was going to say it’s ruining middle America by exposing them to the darkness. Do you think it has that element?

In example (12), on va dire has scope over the que-clause it introduces (que ça donne un style), while in example (13) I was going to say has scope over it’s ruining […] darkness. These syntactic findings need to be related to the semantic-pragmatic analysis, as they may be linked to functional divergences between DMs.

3.2.2 Position with Respect to the Host The second syntactic parameter deals with position and more precisely with position of the DMs with respect to their hosts. The overall results are provided in Table 3.7. Table 3.7 Syntactic position relatively to the host Initial position

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

Final position

Total

Tokens ( n)

%

Tokens ( n)

%

93 97 80 47

69.4 82.2 95.3 100

41 21 4 0

30.6 17.8 4.7 0

134 118 84 47

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Table 3.7 indicates that all four DMs tend to appear initially, a result that is in keeping with studies assuming that initial position is a syntactic feature of DMs (Schourup 1999). It is nonetheless necessary to qualify this statement: I was going to say seems to occur only initially, but the other DMs are also attested in final position (i.e. after their hosts). This result has to be interpreted with caution given the low number of tokens examined. A previous study actually suggests that I was going to say may be found in final position as well, albeit rarely (Lansari 2017). Like scope, position will be related to semantic-pragmatic parameters, in order to assess whether the two positions defined here are linked to a specific semantic-pragmatic function or not.

3.2.3 Position at the Sentence Level At the sentence level, the study of the position of the four DMs yields the following results. For this parameter, I did not distinguish between medial and final positions, since the results were not relevant, and only contrasting initial position with others provides interesting results. Table 3.8 clearly shows that only I was going to say has affinity with initial position at the sentence level. Chapter 5 will shed light on this finding, suggesting that this syntactic feature may be connected to the role of I was going to say as affiliation marker and topic shifter. Table 3.8 Position at the sentence level Initial position

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

Other

Total

Tokens ( n)

%

Tokens ( n)

%

0 0 13 35

0 0 15.5 74.5

134 118 71 12

100 100 84.5 25.5

134 118 84 47

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3.2.4 Position in Turn-Taking As regards turn-taking, Table 3.9 indicates that for all four DMs, initial position is not the preferred position. Table 3.9 Position in turn-taking Initial position

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

Other

Total

Tokens ( n)

%

Tokens ( n)

%

0 0 7 15

0 0 8.3 31.9

134 118 77 32

100% 100% 91.7 68.1

134 118 84 47

Table 3.9 nonetheless points to a specific behaviour of I was going to say, which is more frequent in initial position than the other three DMs. Once more, this syntactic behaviour has to be related to semantic-pragmatic features. I shall now present the results for the last syntactic parameter, which deals with the degree of autonomy of each DM.

3.2.5 Degree of Autonomy As explained in Chapter 2 (in the section dedicated to the annotation grid), the parameter called “degree of autonomy” is not based on a theoretical syntactic analysis but on the presence/absence of typographic signs (hyphens, commas, etc.) inserted before and after the DMs. The degree of autonomy is deemed low in the absence of such signs (in which case the DM is fully integrated within the rest of the clause) and, conversely, high when such signs separate the DMs from the rest of the clause. Table 3.10 summarises the results for the left context, while Table 3.11 provides the results regarding the right context. The data shown in Table 3.10 suggest that all DMs have acquired “autonomy” with respect to the left context, the word “autonomy” being used with all due caution (see Chapter 2). With respect to the right context,

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Table 3.10 Degree of autonomy with the left Low degree

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

High degree

Total

Tokens ( n)

%

Tokens ( n)

%

51 13 8 2

38 11 9.5 4.2

83 105 76 45

62 89 90.5 95.8

134 118 84 47

Table 3.11 Degree of autonomy with the right Low degree

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

High degree

Total

Tokens ( n)

%

Tokens ( n)

%

91 22 74 37

68 18.6 88.1 78.7

43 96 10 10

32 81.4 11.9 21.3

134 118 84 47

the situation is more heterogeneous: shall we say stands in sharp contrast to the other three DMs, since it is the only DM exhibiting a high degree of autonomy with respect to the right context, as in example (14) below: (14) The most controversial aspect of black male/white female dating, to me, is when people start discussing why a black guy might prefer to date a white girl. The reasons I hear people throw around are anything from preference, to viewing them as trophies, to being able to walk all over them, to thinking they are more promiscuous or, shall we say, “sexually adventurous” than other races. I imagine some feel just like I do – they may simply notice one race more than the other, but still are open to anyone.

In this utterance, shall we say occurs between commas, thus exhibiting autonomy with respect to both the left and the right contexts. This might indicate that shall we say is used parenthetically more often than the other DMs examined. This specific property needs to be correlated with scope: the ability of this DM to appear parenthetically is linked to its affinity

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Table 3.12 Co-occurrence with epistemic and degree markers

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

Tokens ( n)

%

Total

24 20 6 14

17.9 16.9 7.1 29.8

134 118 84 47

with hosts that are syntactic constituents (noun phrase, adjectival phrase, etc.). These features of shall we say will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 4. Generally speaking, the phenomenon uncovered here by the typographic signs has to be examined in depth in order to assign a precise syntactic status to the DMs, in relation to the category of “parentheticals”. The next chapters will clarify this issue. Let us now consider the results dealing with collocation patterns.

3.3

Collocational Level

As stated in this chapter, four different types of collocation were annotated: co-occurrence with epistemic and degree markers, opposition markers, CMC signs and with other DMs. For the first three parameters, the unit examined was the sentence. For the last one, I focused on the N-2 and N-1 slots. The different results are summarised in the tables below. Let us start with epistemic and degree markers. Table 3.12 suggests that all four DMs co-occur with epistemic markers (such as I think or I guess and similar markers in French) and low degree markers (like a bit, a little, un peu in French), which corroborates the hypothesis that commitment is not complete. It is striking to note that, at least in my data, I was going to say collocates much more frequently with such items than the other DMs. Co-occurrence with opposition markers (typically but/mais) is similarly higher for I was going to say, as shown in Table 3.13.

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Table 3.13 Co-occurrence with opposition markers

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

Tokens ( n)

%

Total

27 6 21 24

20.1 5.1 25 51

134 118 84 47

Tokens ( n)

%

Total

12 5 5 1

8.9 4.2 5.9 2.1

134 118 84 47

Table 3.14 Co-occurrence with CMC signs

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

As a whole, Table 3.13 indicates that opposition markers appear rather frequently in sentences containing the DMs at stake. This finding must be examined further in order to ascertain the role of opposition. As such, opposition markers seem to signal that the DMs are frequently associated with argumentative strategies whereby the speaker develops conflicting viewpoints. The contextual analysis will show that, in association with on va dire and shall we say, these markers may more specifically lend themselves to a concessive interpretation (see Chapter 4). With j’allais dire and I was going to say, mais and but do not receive such an interpretation but correspond to the speaker’s change of mind, thereby bringing about discourse instability (see Chapter 5). Let us now consider the results for co-occurrence with CMC signs provided by Table 3.14. As stated in Chapter 2, CMC signs designate various linguistic and nonlinguistic signs that are typical of a new type of communication: emojis and emoticons, repeated letters, punctuation marks, capitalisation, etc. Although I do not make particular claims regarding the specific use of the DMs under scrutiny in web data, I assume that co-occurrence with such signs may provide relevant information as to speaker stance. Table 3.14 suggests that on va dire is more liable to be associated with CMC signs

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Table 3.15 Co-occurrence with other DMs

On va dire Shall we say J’allais dire I was going to say

Tokens ( n)

%

Total

19 5 3 3

14.2 4.2 3.6 6.4

134 118 84 47

than the other DMs, a result in keeping with other features suggesting that on va dire sometimes relies on make-believe strategies on the speaker’s part (see Chapter 4). Lastly, co-occurrence with other DMs in the N-1 and N-2 slots is summarised in Table 3.15. Table 3.15 suggests that on va dire is more likely to be preceded by another DM than the other three DMs. The qualitative analysis conducted in Chapters 4 and 5 will uncover interesting differences as to the type of DMs involved: the four DMs do not collocate with the same DMs, which provides valuable information regarding the type of utterance regulation underlying each of them.

3.4

Summary of the Findings

From a syntactic viewpoint, the findings based on the annotation grid highlight interesting phenomena. First, the DMs seem to behave like prototypical DMs, since they mostly occur in initial position (before the host). Second, the annotation of typographic signs has revealed that the DMs tend to develop as autonomous units, a finding that needs to be discussed in relation to the literature on “parentheticals” and “comment clauses”. Semantically and pragmatically, the initial hypothesis that morphosyntactic similarities might have some bearing on semantic-pragmatic features is confirmed. The results clearly show that it is legitimate to carry out a contrastive analysis of the DMs, comparing on va dire and shall we say on the one hand and j’allais dire and I was going to say on the other hand. The

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former pair is characterised by intersubjective stabilisation, while the latter relies on subjective commitment and instability. Another striking difference between the two pairs is that j’allais dire and I was going to say are liable to exhibit several types of pragmatic functions, ranging from metalinguistic comment to more structural and/or dialogical functions. By contrast, on va dire and shall we say specialise in metalinguistic comment. The overview of the corpus findings also shows that there still are divergences within each pair of DMs at the syntactic and collocational levels. This means that it is necessary to conduct a fine-grained analysis combining the different linguistic levels, in order to identify the discursive profile of each DM. Chapter 4 focuses on the comparison between on va dire and shall we say, while Chapter 5 deals with j’allais dire and I was going to say.

Note 1. Conversational Analysis heavily relies on social constructivism, which assumes that emotions should not be viewed as internal affects—as is posited in traditional psychological works—but rather as public manifestations. See Peräkylä (2012: 283–287).

References Authier-Revuz, J. (1995). Ces mots qui ne vont pas de soi. Boucles réflexives et non-coïncidences du dire (Vols. 1 & 2). Paris: Larousse. Fraser, B. (2009). Topic orientation markers. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 892–898. Lansari, L. (2017). I was going to say/j’allais dire as discourse markers in contemporary English and French. Languages in Contrast, 17 (2), 205–228. Lindström, A., & Sorjonen, M.-L. (2013). Affiliation in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 350–369). West Sussex: Blackwell. Peräkylä, A. (2012). What does the study of interaction offer to emotion research? In A. Peräkylä & M.-L. Sorjonen (Eds.), Emotion in interaction (pp. 274–289). New York: Oxford University Press.

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Riou, M. (2015). The grammar of topic transition in American English conversation. Topic transition design and management in typical and atypical conversations (schizophrenia) (PhD dissertation). University Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, University Paris Diderot (Paris 7). Schourup, L. (1999). Discourse markers. Lingua, 107 (3–4), 227–265. Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment, and affiliation during storytelling: When nodding is a token of affiliation. Research on Language in Social Interaction, 41(1), 31–57.

4 Corpus Findings I: On va dire and Shall We Say

This chapter focuses on the pair of DMs on va dire and shall we say. These two DMs share striking morphosyntactic similarities: in addition to the verbum dicendi dire/ say, they both contain an exponent of futurity in the present tense (the periphrasis aller + infinitive, the modal auxiliary shall ) and a pronoun that does not refer to the speaker only but to the speaker/co-speaker dyad. Such similarities should not, however, influence the results of the annotation process (based on a grid combining semanticpragmatic, syntactic and collocational parameters presented in Chapter 2). This chapter provides the main corpus findings regarding on va dire and shall we say. On the basis of these findings, it is clear that on va dire and shall we say share many common points in terms of language use. Both are specialised in one discourse function: metalinguistic comment, whereby the speaker comments upon his/her own linguistic choices and mitigates his/her commitment to these choices. Taking into account syntactic and collocational factors nonetheless shows that the two DMs represent two different stabilising modes, which leads to the definition of two distinct discursive profiles. Section 4.1 consists of introductory remarks briefly retracing the history of each DM. Section 4.2 focuses on the semantic characterisation of the DMs: this operation-based semantic characterisation shows that the © The Author(s) 2020 L. Lansari, A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24896-3_4

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mitigation at stake is based on a feigned intersubjective commitment (the speaker presents commitment as shared by the co-speaker) and aims to stabilise discourse. In Sect. 4.3, I closely re-examine the tokens expressing metalinguistic comment and suggest that various contextual parameters may give rise to slightly different uses (numeral approximation, exemplification) that are not equally represented by on va dire and shall we say. Section 4.4 analyses the two distinct stabilising modes underlying on va dire on the one hand, shall we say on the other, while Sect. 4.5 explores the pragmatic strategies underlying the use of the DMs in relation to euphemism and irony. In Sect. 4.6, I discuss the syntactic classification of the DMs. Section 4.7 summarises the findings and defines a distinct discursive profile for each DM, re-considering the form-meaning relationships for on va dire and shall we say.

4.1

Preliminary Remarks: “Emergent” on va dire vs. Well-Established Shall We Say

Several recent publications in French show that on va dire may be considered an emergent DM (Kuyumkuyan 2008; Lansari 2010a, b; Labeau 2012; Steuckardt 2014, 2016; Abouda and Skrovec 2014). It first appeared in the 1970s and has been on the rise since, but it is only attested in nonliterary genres (spoken and web data, press) and associated with informal registers. To the best of my knowledge, no similar study exists for shall we say, which is only briefly mentioned by Trousdale and Gisborne (2008: 126) and Beeching (2002: 48–49). According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), its first occurrence as DM dates back to 1822 in British English: (1) The ‘Leddy’..is Mrs. Pringle dilated… This last-mentioned character is in its way the master, or shall we say mistress-piece of the author.

In this type of utterance, shall we say is “used parenthetically to call attention to a description which is strikingly original or evocative, or (in later use) a knowing euphemism or understatement” (OED). Indeed, the usual

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phrase is “master-piece”: shall we say indicates that “mistress-piece” is not the expected linguistic choice. Shall we say cannot therefore be considered emergent. In order to confirm or disconfirm the claim made in the OED, I conducted several searches on reference corpora. First, a search on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) corroborates that shall we say first developed its discourse use in the mid-1850s. In that corpus, the first attested token of such a use dates back to 1842, in the following utterance1 : (2) Alas! for the slavery of the Welsh and Cornish; -- shall we say, for every county in Old England, -- from which the people have not had knowledge or power to come out Puritan; -- but whose language is a scoff, and whose daughters are a tribute to the protection of Lord Melbourne! (COHA)

As in example (1) taken from the OED, shall we say in example (2) above is used parenthetically, but not to draw attention to an unexpected formulation. It is used in a more neutral way to elaborate on the speaker’s previous formulation. This goes to show that the definition given by the OED does not take into account the variety of uses of shall we say, hence the need for a corpus-based analysis. All uses considered, the frequency of shall we say in the COHA is stable throughout the period covered by the corpus (from 1840 to 2010): no significant rise in the frequency of the sequence was observed. A more fine-grained analysis targeting only discourse uses would be necessary to assess its frequency as a DM, but the quantitative analysis conducted here is sufficient to prove that shall we say is not undergoing a rise in frequency in contemporary American English. Secondly, I carried out a brief investigation of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which, unlike the COHA, contains spoken data. It confirms the results from the COHA: the frequency of use of shall we say has remained stable from 1990 to 2017. Moreover, both the COCA and the British National Corpus (BNC) show that this frequency is rather low, as summarised in Table 4.1. Let us keep in mind, however, that Table 4.1 takes into account all the tokens of the sequence and is not specifically representative of discourse uses. As stated in Chapter 3, shall we say is likewise rather infrequent in

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Table 4.1 Frequency of use of shall we say in the COCA and the BNC

COCA BNC

Tokens ( n)

Pmw normalised frequency

567 167

1.09 1.67

enTenTen13 (0.60 pmw). By comparison, on va dire is better represented in frTenTen12 (3.72 pmw). The preceding lines have shown that, despite common morphosyntactic features, the two DMs have undergone rather dissimilar developments: on va dire is an emergent DM still associated with informal registers and sometimes described as a linguistic fad.2 Shall we say, by contrast, has been attested for a long time and is not restricted to informal contexts. The overall results presented in Chapter 3 suggest that comparing on va dire and shall we say is nonetheless relevant: the morphological similarities that were taken as a starting point for the comparison strongly correlate with semantic-pragmatic functions. At the semantic-pragmatic level, the results obtained via the annotation grid have shown that both DMs: – present commitment as intersubjective – tend to take into account only one formulation p, p being rarely mentioned – are specialised in metalinguistic comment. At the syntactic and collocational levels, however, many divergences were observed: the two DMs do not behave in the exact same way as concerns scope, position or syntactic autonomy, nor do they appear in the same contextual environments. The goals pursued in the present chapter are to interpret these findings and correlate the different levels of analysis in order to define, for each DM, a discursive profile integrating all the parameters involved.

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4.2

119

Semantic Characterisation: From Instability Towards Intersubjective Stabilisation

As stated in Chapter 2, the four DMs of saying under scrutiny mark minimal, or incomplete, commitment: the speaker using them does not strictly assert p but mitigates his/her commitment. Within this general mitigation process, it is nonetheless possible to distinguish between two pairs of markers. The results presented in Chapter 3 indeed show that there exists a clear dividing line between on va dire and shall we say on the one hand, and j’allais dire and I was going to say on the other hand, at least from a semantic enunciative perspective. The former pair of DMs presents (minimal) commitment as intersubjective and tries to stabilise discourse by mentioning p only. The latter always presents commitment as subjective (as emanating from the speaker only), but is less stability-oriented: p and non-p tend to coexist in the utterances under scrutiny, which confers a sort of instability to the speaker’s linguistic choices. I suggest more specifically that on va dire and shall we say rely on the following operations as far as commitment is concerned: – the speaker is of course the origin of commitment, but it is the speaker/co-speaker dyad which is presented as endorsing the propositional content (though minimally) – p is usually presented as the only possible linguistic choice. Drawing on these two elements, I argue that on va dire and shall we say are both used to mitigate commitment by building a false intersubjective commitment to one linguistic formulation: their presence highlights some kind of linguistic problem, hence the lack of assertion, but the two DMs are used to reach a solution and stabilise discourse. The regulation process at stake in the type of discourse marking expressed by on va dire and shall we say may be seen as a stabilisation attempt. This semantic characterisation is in keeping with previous studies on on va dire (Kuyumkuyan 2008; Labeau 2012; Steuckardt 2014, 2016; Abouda and Skrovec 2014), which all claim that on va dire aims to reach an intersubjective consensus.3 This consensus is of course fictitious: the speaker pretends that the

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co-speaker shares his/her commitment to p, which allows him/her to develop various pragmatic strategies (pre-emptive strategies anticipating possible criticisms, irony, etc.). Many utterances containing on va dire and shall we say are indeed characterised by a sort of initial discourse instability, which may have different causes: the speaker may not know how to express him/herself, she/he may not dare say what she/he has in mind, or she/he may say something that does not really correspond to her/his intention. This means that mitigation may be linked to epistemic and/or intersubjective factors, as suggested by Caffi (1999) about other markers. In my data, the speaker’s epistemic stance is sometimes clearly stated in the rest of the utterance, via epistemic markers and metalinguistic comments marking uncertainty: (3) après elle a beau être en colère tout ça mais bon elle se rend compte que utiliser les enfants c’est vraiment pffffffff je sais même pas comment dire tiens!!!! On va dire nul pour rester polie!!!!! (3 ) OK she might be angry and stuff but well surely she realises using children is really pfffffff I don’t even know what to say you know!!!! To be polite let’s say [on va dire] it sucks!!!!! (4) Could you tell me how intelligent infinity became, shall we say (I’m having difficulty with some of the language), how intelligent infinity became individualized from itself?

In example (3), the speaker’s epistemic stance cannot be dissociated from his/her emotional one: she/he sounds angry and undoubtedly has in mind other less polite adjectives, but to be on the safe side (so as not to shock the co-speaker) she/he finally picks the rather neutral adjective nul. In example (4) with shall we say, the sentence that appears in brackets constitutes a metalinguistic comment: the speaker elaborates on his/her trouble in finding the right words. Quantitatively speaking, the annotation of the co-occurrence of the two DMs with epistemic or degree markers gives the following results. Table 4.2 shows that the two DMs behave rather similarly. The same annotation parameter yields contrasting results for j’allais dire and I was

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Table 4.2 Co-occurrence of on va dire et shall we say with epistemic or degree markers

On va dire Shall we say

Tokens ( n)

%

Total

24 20

17.9 16.9

134 118

going to say when they have a metalinguistic function: j’allais dire is very rarely associated with epistemic or degree markers, while I was going to say is in almost half of the tokens (see Chapter 5). Discourse instability may also materialise in the form of other markers in the contextual environments of on va dire and shall we say. For instance, as noted by Steuckardt (2016), suspension points may appear in the immediate context, indicating some hesitation: (5) Because it is such a lengthy and consistent effort, it would take several posts here to fully document the evidence Julie has uncovered….so, it’s best to simply refer you to her blog and read up on what she and some of her commenters say. I will, however, cross post some of the more…shall we say, interesting elements of her case against Shelley Lubben as seperate pages. (6) Même sur le vélo, je pense que je m’entraine différemment d’avant . On va dire …plus efficacement! (6 ) Even on my bike, I think I exercise differently from before. Let’s say [on va dire]…more efficiently!

These first remarks suggest that from a semantic viewpoint both DMs seek to stabilise an initial linguistic instability. The stabilisation at stake involves the co-speaker, who is presented as taking equal responsibility for the speaker’s choice. At closer quarters, it seems, however, that the two DMs do not rely on the exact same type of stabilisation. First, a fine-grained contextual analysis reveals that metalinguistic comment is not a homogeneous phenomenon, since it may actually give rise to slightly different contextual uses, sometimes called “approximation” and “exemplification” in the literature (Brinton 2005). The two DMs display striking dissimilarities in relation to these two specific contextual uses. Secondly, the syntactic

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and collocational parameters highlight interesting divergences in terms of stabilisation: they show that on va dire is associated with greater stabilisation, sometimes developing a framing role for the rest of the interaction. Section 4.3 below focuses on metalinguistic comment and suggests that various contextual parameters may give rise to slightly different uses that are not equally represented by on va dire and shall we say, while Sect. 4.4 closely examines the two distinct stabilising modes underlying on va dire on the one hand, and shall we say on the other.

4.3

Metalinguistic Comment, Approximation and Exemplification

Within the general function labelled “metalinguistic comment”, it seems relevant to distinguish between slightly different sub-functions or uses, all the more so since on va dire and shall we say develop different behaviours depending on the sub-function considered. In the vast majority of the occurrences, on va dire and shall we say are used to comment on the choice of a specific lexeme or formulation (depending on the syntactic nature of the host). In other cases, what is at stake is not the adequacy of the word chosen to the reality described, but the adequacy of a numerical element to this reality. Let us compare the two pairs of utterances below: (7) The screenwriting industry is a little more, shall we say, in your face. (8) après elle a beau être en colère tout ça mais bon elle se rend compte que utiliser les enfants c’est vrent pffffffff je sais même pas comment dire tiens!!!! On va dire nul pour rester polie!!!!! (8 ) OK she might be angry and stuff but well surely she realises using children is really pfffffff I don’t even know what to say you know!!!! To be polite let’s say [on va dire] it sucks!!!!! (9) I said I was a bit busy tomorrow but would be able to meet for something to eat, shall we say, late afternoon. (I’m going out tomorrow night).

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(10) J’y ai joué dans les années 80, entre 85 et 88 on va dire. (10 ) I played there in the 1980s, between 85 and 88 shall we say [on va dire].

In the first pair of utterances, shall we say and on va dire comment on the use of in your face and nul as linguistic signs that may not be completely adequate to the reality described. In the second one, the metalinguistic comment bears on a numeral element that the speaker has trouble identifying. The theoretical question raised is whether we are dealing here with two different pragmatic functions or only one, “metalinguistic comment”, liable to give rise to various contextual effects. In pragmatic case studies involving DMs of saying (especially let’s say, Brinton 2005), examples (9) and (10) correspond to a pragmatic function known as “approximation”. In my view, the same process is at stake in both pairs of utterances: the speaker mitigates his/her statement, as she/he is unable to assert p. The only difference stems from the nature of p: in the first case, it is a linguistic sign; in the second case, a numerical element (or an element that represents a time period—see late afternoon in example (9) above). This contextual effect will be more closely examined below (Sect. 4.3.1). In other utterances, the DMs under scrutiny—and more particularly on va dire—seem to be used to introduce an example relevant to the speaker’s argumentation: (11) Le Fastpack est une sacoche de selle rétractable destinée à porter quelques bricoles sur votre sportive, sans avoir à installer le porte-bagage et sortir les sandos. Très discret (et c’est bien là sa principale qualité), il prend l’aspect d’une selle arrière avec une apparence “ carbone ” lorsqu’il est vide. Une fois plein (on va dire que vous y avez mis votre brosse à dent , un téléphone portable, une carte routière et un t-shirt), son volume restreint lui permet de rester bien calé dans votre dos. (11 ) The Fastpack is a collapsible saddlebag where you can store a few things on your bike without having to install your luggage carrier. Very discreet (and that’s its main quality), it looks like a back saddle thanks to its carbon colour when it’s empty take. Once full (let’s say [on va dire] you’ve put in it your toothbrush, a cellphone, a road map and a T-shirt), it stays well in place behind your back thanks to its small size.

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In this utterance, on va dire introduces a hypothetical situation to illustrate what the adjective plein means. The same theoretical question as before arises: Is it relevant to posit the existence of a different pragmatic function that might be labelled “exemplification”, or is “metalinguistic comment” an umbrella term sufficiently broad to accommodate these occurrences as well? In my opinion, these occurrences may be analysed as instances where the speaker still comments on his/her own discourse but elaborates on it on a fictive mode. Before examining such occurrences, let us go back to the “approximation” use.

4.3.1 Approximation As explained above, I shall consider “approximation” as a contextual effect linked to the fact that p is no longer a linguistic sign per se but a numerical element. This case is rare in my data: it corresponds to one token with shall we say, to 9 with on va dire. The quantitative difference between the two DMs, however, may not be significant given the size of the samples examined. As argued before, the same mitigation process is at stake as in typical metalinguistic comment, irrespective of the nature of p: the speaker is not in a position to assert p, which brings him/her to mitigate commitment by building a false intersubjective commitment. Unsurprisingly, the same markers occur in the contextual environments of the DMs, for instance other DMs such as allez: (12)

Mais ouais allez, pour te faire plaisir on va dire que Nintendo n’a pas eu le temps de réfléchir a leur nouvelle console parce qu’ils étaient occupés a concevoir un pack de cables Wii (12 ) but yeah ok to please you let’s say [on va dire] Nintendo did not have time to think about their new console because they were too busy designing a pack of Wii cables (13)

encore joyeux anniversaire…

… Eh beh dis donc si je m’attendais à tant de messages … encore merci Coco !! Merci à tous et toutes

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ça va seulement arrivé..loll car là beaucoup de gens travaillent et passent chez moi le soir….allez on va dire 40 messages jusque demain soir , ça te vas???lollllllllllllllllllll

(13 ) happy birthday again… Waouh well I certainly didn’t expect so many messages…thanks again Coco!! Thanks everybody It is only the beginning…loll because a lot of people work and pop in at night …well let’s say [on va dire] 40 messages till tomorrow night, is that ok with you??? Lollllllllllllllllllll

In example (12), the speaker wishes to put an end to a polemical discussion and tries to decide on a consensual conclusion (Nintendo didn’t have time to think about …).4 With allez, a DM originally based on the imperative form of the verb aller, the speaker registers the initial intersubjective conflict and tries to solve it (Khaloul 2013). In the approximation context of example (13), allez likewise reinforces the speaker’s effort to reach an intersubjective consensus. From a syntactic perspective, no striking difference between “classic” metalinguistic comment and approximation may be observed. The only difference deals with scope: in approximation uses, the DMs exclusively have scope over specific constituents, preferentially noun phrases as is indeed the case in the examples reproduced above. These common syntactic and collocational features seem to plead in favour of my position that approximation is not an essentially different function but simply a contextual use triggered by a numerical element. It might be relevant to note, however, that the nature of p (linguistic sign vs. numerical element) has an impact on the interpretation of the verb say/ dire: in approximation instances, the context leads us to interpret the verb more as an opinion verb (easily glossed by admit, imagine or hypothesise) than as an actual speech verb. The same interpretation applies for the exemplification use to which I now turn.

4.3.2 Exemplification In exemplification uses, the DMs introduce a hypothetical situation or example relevant to the speaker’s argumentation. In quantitative terms, it

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only represents one occurrence with shall we say and 6 occurrences with on va dire. I reproduce below the sole token with shall we say: (14) Let s persist with the Dolphins/Bills game. Shall we say the Dolphins were favored by 3.5 so are up at halftime 24-7. The halftime bet originates out effectively Bills are favored by 4. Your original bet was the Dolphins. Well, even now they look incredible in within bet right?

Example (14) sounds rather odd in English and may not have been produced by a native speaker. In any case, shall we say is here used argumentatively by the speaker to make his/her point. It occurs once the general discourse frame has been established and represents an elaboration on a previous statement. With on va dire, the same elaboration process is at stake: (15) Le Fastpack est une sacoche de selle rétractable destinée à porter quelques bricoles sur votre sportive, sans avoir à installer le porte-bagage et sortir les sandos. Très discret (et c’est bien là sa principale qualité), il prend l’aspect d’une selle arrière avec une apparence “ carbone ” lorsqu’il est vide. Une fois plein (on va dire que vous y avez mis votre brosse à dent , un téléphone portable, une carte routière et un t-shirt), son volume restreint lui permet de rester bien calé dans votre dos. (15 ) The Fastpack is a collapsible saddlebag where you can store a few things on your bike without having to install your luggage carrier. Very discreet (and that’s its main quality), it looks like a back saddle thanks to its carbon colour when it’s empty. Once full (let’s say [on va dire] you’ve put in it your toothbrush, a cellphone, a road map and a T-shirt), it stays well in place behind your back thanks to its small size.

In example (15), on va dire introduces a hypothetical situation to illustrate what the adjective plein entails at a more concrete level. In my view, the speaker still comments on his/her own discourse but elaborates on it on a hypothetical mode. This contextual use is therefore constrained by one element: the DMs must occur after a first statement or item serving as a frame. Within this frame, the DMs may then introduce a more specific example or hypothesis. This claim is strengthened by the fact that on va dire occurs within a parenthetical remark in example (15).

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As already mentioned, the specific contextual uses under discussion remain rare in my data, especially for shall we say. This finding may be related to the fact that in such uses another DM of saying frequently occurs in contemporary English: let’s say. Although let’s say was not included in the present study, the features it shares with on va dire and shall we say have led me to conduct a small-scale analysis of this marker.

4.3.3 Focus on Let’s Say A search in the enTenTen12 shows that let’s say has a frequency of 3.47 pmw. By comparison, on va dire occurs 3.72 pmw and shall we say only 0.6. Quantitatively speaking, let’s say therefore seems closer to on va dire than shall we say. The rare translations of on va dire found on the Internet (via the tool Linguee, https://www.linguee.fr/) actually highlight major similarities between on va dire and let’s say. Let us examine the following translated pair: (16) Si ça continue, il va falloir que je dégaine mon e-mail pour demander, mais? ouhla, non, trop éprouvant, et puis il fait trop chaud, on va dire. (Linguee) (16 ) I’m gonna end up having to write them for information, but? oh well, nah, that would be too demanding, and let’s say the weather’s too hot for that.

In this pair of utterances, both DMs have a metalinguistic function: they indicate that the speaker does not exactly know what to say and finally picks what she/he views as the best formulation. Syntactically speaking, however, there is a striking difference: on va dire is in final position whereas let’s say appears initially. A small-scale analysis conducted on the first 50 tokens of let’s say in enTenTen13 reveals that the DM actually specialises in a specific type of metalinguistic comment: exemplification, as in example (17) below: (17) For example, let’s say you loan $30,000 from a bank and opt to repay that amount over a 3 or 5 year period. Upon the last payment, you will

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have paid a % of interest that increased your total repayments to $35,000 or perhaps more.

In this utterance, let’s say occurs in initial position and has scope over an entire clause. From a semantic-pragmatic viewpoint, the DM introduces a fictitious example that enables the speaker to elaborate on his/her previous argumentation. The initial position of the DM allows for the creation of a frame in which the example may then be introduced. These syntactic and semantic-pragmatic features are typical of let’s say: they are found in 48 out of the 50 tokens examined, which shows a high degree of specialisation of let’s say in exemplification—a result in keeping with previous studies (Brinton 2005). By contrast, I have shown in the preceding pages that on va dire and shall we say rarely develop this contextual use (and have a more heterogeneous syntactic behaviour in terms of scope and position). Now that I have shed light on the different contextual uses linked to metalinguistic comment, I shall focus more precisely on the divergences between on va dire and shall we say in terms of discourse regulation. As stated before, both DMs aim to stabilise discourse, but the results provided by the annotation grid clearly show that they are related to two different means of stabilising discourse.

4.4

Different Stabilising Modes

4.4.1 Syntactic Divergences: Greater Stabilisation with on va dire The syntactic divergences observed mostly concern scope. In terms of position, Table 4.3 does not reveal major differences between the two DMs. Table 4.3 shows that both DMs preferentially occur initially, i.e. before the host, but they may also occur after the host. The position is of course significant, and I shall show below that each position may be associated with specific pragmatic strategies and degrees of discourse stability. In terms of scope, Tables 4.4 and 4.5—already presented in Chapter 3—indicate that the DMs behave differently, since shall we say

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Table 4.3 Syntactic position of on va dire and shall we say Initial position

On va dire Shall we say

Final position

Total

Tokens ( n)

%

Tokens ( n)

%

93 97

69.4 82.2

41 21

30.6 17.8

134 118

Table 4.4 Scope of shall we say Syntactic category

Tokens ( n)

%

Adjectival phrase Noun phrase Ø – clause Prepositional phrase Verb phrase Total

50 47 10 7 4 118

42.4 39.7 8.5 6 3.4 100

Syntactic category

Tokens ( n)

%

Que-clause ø clause Noun phrase Adjectival phrase Prepositional phrase GV GAdv Total

67 15 22 16 6 5 3 134

50 11.2 16.4 12 4.5 3.7 2.2 100

Table 4.5 Scope of on va dire

mostly has scope over specific constituents (noun phrase or adjectival phrase), whereas on va dire may have scope over a variety of hosts, entire clauses included. Prototypically, shall we say has scope over one specific constituent, as in example (18): (18) Granted, I’m not exactly happy with Apple, given how they have screwed developers over, the fact you need a Mac to develop for their systems, the fact they want to clamp down on open standards and that their iStore is subject to extremely draconian rules, but even then they haven’t quite generated the amount of shall we say “fury” that Sony has.

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Shall we say is here used to comment on the noun fury. The quotation marks clearly indicate that the noun is referred to as a linguistic sign: its linguistic properties are questioned by the speaker, who is aware of his/her slightly unexpected use of the word. Quotation marks call attention to the host as a linguistic sign. They actually constitute a frequent phenomenon in relation to mitigation (Authier-Revuz 1995: 133–140) and are indeed attested with the four DMs of saying under discussion.5 Shall we say may also have scope over entire clauses, in which case the clause is introduced by ø (never by that in my data), as in example (19) below: (19)

JAH: Grandpa Charlie worked on Spookbusters with the Bowery Boys. Tell us about him working with the Bowery Boys.

Middleton: He thought they were nuts, anyway. Shall we say politely their reputations preceded them, on and off the screen.

The absence of that entails that, in terms of information structure, it is the subordinate clause their reputations preceded them which is informationally salient, shall we say politely 6 being backgrounded. The syntactic analysis conducted in Sect. 4.6 below will show that loss of that can be interpreted as evidence of the fact that the verb say within the DM can no longer be analysed as a matrix verb fully governing the subordinate clause. Likewise, on va dire may have scope over a specific constituent, as shown below: (20) Si par le passé il y a eu cette erreur de papiers je pense que c’est par négligence car Véronique est on va dire un peu “bordélique” mais pas par fraude quelconque. (20 ) At one point there was this administrative issue, but I think it was out of neglect since Véronique is a bit shall we say [on va dire] “messy”, it was not an intentional fraud.

Here again, the host occurs between quotation marks. It is preceded by the downgrader un peu, which indicates that the linguistic choice is only minimally endorsed by the speaker. Minimal endorsement may also be linked to the fact that this adjective is rather vulgar in French: the speaker

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sets up a pre-emptive intersubjective strategy to avoid possible criticisms from the co-speaker. As Table 4.5 clearly reveals, the most frequent type of host with on va dire is a que-clause (in which case the DM is necessarily in initial position), as in the following utterance: (21) Malgré une piètre performance, on va dire que c’était quand même pas mal pour une reprise. (21 ) Even though it wasn’t a great show, let’s say [on va dire] that it was not too bad for the beginning of the season.

This finding corroborates Steuckardt’s (2016) conclusion, but it is in contradiction with Labeau’s (2012) analysis. Based on spoken data, Labeau (2012) shows that in more than half of the occurrences of her data on va dire appears in final position and has scope either over a ø-clause or over a specific constituent. This might indicate that the results obtained are highly genre-dependent: in spoken interaction, on va dire seems to have acquired syntactic mobility (hence its more frequent final position). This in turn might be linked to pragmaticalisation: the on va dire que p configuration, which is syntactically identical to the non-pragmaticalised original sequence, is the most frequent one in written material, which is by definition more conservative. In spoken data, which is often the locus of language innovation, more pragmaticalised configurations are likely to be more frequent (see Chapter 6 for a discussion on degrees of pragmaticalisation). Cross-linguistically speaking, the contrast observed here suggests that on va dire is more polyvalent than shall we say in terms of scope. I assume more precisely that this contrast is related to semantic-pragmatic features: in my view, the on va dire que p configuration marks greater discourse stabilisation, giving rise to a framing function that has no equivalent with shall we say. In the configuration under scrutiny, the speaker tries to build an intersubjective consensus that will serve as a frame for the rest of the interaction. Let us go back to example (21): (21) Malgré une piètre performance, on va dire que c’était quand même pas mal pour une reprise.

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(21 ) Even though it wasn’t a great show, let’s say [on va dire] that it was not that bad for the beginning of the season.

In this utterance, on va dire is once more associated with a concessive strategy, in which two viewpoints or formulations p and p coexist: the speaker first concedes that the football game (p ) was not a great show before stating that it was not that bad (p). On va dire indicates that, in accordance with the co-speaker, the second viewpoint is finally chosen. In association with a que-clause, on va dire has a clear closure function: the speaker has put an end to the initial instability, which means that the interaction may proceed on new common ground. It should be mentioned as well that the on va dire que configuration may give rise to specific contextual effects where metalinguistic comment does not specifically deal with choosing the adequate words but is more akin to defining a common resolution. Indeed, in on va dire que the verb dire seems sometimes closer to a cognitive verb such as admit than to an actual speech verb, as evidenced in examples (22) and (23) below: (22)

-“Tu semble avoir du temps libre devant toi. Voudrais-tu m’aider à nettoyer les chemins? Comme ça, si tu veux te promener, tu vas le faire tout en te rendant utile . On va dire que c’est ce que tu me dois pour la limonade.”

(22 ) You seem to have free time on your hands. Would you like to help me clean up the paths? That way, if you feel like having a walk, you can do it and be useful. Let’s say [on va dire] that it’s what you owe me for the lemonade. (23) Des arbitres de L2 ou National aurait pu arbitrer cette rencontre mais ils étaient pris ailleurs. On va dire que cela aura été son baptême du feu et j’espère que cela lui servira d’expérience pour le futur car nous risquons de le voir rapidement en National, L2 et L1… (23 ) Referees from League 2 or National Division could have refereed the match but they were otherwise engaged. Let’s say [on va dire] that he had his baptism of fire and that will serve as a lesson for the future since he’s likely to referee again in National, League 2 and League 1…

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In utterances (22) and (23), the sequence on va dire que may be glossed by: let’s assume for the rest of the discussion that, etc. Discourse instability has been unequivocally stabilised: the speaker pretends that she/he has reached a clear consensus with the co-speaker. Both speaker and co-speaker are presented as sharing the same view or interpretation on the topic discussed—an interpretation that cannot be questioned in the future. In this light, it is striking to note the presence of the futur antérieur in example (3) (cf. cela aura été ), a tense in French that serves as a stocktaking device: the speaker takes stock of what has happened, which in turn allows him/her to define the common ground necessary for the rest of the interaction. As the translations provided, for example (22) and (23), suggest, shall we say does not occur in that context: let’s say would indeed be the closest equivalent. Let us now examine the stabilisation process in relation to position. In the absence of a subordinate clause, on va dire may retain its framing function when it occurs initially, i.e. before its host, as is the case below: (24) Si par le passé il y a eu cette erreur de papiers je pense que c’est par négligence car Véronique est on va dire un peu « bordélique » mais pas par fraude quelconque. (24 ) At one point there was this administrative issue, but I think it was out of neglect since Véronique is a bit shall we say [on va dire] “messy”, it was not an intentional fraud.

On va dire is here clearly associated with a metalinguistic comment on the adjective bordélique: the speaker wants the co-speaker to accept his/her choice of the word (and, consequently, his/her opinion on Véronique) once and for all. In final position, the stabilisation process is less obvious, be it with on va dire or shall we say. The DMs seem to draw attention to the linguistic problem in extremis, as a kind of afterthought reflecting the speaker’s hesitation. Let us have a look at two examples with shall we say: (25) If the contributors can be a little more disciplined in their ‘contribution’ shall we say, I think it would improve an already very good podcast.

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(26) All thematic issues aside, I think that the writing is very, er, uneven, shall we say ? Overwhelmingly episodic, not terribly consistent, and largely as dimensionless as the characters.

In both examples, the speaker associates shall we say with the epistemic phrase I think, which might be a sign of increased uncertainty.The question mark in example (26) is also striking, since it seems to reflect the speaker’s incapacity to stabilise discourse. In my data, utterances with final on va dire do not contain epistemic markers. They may nonetheless contain suspension points or a question mark after on va dire, as in the instances below: (27)

Perso je suis pas un admirateur de ballades ! donc j’ai apprecié le titre “normalement” on va dire… J’aime bcp la voix de Seal et elle se mele bien à celle de Mylene. (27 ) Personally I’m not a ballad fan! So I enjoyed the song “normally” shall we say [on va dire]…I really like Seal’s voice, it mixes nicely with Mylene’s. (28)

J’ai pu trouver un accès Internet défier mon adversaire de la semaine prochaine et voir les scores contre la Haute Normandie. défaite encourageante on va dire ? (tous les matchs à l’extérieur, c’était pas évident non plus !)

(28 ) I managed to have internet access to challenge my opponent of next week and see the scores against Haute Normandie. Encouraging defeat shall we say [on va dire] ? (all their away matches were not easy either!)

In example (27), the suspension points materialise discourse instability, as if the speaker was unable to make up his/her mind as to what term she/he should choose. In the case of example (28), the question mark occurring after on va dire is even more surprising than with shall we say: shall we say is based on an interrogative form, which is not the case of the French DM. The question mark is linked to the position of on va dire in terms of turn-taking: if one leaves aside what appears in brackets, on va dire is turn-final here. The question mark thus draws special attention to the speaker’s epistemic stance: the oxymoronic dimension of the formulation makes him/her even less assertive, which prompts him/her to re-destabilise discourse and ask for the co-speaker’s confirmation.

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Table 4.6 Co-occurrence of on va dire and shall we say with other DMs

On va dire Shall we say

Tokens ( n)

%

Total

19 5

14.2 4.2

134 118

As such, turn-final position is therefore more likely to be associated with some form of speaker uncertainty and discourse instability, as if the speaker increasingly needed to rely on the co-speaker’s opinion. As Beeching and Detges suggest (2014: 3–4), crosslinguistically speaking, DMs in final position, that is to say at the right periphery of the argument structure, have clear intersubjective functions: “They serve to confirm shared assumptions, check or express understanding, request confirmation, express deference or are used for face-saving”. In the case of on va dire and shall we say, turn-final position is rare, but it is indeed clearly intersubjective: after choosing one term, the speaker pretends that she/he has to check with the co-speaker for approval. To sum up the discussion, the study of scope and position has revealed relevant differences between the two DMs in terms of stabilisation. The most salient conclusion is that on va dire is associated with greater stability, due to the high proportion of the on va dire que configuration in the data examined. This syntactic configuration, in which on va dire has scope over an entire clause, gives rise to framing functions that shall we say is not liable to exhibit. The investigation of other parameters confirms that on va dire involves a clearer stabilisation process. One of these parameters deals with collocation patterns and more specifically the DMs’ co-occurrence with other DMs and opposition markers.

4.4.2 Co-occurrence with Other DMs and Opposition Markers The annotation of the co-occurrence with other DMs in the N-1 and N-2 slots yields interesting results, as shown in Table 4.6. Table 4.6 suggests that both on va dire and shall we say may be preceded by other DMs. The qualitative analysis reveals that the DMs involved are

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rather different. On va dire mainly co-occurs with DMs having closure functions such as allez, bon, enfin, bref,7 as in the following examples: (29) si on compte qu’ils doivent tout de même manger pendant 8 jours à raison d’une viande environ par jour ça donne 313.75 - 144  169.75 environ sauf pour ceux qui étaient au max en caractéristiques et qui mange du pain soit 313.75 - 50  263.75 environ

bref on va dire que chaque castelroussin mort a perdu environ 200 écus quoi

(29’) if we consider that they have to eat for 8 days with one meat ration per day it gives 313.75 – 144  169.75 or so except for those who were at the maximum in terms of characteristics and eat bread i.e. 313.75 – 50 or so Anyway let’ say [on va dire] that each dead inhabitant of Châteauroux has lost about 200 ‘écus’ (30) Hey! T’es passée sous un rouleau compresseur ou tu fait partie d’un gang? Non parce que, pour être cabossée comme ça… M’enfin, on va dire que ça donne un style ! (30 ) Hey! Have you been run over by a road roller or are you a gang member? Because to look like that…Well, let’s say [on va dire] that it’s stylish!

In example (29), the sequence bref on va dire que allows the speaker to broadly summarise the detailed calculations conducted by the co-speaker. In example (30), the argumentation unfolds in two different steps. First, the speaker formulates several negative hypotheses to explain the cospeaker’s physical appearance. Then, she/he adopts a more positive—yet possibly ironic—viewpoint introduced by mais (under the reduced form m ). This viewpoint is presented as final, as enfin explicitly signals. The collocations uncovered here suggest that on va dire has affinity with DMs marking closure or resolution. The validity of these findings may easily be tested in enTenTen13: an automated search for collocations in N-1 and N-2 slots shows that bon is the most frequent collocate of on va dire and donc the second most frequent one. Bon has a concluding function as “mot de la fin” (Beeching 2011), and donc has been recently described as an item marking “discourse completion” (Badiou-Monferran and Rossari 2016), which strengthens my own conclusions.

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There is therefore sufficient evidence to claim that on va dire operates regulation by stabilising discourse: the search for intersubjective commitment leads the speaker to conclude on p. In the case of shall we say, co-occurrence with DMs is lower (only 6 occurrences) in my data and the DMs that appear in the N-1 and N-2 slots are of a more deliberative nature. It is indeed the case in the example below: (31) You move down the line and pick and choose what you want on your plate. And though some of what you can order while at the restaurant is… well… shall we say exotic (as mentioned in the video), you can absolutely stick with the basics if you’re more comfortable with that.

In association with suspension points and well, a DM described as sometimes having a demurral interpretation (Beeching 2011), shall we say marks the speaker’s hesitation to endorse the choice of exotic as the best way to characterise the food under discussion. An investigation of the enTenTen13 confirms the affinity of shall we say with deliberative markers (as opposed to conclusive ones) in the left context: an automated search on the whole corpus shows that um is the most frequent collocate (the search carried out concerned N-1 and N-2). Traditionally relegated to a “filler” status, um has recently been re-analysed as a DM in its own right (Tottie 2011): it has significant “planning” functions, since it is typically used to prepare co-speakers to the introduction of new discourse entities. Let us consider example (32): (32) Robbins tries less to understand Vos’ history and cultural background than to make a blunt allegorical example of the character and draw comparisons between all that Vos represents and an American administration with which the actor is, um, shall we say, dissatisfied.

In this utterance, the speaker intentionally relies on a consensual term unlikely to shock the co-speaker, but she/he may have in mind less neutral adjectives. The association of um and shall we say is thus part of a euphemistic strategy for which careful planning is required (see Sect. 4.5 on euphemism).

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Table 4.7 Co-occurrence of on va dire et shall we say with opposition markers

On va dire Shall we say

Nb

%

Total

27 6

20.1 5.1

134 118

The findings presented here, both on the samples retrieved for the qualitative analysis and on the TenTen corpora for a quantitative approach, suggest that shall we say is likely to be associated with unstable planning, while on va dire tends to be part of concluding movements. Another case in point is the co-occurrence of the DMs with opposition markers (typically but and mais) annotated via the annotation grid. Table 4.7 reveals that this co-occurrence is much stronger with on va dire, which points to the more argumentative nature of the French DM. Let us focus on a specific example: (33) Le Thunderbird est situé en face des casinos car j’ai pas vraiment envie de m’éloigner encore, tu vois ! Y’a une Mamy avec une permanente “ postatomique ” bleue qui clope dehors. C’est la patronne. 62$ la nuit. Pas grand luxe mais propre on va dire ! (33 ) The Thunberbird is just opposite the casinos because I don’t feel like walking, you know! There’s a grandmother with blue “post-atomic” wavy hair smoking outside. She’s the lodger. 62$ per night. Not fancy but clean let’s say [on va dire]!

In example (33), the speaker first characterises the place negatively before moving on to a positive polarity, thus exposing discourse instability. Such instability is actually linked to a concessive strategy here. A possible gloss would be: it may not be fancy but it is clean. On va dire does not play an active role in marking concession, and suppressing it does not impact the concessive interpretation of the utterance: (33a) Pas grand luxe mais propre ø !

Broadly speaking, concession consists in de-constructing the expected inference between two propositional contents (see Rossari 2016 on mais

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in French): normally, a place described as “not fancy” may lead the cospeaker to infer that it may be dirty. Here, on the contrary, the speaker wants to stress that the place is clean. On va dire is then used by the speaker to draw attention to the choice of the rather unexpected word clean and to impose it to the co-speaker (since on includes the co-speaker). On va dire may therefore be seen in such contexts as a concessive facilitator: it does not mark concession per se, but its affinity with concessive strategies suggests that its intersubjective dimension helps the speaker deploy such strategies. Even if co-occurrence with but is much less frequent with shall we say, concessive strategies are also attested: (34) Pete - Oh my. At first I thought he was faking his Tourette’s, but it’s clearly genuine. He reminds me of Peter from The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer . In fact, I’m sure he said ‘donkey’ just after he entered the house. Falling down the stairs seemed a bit desperate, I thought we was a complete tosser at that point . He’s quite OTT, shall we say, but he’s definitely my favourite so far.

As in example (33), the speaker here tries to make the co-speaker accept his/her own viewpoint: she/he concedes that the actor discussed is strange (OTT meaning “Over The Top”) but insists on the fact that he is nonetheless his/her favourite character. Building intersubjective consensus beforehand via shall we say facilitates the concessive strategy. The frequent association of on va dire with concession highlights the argumentative nature of the French DM: in French occurrences, the speaker first concedes p but then strongly reasserts p as his/her final choice. On va dire serves as a facilitator, since it forces the co-speaker to accept p . It must be noted that no such strategies have been observed in the contextual environments of j’allais dire and I was going to say: these two DMs are also frequently associated with opposition markers but without any concessive interpretation (see Chapter 5). The analysis of the co-occurrence of the two DMs with other DMs and opposition markers suggests that on va dire is more clearly associated with stabilisation. This hypothesis finds further confirmation in my study of the reformulation uses of the two markers.

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4.4.3 Different Reformulation Uses As explained in the section dedicated to the operation-based semantic characterisation of the DMs, on va dire and shall we say tend to comment on p without mentioning p . The results of the annotation, already presented in Chapter 3, are reproduced below for clarity’s sake. Table 4.8 makes it clear that both DMs tend to stabilise the choice of p, which means that “repair” uses of the markers are rare. I would like, however, to focus on such uses, which I shall label “reformulation” uses. As stated in Chapter 2, the term “repair” is rather problematic for the theoretical framework adopted here: “reformulation” is more neutral and does not suggest that alternative phrasings are included to correct discourse for the co-speaker’s sake. The contextual analysis of my data shows that on va dire and shall we say are not associated with the same reformulation strategies. Let us first briefly define reformulation. Reformulation is a significant linguistic notion in French linguistics. Important contributions to this field are Rossari (1997, 2000), Le Bot et al. (2008), and Pennec (2018). In the English-speaking tradition, the notion of “elaboration” used by Fraser (2009) seems very close, but given the global enunciative approach adopted in this book, I shall use the term “reformulation”. The abundant scholarly literature on reformulation in French makes a crucial distinction between “paraphrastic reformulation” and “non-paraphrastic reformulation” (Rossari 1997: 13–17): “paraphrastic reformulation” relies on semantic equivalence and more precisely on “identity predication”. It means that segment b. reformulating segment a. must allow a paraphrase involving “be”. Let us take a very simple example, with the following segments: a. my friend Mary b. my best friend Table 4.8 p/p relationship with on va dire and shall we say p/p On va dire Shall we say

33 19

Only p 24.6% 16.1%

101 99

Total 75.4% 83.9%

134 118

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b. may serve as a paraphrastic reformulation of a. since a gloss by “my friend Mary is my best friend” is possible. In “non-paraphrastic reformulation”, the link between segment a. and segment b. is looser. Let us examine another pair of utterances: c. I’ve lost my key d. I can’t find my key In interaction, one speaker may easily say “I’ve lost my key, well I can’t find it anyway”. Segment d. reformulates segment c., but there is no strict equivalence between the two segments: losing one’s key is not exactly tantamount to the impossibility of finding it. This distinction is indeed important, and it should be borne in mind from the start that on va dire and shall we say can never mark paraphrastic reformulation. Let us now move on to the non-paraphrastic reformulations found with the DMs under scrutiny. With shall we say reformulation is rather simple: when two competing formulations p and p coexist in the same utterance, they are linked by or: (35) The most controversial aspect of black male/white female dating, to me, is when people start discussing why a black guy might prefer to date a white girl. The reasons I hear people throw around are anything from preference, to viewing them as trophies, to being able to walk all over them, to thinking they are more promiscuous or, shall we say, “sexually adventurous” than other races. I imagine some feel just like I do – they may simply notice one race more than the other, but still are open to anyone. (36)

Max Cady (maks - kA-dE) Not confined by the boundaries of rock, punk, garage, pop or metal, but call it whatever you like. We like to call it rock-n-roll, or shall we say rawk-n-roll.

In both utterances above, the pattern is of the “p shall we say p ” type, and p and p cannot be viewed as equivalent. P actually corresponds to the expected term whereas p , introduced by shall we say, is a more original term—which might explain the quotation marks in example (35)—or a more specialised one (as in the case of rawk-n-roll, which is used by specialists only, in example (36)). P is therefore rather unexpected and potentially problematic for the co-speaker, which justifies mitigation by

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shall we say. Even though p and p belong to the same lexical field, going from p to p corresponds to a significant change of viewpoint (hence my analysis as non-paraphrastic reformulation). I assume that this change is to be analysed in terms of “subjective revision”: p is seen as a more personal and daring choice that might not be easily accepted by the co-speaker. The speaker uses shall we say (and not I would say, for instance) precisely because this DM allows him/her to force the co-speaker to share responsibility. Moreover, what is clear for the two examples above is that shall we say cannot be analysed as a reformulation marker per se: the conjunction or marks reformulation; in fact, shall we say can be deleted without affecting the reformulation process. The DM does not reformulate the preceding discourse chunk but indicates what kind of commitment should be associated with the proposed reformulation: shall we say draws attention to the fact that p is in some way problematic and yet already accepted by the co-speaker. By contrast, on va dire is not specialised in reformulations relying on “subjective revision”. The French DM is on the contrary associated with various reformulation strategies ranging from precision to generalisation, sometimes in co-occurrence with the DMs already mentioned (enfin, bon). The first example below illustrates precision: (37) Ce qui m’étonnait, c’était le style de la formulation. Normalement, vous voyez fatal error (combien de fois j’ai cru que tout était pété à cause de ça !) ou des trucs de ce genre. Plus solennels , on va dire… M’enfin, si tout marche bien et va son train-train, tant mieux. (37 ) What was surprising was the style of the formulation. Normally you see fatal error (how many times I thought everything had crashed down!) or stuff like that. More formal, shall we say [on va dire]. But anyway if everything’s ok and goes smoothly then good.

The phrase des trucs de ce genre (stuff like that ), which might be assimilated to a “placeholder” (Jucker et al. 2003), indicates that the speaker has trouble finding his/her words. With on va dire, she/he elaborates on this first approximation and introduces a more precise formulation, presented as highly consensual.

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At the other end of the spectrum, on va dire may reformulate in an attempt to summarise the preceding context, as in example (38): (38) Oscar est belle et androgyne donc cette ambiguté fascine les femmes de son entourage.En plus,elle a la force d’un homme(enfin presque mais on fermera les yeux! )et la sensibilité d’une femme(ça vous rappelle pas quelqu’un? non,pas la peine de rappliquer ici DS on va pas flooder ce topic! )donc des qualités tres recherchées on va dire… (38 ) Oscar is a beautiful and androgynous woman so this ambiguity fascinates women around her. Moreover she is a strong as a man (well almost but we’ll close our eyes) and as sensitive as a woman (does it ring a bell? But no need to come round DS we’re not going to flood this topic!) so highly sought after qualities shall we say [on va dire]…

Here, the noun phrases la force d’un homme and la sensibilité d’une femme referring to gender-based physical and moral qualities are summarised by a more general, gender-neutral characterisation: qualités très recherchées. The generalisation process at stake is presented as a logical movement, as donc shows. In the two cases examined so far (precision and generalisation), p and p are strongly connected, though not equivalent. In other examples, on va dire associates two formulations p and p that can be seen as radically opposed, in which case the reformulation process corresponds to a “total revision” of the speaker’s viewpoint (Rossari 2000). Example (39) below illustrates this specific case: (39) et bien j’ai “ upload ” pas moins de 5 photos sans trouver le moindre petit point commun avec une star…aucune ressemblance avec une star (tout genre confondu) probablement qu’ET n’y est pas… enfin ˆˆ on va dire que j’ai qd meme qq pt commun ˆˆ du genre deux yeux, un nez , une bouche :) (39 ) ok well I’ve uploaded no fewer than 5 photos without finding the slightest resemblance with a star… no resemblance with any star (male or female) ET may not be in the list…anyway ˆˆ let’s say [on va dire] after all I do have common features ˆˆ like eyes, nose and mouth :)

The speaker starts by stating that she/he has nothing at all in common with celebrities (aucune resemblance). She/he then changes his/her mind and

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mentions one possible similarity: the fact that she/he has eyes, a nose and a mouth. This change of mind must be considered final, as enfin signals. Moreover, the speaker relies on a concessive strategy: if the speaker has changed his/her mind, it is because she/he finally concedes a point to the co-speaker. The DM quand même, which here plays a role rather similar to after all,8 makes the concession more explicit. As with shall we say, it is important to bear in mind that on va dire is not a reformulation marker per se: it is the DM enfin which serves as a genuine reformulation marker. Evidence for this claim is that on va dire may be suppressed whereas enfin may not, as Rossari (2000) shows. Likewise, on va dire may not be analysed as a concessive marker: concession is marked by quand même. On va dire merely acts as a “concession facilitator” (see subSect. 4.4.2 above), since it signals that the revision process is now stabilised from an intersubjective perspective: for the rest of the interaction, speaker and co-speaker agree on the second viewpoint introduced. Interestingly, on va dire clearly indicates in example (39) quoted above that the revision process is in some sense spurious: the alleged resemblance suddenly uncovered by the speaker is not what would be usually considered a shared feature. As Saunier (2012) aptly points out, on va dire often relies on feigned viewpoints and make-believe, which is not the case of disons. Other linguistic items indicate that the reformulation at stake is not genuine: the ˆˆ emoticons, which indicate that the revision has to be interpreted on a humorous level. In conclusion, the analysis of reformulation contexts first reveals that on va dire and shall we say are not reformulation markers: even when two formulations coexist, the second one elaborating on the first one, the DMs may be suppressed without impacting the reformulation interpretation. Their presence in reformulation contexts signals an interesting affinity between metalinguistic comment and reformulation. On va dire and shall we say facilitate reformulation at the intersubjective level. The elaboration proposed is anticipated by the speaker as potentially problematic for the cospeaker—not necessarily offensive, but surprising at any rate—hence the need to mitigate commitment using an intersubjective DM. Secondly, the contrastive analysis conducted confirms previous findings: in association with the conjunction or, shall we say tends to maintain a p/p instability, whereas on va dire is more likely to function as a reformulation (and

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concession) facilitator in contexts where p is eventually adopted as the ultimate formulation. Before moving on to a syntactic characterisation of the two DMs at stake, one last aspect dealing with the semantic-pragmatic behaviour of the DMs has to be highlighted: the different intersubjective pragmatic strategies they are liable to deploy. Concession has already been mentioned, but other strategies are worth examining as they emphasise strong links between the DMs and euphemism and/or irony.

4.5

Pragmatic Strategies: Euphemism and Irony

Previous studies on on va dire lay emphasis on the affinity between on va dire and euphemism (Steuckardt 2016). This affinity is indeed obvious in the following utterance: (40) après elle a beau être en colère tout ça mais bon elle se rend compte que utiliser les enfants c’est vraiment pffffffff je sais même pas comment dire tiens!!!! On va dire nul pour rester polie!!!!! (40 ) OK she might be angry and stuff but well she realises using children is really pfffffff I don’t even know what to say you know!!!! To be polite let’s say [on va dire] it sucks!!!!!

The metalinguistic comment pour rester polie signals that the adjective nul is a default choice: the speaker uses it to abide by social conventions, but her anger is obvious and she clearly has other adjectives in mind (see the recurring use of emoticons). Euphemism may also be considered a characteristic feature of shall we say, as the OED definition suggests: “used parenthetically to call attention to a description which is strikingly original or evocative, or (in later use) a knowing euphemism or understatement”. Examples taken from my data corroborate this claim: (41) Cressie is often described as “free spirited” and “bohemian” which may or may not explain her usually rather, shall we say , un-u-su-al sartorial

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selections (sequinned jacket over a maxi dress avec flower clipped in one’s hair for an English wedding anyone?) ……

In this utterance, the speaker makes use of a peculiar typographic choice to spell the adjective unusual: the spelling imitates strong syllabic separation, a spelling that may be analysed as a typical Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) sign (like emoticons, capital letters, etc.). Such a spelling calls attention to the choice of unusual and guides the co-speaker in his/her interpretation of the adjective as being a euphemism for a more negative appraisal of the situation. As a whole, the utterance relies on a strong intersubjective complicity: the question in brackets in the right context shows that the speaker wants to make sure his/her co-speakers have grasped the euphemism and share his/her negative appraisal of the clothing style under discussion. A recent pragmatic approach by Jaubert (2008) shows that euphemism is based on a dissociation of viewpoints: the speaker takes into account a different viewpoint, which may be the co-speaker’s but also more largely a viewpoint put forward by social conventions (what Jaubert calls “interdiscours” in French). In other words, the speaker adopts a normative viewpoint that she/he does not truly share. Following Jaubert’s analysis, it is assumed that in the examples under scrutiny on va dire and shall we say dissociate two viewpoints—the speaker’s and an opposition viewpoint based on social norms. This allows the speaker to provisionally adopt (or feign to adopt) the latter. In Sect. 4.7 below, I shall argue that this dissociation process is to be related to the pronouns involved (on/we). The affinity with euphemism, however, must not hide the fact that the DMs may also serve to introduce potentially shocking formulations. A case in point is example (42) below: (42)

I’ll be the first on this thread to say that there are a lot of –shall we say – dicks out there talking very loudly about things they probably have no real perspective over.

Here, shall we say is not associated with euphemism: on the contrary, it introduces the term dick, which belongs to a very informal register and might shock the co-speaker. It is precisely because dick is problematic that

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shall we say is important: the DM presents this linguistic choice as shared by the co-speaker, which blocks any negative reaction in advance. This goes to show that euphemism is only one possible intersubjective strategy. What is crucial to on va dire and shall we say is not euphemism per se but false intersubjective consensus: this consensus may lead to euphemism if the formulation p conforms to social conventions; otherwise, no such strategy is observed and the DMs are compatible with anti-conformist formulations. In any case, the presence of the DMs indicates minimal commitment. In euphemism, the speaker does not fully assert p since the viewpoint conveyed by p does not truly correspond to his/her own viewpoint. In other cases, mitigation stems from the speaker’s desire to anticipate possible negative reactions. What is unique to euphemism, however, is the dissociation between two viewpoints. In examples such as (42) where no euphemism is at stake, the utterance represents the speaker’s viewpoint only. The discussion on euphemism actually reveals one important feature of on va dire and shall we say in comparison with j’allais dire and I was going to say: the former pair of DMs may dissociate viewpoints, which is totally impossible with the latter (see Chapter 5). Dissociation of viewpoints is even more striking with irony, as exemplified with the two utterances below: (43) sa menerve de voir ca !!! et ds certain blog les créateur (créatrice) met en vu des comm’s dotre pers mai ki son alucinant !!!! c hor sujet enfin pas tro car on les qualifirai de groupi car soit disan elle orai vu une fille o bras de tom ou un membre du group elle linsulte pas possible de p..e de …enfin voila et les menace de les detruire si elle les revoi et pi si elle trouve leur blog demand a ce kon aille metre des comm’s pas gentil mai bon !! on va dire ke ya plus de place ds les opito spycatrik !!! dsl mai a se poin sa devien grave !!!!! enfin bon voila g ecrit un pti roman mdr !!! (43 ) it pisses me off to see that !!! and in some blogs the blog founders show comments from other people that are just crazy!!!! It’s off topic well not completely because they are like groupies because she allegedly saw a girl with tom or a member of the group she calls them sluts…well you know and she threatens to kill them if she sees them again and if she finds their blogs asks people to post offensive reactions but anyway!! Let’s say [on va

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dire] psychiatric wards are full!!! Sorry but this is too much !!!! well anyway I’ve been writing a novel lol!!! (44) Mais ouais allez, pour te faire plaisir on va dire que Nintendo n’a pas eu le temps de réfléchir a leur nouvelle console parce qu’ils étaient occupés a concevoir un pack de cables Wii (44 ) but yeah ok to please you let’s say [on va dire] Nintendo did not have time to think about their new console because they were too busy designing a pack of Wii cables

In both utterances above, the speaker feigns to adopt one specific viewpoint with which she/he in fact strongly disagrees. In example (43), where the linguistic characteristics of CMC are fully exploited (phonetic spelling, abundance of exclamation marks), the speaker reacts to violent threats she/he has seen made in blogs. She/he then puts forward an explanation to the violent behaviours at stake (psychiatric wards are full, which explains why “crazy” people are around), but the explanation does not exactly correspond to his/her own viewpoint and must not be taken at face value by the co-speaker. In example (44), the speaker initially disagreed with the co-speaker but then adopted the latter’s viewpoint. Here, the viewpoint at stake does not correspond to social norms but unmistakeably to the co-speaker’s. The metalinguistic comment pour te faire plaisir nonetheless indicates that such a sudden change of mind is not genuine: the speaker has not truly changed his/her mind. For Saunier (2012), on va dire has a marked tendency to express irony, which is not at all the case of disons. Relying on a number of linguistic manipulations, she shows that on va dire may be associated with a variety of stances (irony, make-believe, etc.). On the other hand, disons always involves a sincere search for linguistic adequacy. Indeed, disons sounds less ironic than on va dire in the same contexts and more awkward: (43a) ? disons ke ya plus de place ds les opito spycatrik !!!

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(44a) ? Mais ouais allez, pour te faire plaisir disons que Nintendo n’a pas eu le temps de réfléchir a leur nouvelle console parce qu’ils étaient occupés a concevoir un pack de cables Wii

To sum up the discussion, it seems that in terms of speaker stance, on va dire lends itself to three different cases. In case 1, the DM reflects the speaker’s viewpoint—a viewpoint that is imposed on the co-speaker via on, which corresponds to you and I. The other two cases are more complex, since they rely on a coexistence of opposite viewpoints. In case 2, the speaker performs agreement with social norms, without necessarily adhering to them. In this case, on va dire gives rise to euphemistic interpretations where on corresponds to the vox populi. Finally in case 3, the speaker provisionally adopts the co-speaker’s viewpoint, but nobody is fooled: the discourse participants are aware that the speaker is only pretending to agree. Interestingly, shall we say does not exactly serve the same strategies. As previously stated, shall we say may be associated with euphemism, but it never occurs in ironic contexts—at least in my data. This pragmatic feature may be related to the fact that the DM tends to have scope over specific lexemes (nouns, adjectives), not over entire clauses. Irony presumably develops over larger discourse chunks, whereas euphemism may easily bear on one lexical item. The diversity of viewpoints associated with on va dire is to be linked to the pronoun on, which is not strictly equivalent to the first person plural pronouns nous and we and is liable to develop many different contextbased interpretations. Several studies on on in French actually lay emphasis on its referential indeterminacy (Simonin 1984; Bouguerra 1999; Fløttum et al. 2008): even in a given context, on may retain its indeterminacy, which entails difficulties in defining a unique corresponding referent. So, even if on necessarily includes the speaker and the co-speaker in the utterances examined, its ability to set up ambivalent viewpoints is rather unique and sets it apart from nous and we. Finally, the tendency of on va dire to occur within pragmatic strategies linked to irony may have as a corollary its more frequent co-occurrence with CMC signs, which may be analysed as expressive signs (expressivity

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Table 4.9 Co-occurrence of on va dire and shall we say with CMC signs

On va dire Shall we say

Tokens ( n)

%

Total

12 5

9 4.2

134 118

including elaborate staging strategies, see Chapter 3). Table 4.9 shows that on va dire is more frequently associated with such signs than shall we say: The results provided in Table 4.9 are to be interpreted cautiously: the number of tokens involved is too small to allow significant generalisations. Future research on specific CMC genres (blogs, forums, etc.) is clearly needed to confirm the greater affinity of on va dire with expressive signs (see Chapter 6). The study of the pragmatic strategies underlying the use of on va dire and shall we say highlights one relevant common point: both DMs may express euphemism. Conversely, it shows that only on va dire may be associated with irony, which suggests that the French DM relies on a more complex speaker stance. In sub-Sect. 4.7 below, I shall argue that this complexity may be ascribed to its morphosyntactic features. One last dimension of the two DMs needs to be investigated: their syntactic classification.

4.6

Syntactic Classification

As evidenced in Chapter 1, there is no consensus regarding the syntactic definition of DMs. It has nonetheless been noted in the literature that DMs developing out of finite clauses—as is indeed the case of on va dire, shall we say, j’allais dire and I was going to say—may acquire a specific syntactic status. This type of DM has been variously labelled “clausal DM” (“marqueur discursif propositionnel”, Andersen 1996, 2007), “parenthetical” (Dehé 2010; Avanzi and Glikman 2009; Kaltenböck 2007; Schneider 2007; Schneider et al. 2015), “comment clause” (Brinton 2008) or more recently “extra-clausal constituent” (Kaltenböck et al. 2016). The French tradition relies on a different terminology with the terms “incise” (Pop 2000) and “recteur faible” (Apothéloz 2003; Blanche-Benveniste 1989).9

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It should be borne in mind, however, that some of the terms mentioned refer to very heterogeneous markers: “parentheticals” and “extra-clausal constituents” are not restricted to the type of clausal DM on which I focus. Needless to say, these labels are not interchangeable and are based on precise theoretical prerequisites. However, irrespective of the labels used, all the aforementioned studies assume that clauses associating pronominal subject and finite verb—such as je crois/I think—are liable to exhibit semantic-pragmatic and syntactic features that call for a rapprochement with more prototypical DMs (such as bon, well ). From a semanticpragmatic viewpoint, all these markers share similar attitudinal functions, especially in relation to speaker epistemic stance—which explains the term “comment clause” used in reference grammars of English (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985)—but also in terms of intersubjective functions, especially for clauses with a second person pronoun (Andersen 2007). Some of the studies mentioned also highlight a remarkable tendency: the propensity of these clauses to “freeze” with a first person pronoun and with verbs in the present tense (Brinton 2008: 2). Quirk et al. (1985: 1114) are more nuanced and claim that other cases are not infrequent: “Commonly, the subject is I and the verb is in the simple present, but the subject may be an indefinite one or they or (usually with a passive verb) it and the verb may (for example) have a modal auxiliary or be in the present perfective”. Syntactically, the common characteristic of these clauses when they function as DMs is autonomy. The verb in the clauses may cease to govern its object (represented for instance by a que- or that-clause that habitually follows the verb), hence the term “verbe recteur faible” (meaning “weak governing verb”) coined by the syntax specialist Blanche-Benveniste (1989) and reprised by Steuckardt (2016) to describe on va dire. This lack of strong government leads to positional mobility and optionality. The phenomenon known as “rection faible” in French linguistics may be illustrated by the following fabricated examples involving the French verb croire (believe): a. Je crois bien que c’était signalé dans le journal. I believe (that) it was mentioned in the newspaper. b. c’était signalé dans le journal, je crois bien.

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It was mentioned in the newspaper, I believe. c. c’était, je crois bien, signalé dans le journal. It was, I believe, mentioned in the newspaper. d. c’était Ø signalé dans le journal. It was Ø mentioned in the newspaper. In utterance (a) the main clause je crois bien is followed by a subordinate que-clause as is the case for any prototypical governing verb and the two clauses are syntactically strongly interdependent. On the contrary, in utterances (b) and (c), the main clause is syntactically independent, since it may not precede the subordinate clause—which is no longer introduced by que—but may instead appear in sentence-final or sentence-medial positions. These positions, characterised by autonomy between main clause and subordinate clause, are only licensed by “recteurs faibles”. Utterance (d) shows that such syntactic features lead to optionality, since the clause may be deleted without affecting the grammaticality of the utterance. Positional mobility and optionality are indeed typical characteristics of DMs (Schourup 1999), which justifies including the clausal markers under discussion within the class of DMs. It should nonetheless be stressed that the phenomenon delineated here concerns French: the translation provided for utterance (c) clearly shows that positional mobility functions differently in French and English.10 This implies that the criteria put forward for “recteurs faibles” may not be transferable as such to English clausal DMs. Another more recent approach is Schneider’s (2007) attempt to circumscribe a subclass of “reduced parenthetical clauses” (henceforth RPCs) within the rather heterogeneous group of “parentheticals” (Kaltenböck 2007). Schneider’s analysis only deals with RPCs in some Romance languages (French, Italian and Spanish), which may raise problems in relation to English (see below). In Schneider’s approach, RPC is “a general term independent of discourse function” (Schneider 2007: 74). In other words, the subclass of RPCs, which contains on va dire according to Schneider,11 is defined on purely syntactic grounds. Once this subclass is clearly identified, a pragmatic analysis in terms of mitigation (Caffi 1999) may be conducted.

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The syntactic criteria listed by Schneider to define this new closed class of clausal units are the following: a. The verb of the clause is finite. b. There is no overt link between the RPC and the host clause. c. When the RPC is in medial position, it may interrupt a close syntactic relation. d. The host clause and the RPC are syntactically independent of each other. Consequently, the RPC may be deleted without affecting the truth-conditionality of the utterance. e. The RPC always lacks an argument. In the case of the DMs of saying on which I focus, the missing argument is the object of dire/ say. It is precisely this fifth criterion which justifies Schneider’s label: “reduced” in RPC refers to the fact that the parentheticals under discussion are not complete, contrary to clausal parentheticals such as je l’espère where the clitic l ’ is the object of the verb espérer. f. The missing argument is semantically recoverable. In some of their uses, on va dire and shall we say clearly meet these criteria. Let us examine each criterion in turn. a. The verb is at a finite form in both DMs. b. There are many tokens where the host clause appears without any conjunction, especially for shall we say. It is nonetheless crucial to note that the criterion discussed here was originally defined for Romance languages. For English, the absence of the that conjunction is more problematic and cannot be taken as a proof of parenthetical status: even in non-discourse uses, shall we say may be followed by a ø-clause. c. As previously noted, sentence-medial position is attested for both DMs, which may interrupt close syntactic relations as in examples (45) and (46) below: (45) You move down the line and pick and choose what you want on your plate. And though some of what you can order while at the restaurant is… well… shall we say exotic (as mentioned in the video), you can absolutely stick with the basics if you’re more comfortable with that.

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(46) Je prie et en quelque sorte concentre mes énergies, j’allume des bougies, …etc pour protéger certaines personnes qui ont vraiment trop de problèmes , on va dire “bizarres”.. sans tomber dans l’excès des envoûtements ou autres.. (46 ) I pray and I kind of concentrate my energies, I light up candles…etc to protect some people who have too many shall we say [on va dire] “weird” problems… without falling into voodoo stuff and all…

d. The syntactic autonomy between the DMs and their host clauses leads to optionality. The DMs may be deleted, as the manipulations below show: (45a) what you can order while at the restaurant is… well… Ø exotic. (46a) j’allume des bougies, …etc pour protéger certaines personnes qui ont vraiment trop de problèmes , Ø “bizarres”.. sans tomber dans l’excès des envoûtements ou autres..

e. In some occurrences, on va dire and shall we say have no object (contrary to on va dire ça, which was excluded from the present study). f. The object is always contextually recoverable: it is the host, which is easily identified. These syntactic features suggest that on va dire and shall we say have acquired RPC status, at least in some of their uses. I believe that Schneider’s approach is essential insofar as it seeks to establish different syntactic subclasses within the heterogeneous group of parenthetical mitigators. It nonetheless raises important issues. First, even though some of the tokens of on va dire and shall we say do meet the criteria listed by Schneider, it is not the case for all the tokens of my data—for instance tokens where the DMs are followed by a that/que subordinate clause. How are we to analyse tokens where the DMs do not function as RPCs? Are they to be excluded from the class of DMs on the basis of the syntactic parameters defined above? In my view, the relevance of some of Schneider’s criteria is questionable. As will be made clear below, Schneider’s definition of RPCs relies on a syntactic model that may oversimplify and overemphasise syntax at the expense of semantic-pragmatic features.

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First, I argue that criterion b—which demands that there be no overt link between RPCs and their host clauses—is a moot point, since it may give rise to a conflict between the semantic-pragmatic level and the syntactic one. Criterion b entails ruling out the occurrences where on va dire governs a que-clause in French (since Schneider’s classification only tackles Romance languages). This in turn implies giving prominence to a syntactic approach of the phenomenon at stake: it draws a clear-cut dividing line between on va dire + que and other configurations involving on va dire, thus overlooking what may be common semantically and pragmatically to these different configurations in terms of metalinguistic comment. On the contrary, as laid out in Chapter 2, my own selection of discoursemarking tokens relies on a semantic-pragmatic interpretation, which explains why tokens of on va dire + que were not excluded a priori. The analysis conducted in the preceding pages has indeed shown that on va dire que plays an active role in discourse marking. Secondly, criterion d, which defines optionality as a syntactic prerequisite for RPC status, is problematic as well, since it has questionable implications at the semantic-pragmatic level. Deletion tests of the kind presented above have no real relevance from a semantic-pragmatic perspective and seem to suggest that RPCs are unnecessary—or even parasitic—items that may be deleted. I adopt an opposite view, emphasising the role played by DMs as symptoms of language instability (see the presentation of “énonciation” in Chapter 1). Moreover, even if such tests function for on va dire and shall we say on a strict syntactic basis, I shall show in Chapter 5 that they are less easy to apply to j’allais dire and I was going to say, the deletion of which sometimes renders the utterance incomprehensible. My discussion of criterion d actually suggests that syntactic autonomy is not an adequate concept on which to base a subclass of DMs. Based on French spoken data, Kahane and Pietrandrea (2009) demonstrate that syntactic autonomy relies on a simplistic syntactic theoretical model, which wrongly equates absence of syntactic government with absence of syntactic relation. According to the authors mentioned, who rely on the theory of “macro-syntax” developed in the wake of BlancheBenveniste’s works (within the research group entitled “Recherches sur le français parlé”), it is crucial to distinguish between a micro-syntactic level and a macro-syntactic one. The former deals with government relations

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between syntactic units. These relations are evidenced by well-established syntactic tests, such as clefting as far as verbs are concerned: for instance, the pair I like tea (uncleft) and it is tea that I like (cleft) proves that the verb like governs the object (the NP tea). The latter deals with syntactic links of a different, looser nature. These links may go unnoticed, since they cannot be analysed as government relations. They nonetheless exist and must be accounted for. Linguistic units that entertain looser syntactic links are called “non-governed” units by Kahane and Pietrandrea (2009). Among these “non-governed” units, one group deserves special attention: parentheticals, which Kahane and Pietrandrea suggest re-labelling “Associated Illocutionary Units” (henceforth AIU). These units are not governed strictly speaking, but this does not entail that they are autonomous. Evidence for the absence of autonomy is provided by the “adjacency” phenomenon analysed by the authors. Let us examine one of the utterances taken from their data: a. euh dans la confusion [.hhhhh Well I wz goin’ to say if I came 8 with ¯you p’raps we could stay in ahk- (.) 9 in: Hadd’nham ¯for the night.¯

In this utterance, the speaker regains the floor at line 7 in order to provide a solution. Interestingly, the solution is presented via a non-assertive stance (see p’raps  perhaps). The modal adverb marking speaker uncertainty corroborates the idea that a highly subjective opinion is being voiced here. With DMs derived from imperatives (look, as in example [25], or wait ), it is intersubjectivity which is foregrounded. The speaker explicitly signals to his or her co-speaker that he/she is about to move on to another subject matter. The fact that I was going to say is more frequently associated with well than with look or wait is linked to its subjective dimension. Summary on topic shifting Topic shifting marked by I was going to say is characterised by two elements: – whether the DM introduces an entirely new topic or elaborates on the topic at hand (developing a new viewpoint or a counter-argument), it seeks to reorganise discourse sequentially speaking, by steering it towards the right. – discourse reorganisation is clearly marked as subjective (through the first-person pronoun in the singular): the speaker re-directs discourse on his/her own expectations while at the same sounding non-assertive (as opposed to I want to say, for instance). In some utterances, the speaker wants to go back to a topic previously mentioned and the DM seems equivalent to initially, I was going to say. In others, the DM receives an interpretation in tentative terms and corresponds to I would like to say next. The second case may represent a higher degree of pragmaticalisation, since it departs from the original grammatical use expressing speaker intention. Like in the pragmatic function labelled “metalinguistic comment”, the DM also signals underlying alterity here: I was going to say indicates that the speaker intends to talk about something else, which confers instability. Let us now consider the affiliative function of the DM.

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5.3.2.2 Focus on Affiliation In the COCA sample examined here, about one-third of the tokens identified as discourse uses corresponds to affiliation marking. I was going to say therefore takes on a more intersubjective role, since it expresses affiliation with the co-speaker’s viewpoint. Let us focus on three examples: (26) WILLIE-GEIST# So let’s do two weeks in Australia. NATALIEMORALES# Let’s do two weeks. TAMRON-HALL# Okay. AL ROKER: No. WILLIE-GEIST# You think? TAMRON-HALL# Now we’re pushing it. AL ROKER: Yeah, I was going to say. TAMRON-HALL# You know we’re not going to get two weeks. So let’s just go real. (27) Mr-KEVIN-CLASH-1M: Yeah. Normally, I’m behind the couch. LAUER: Yeah, exactly. I was going to say, usually you’re under or behind the couch. Mr-CLASH: Yes, or underneath the table or something. (28) SHEINELLE-JONES# So for me, you know, I picked a recent one. We all know on This Is Us, Ron Cephas, his character is William. We know he was, you know, we knew he was going to die -- AL ROKER: Right. SHEINELLE-JONES# -- and I was still this -- was this a couple of weekends -- two weeks ago? Traumatic for me. I mean I was crying like a baby. Everybody was. It was just his acting was just so good. JAIMIEALEXANDER# I was going to say so much good acting on that show.

In all three utterances, I was going to say occurs after a specific statement made by the co-speaker. The DM is therefore used by the speaker to publicly declare that he/she shares the same stance and endorses the statement. As already mentioned, affiliation is a highly social phenomenon: CA researchers have shown that affiliation is the expected response in interaction (Stivers 2008; Lindström and Sorjonen 2013). In CA, affiliation is clearly distinguished from “acknowledgment” (Stivers 2008). The latter refers to strategies signalling active listening, explicitly marking that the speaker is paying attention, while the former specifically deals with marking shared commitment. The distinction made here between acknowledgement and affiliation is crucial to understanding how I was going to say works in the utterances

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under discussion. In examples (26) and (28) above, yeah signals acknowledgement and roughly means OK, I heard you. In this light, it may be analysed as a “reception marker” (Jucker and Smith 1998) or as a “token of back-channelling” (Lambertz 2011). After the speaker has clearly indicated that he/she is listening, he/she may proceed to the next step and express shared commitment using I was going to say. Indeed, expressing that you wanted to “say” the same thing is tantamount to stating that you share the same epistemic stance. It should be borne in mind that I was going to say systematically appears after a previous statement endorsed by the co-speaker. The DM may therefore be viewed as marking a kind of “response” commitment. A closer examination of the utterances of the sample suggests that there exist two slightly different cases. In the first case, I was going to say only serves to mark affiliation, especially when it functions as a stand-alone marker (as in example [28] above). In the second case, the DM seems to conflate affiliation marking and anaphora, as in example (27) already quoted: (27) Mr-KEVIN-CLASH-1M: Yeah. Normally, I’m behind the couch. LAUER: Yeah, exactly. I was going to say, usually you’re under or behind the couch. Mr-CLASH: Yes, or underneath the table or something.

In this example, the speaker repeats the co-speaker’s words almost verbatim (I’m behind the couch). Such cases raise the issue of scope: even if the DM is followed by a clause as in example (27), it semantically has scope over the previous statement. This statement is rephrased (see the passage from normally to usually), but it is the first statement which is endorsed by the speaker. As already mentioned, the original intentional meaning of the semimodal be going to is still persistent in this discourse function, since I was going to say may be glossed as That’s what I wanted to say as well. In this respect, affiliation marking seems very close to topic shifting: in both uses, the DM is closely connected to intention. One major difference remains, however, since affiliation marking is clearly anaphoric while topic shifting has an announcement dimension, therefore pointing forward. In terms of collocations, the two uses also

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display major divergences. As stated above, topic shifter I was going to say frequently collocates with well, whereas in affiliation marking it collocates with yeah, as examples (26) and (27) suggest. At this point, one important theoretical issue needs to be addressed: how do we account for the links between the three functions, affiliation, topic shifting, metalinguistic comment? On the basis of the pragmatic analysis conducted here, it may be assumed that there exist three distinct DMs I was going to say, or at least three entirely different pragmatic functions. In enunciative terms, however, it is more relevant to emphasise the shared features. These three uses actually correspond to the same operation-based semantic characterisation. First, the type of commitment at stake is explicitly subjective, since the speaker is presented as taking sole responsibility for the propositional content. In metalinguistic comment, I was going to say presents commitment as minimal: the propositional content is deemed not entirely accurate to refer to the reality being described. In affiliation and topic shifting, commitment may be seen as incomplete as well, for different reasons. In affiliation, I have assumed that commitment is only a sort of “response” commitment: the speaker only endorses the propositional content after it has been endorsed by the co-speaker. In the case of topic shifting, the speaker expresses his/her intention to plan discourse differently, but only tentatively. In all cases, there is a sort of alterity underlying the use of I was going to say. In metalinguistic comment, alterity implies other possible linguistic choices. In topic shifting, it corresponds to the speaker’s intention to broach a different subject matter, while in affiliation it foregrounds the fact that the speaker’s commitment only occurs after a previous speaker has expressed commitment. In Sect. 5.5 below, I shall argue that these three uses may actually correspond to three different pragmaticalisation paths. From a syntactic viewpoint, I shall show in the next section that in all three uses the DMs have acquired a new syntactic status—like on va dire and shall we say.

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Syntactic Classification

The data suggests that j’allais dire and I was going to say—like on va dire and shall we say—may be assigned two different syntactic statuses depending on the context. In some cases, they function as “Associated Illocutionary Units” (AIUs) as defined by Kahane and Pietrandrea (2009): they are no longer followed by a that/que clause and do not syntactically govern the argument over which they have semantic scope. They are, however, closely linked with their “anchors” (or hosts). In such cases, they correspond to clausal AIUs. A detailed discussion of AIUs is provided in Chapter 4. In utterances where the DMs are followed by that/que clauses, I assume that they belong to discourse marking but without developing an AIU status. In such cases, the verbs dire/ say behave as weak governing verbs (“recteurs faibles” in the French terminology). This means that the verbs do not syntactically govern the that/que clause. This in turn allows for syntactic mobility of the clause. Let us look at an example with j’allais dire: (29) Ce qui aurai été un plus c’est que tu comment jusqu’a la fin Sinon la vidéo n’est pas très fluide … De même que le “commentary” en lui même.

9. J’allais dire que ça s’apparente un peu a du camp … M’enfin bon … Il est dommage que tu ne rush pas un peu, pour nous montré ton talent comme tu le fait si bien en privé. (29 ) It would have been better if you had commented on the video till the end otherwise the video is not very fluent…Nor is the commentary itself. I was going to say [j’allais dire que] it looks a bit like camp…Well anyway…It’s a shame you don’t rush a little bit, to show us your talent just like you do in private.

J’allais dire may easily be post-posed, which points to its syntactic mobility: (29a) […] ça s’apparente un peu a du camp, j’allais dire …[…].

It should be noted however that the utterances where DMs j’allais dire et I was going to say are followed by that/que clauses are rare in the data exam-

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ined. Prototypically, the DMs have scope over a specific lexeme or over a pre-posed clause, therefore ceasing to govern a clause via a conjunction and developing AIU status. Semantically, a form of dependency between the DMs and their “anchors” remains, which explains why the deletion test sometimes advocated in the literature on “parentheticals” (Schneider 2007) is highly problematic. This is especially true for j’allais dire and I was going to say. Contrary to on va dire and shall we say, they often occur in utterances where two competing formulations co-exist and deleting them leads to incomprehensible utterances. Let us re-consider two examples: (30) Tes désaccords – j’allais dire fréquents mais je crois que systématiques serait plus exact – avec Eviv ne m’ont jamais semblé dériver vers la haine obsessionnelle. (30 ) Your disagreements – I was going to say [j’allais dire] frequent but I guess systematic would be more accurate – with Eviv have never in my view seemed to steer towards obsessive hatred. (31) For example, the Catholics meant the “separated brethren” thing to be ecumenical and cordial, but I find it terribly … I was going to say offensive but that’s not the right word… smug.

Due to the mais/but clause, deletion is irrelevant, as shown below: (30a) ?? Tes désaccords – Ø fréquents mais je crois que systématiques serait plus exact – avec Eviv ne m’ont jamais semblé dériver vers la haine obsessionnelle. (31a) ?? For example, the Catholics meant the “separated brethren” thing to be ecumenical and cordial, but I find it terribly … Ø offensive but that’s not the right word… smug.

A purely syntactic analysis based on this deletion test does not do justice to the complex behaviour of the DMs under study. As laid out in Chapter 4, Sect. 4.6, I assume that a purely syntactic approach like the one put forward by Schneider (2007) in his definition of “reduced parenthetical clauses” is too restrictive. This has led me instead to analyse the discourse uses

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under discussion as AIUs, within the theoretical framework developed by Kahane and Pietrandrea (2009). In the last section, each DM will be assigned a specific “discursive profile” based on the various parameters involved in the analysis, and the relationship between form and meaning will be discussed.

5.5

Summary and Discussion: Two Distinct “Discursive Profiles” and Form/Meaning Motivation

The analysis conducted throughout the present chapter has confirmed that j’allais dire and I was going to say share several features. They both rely on a subjective commitment that maintains p and non-p, therefore failing to stabilise discourse. The pragmatic, syntactic and collocational parameters annotated nonetheless shed light on major divergences. It seems that j’allais dire mostly specialises in metalinguistic comment and serves to mitigate the speaker’s linguistic choices. I was going to say is also liable to express metalinguistic comment, but in a slightly different way: its contextual environment contains more epistemic and degree markers as well as opposition markers, which suggests that I was going to say is more strongly associated with speaker uncertainty than j’allais dire. Two other pragmatic functions were examined: topic shifting and affiliation. The data extracted from the TenTen corpora indicates that I was going to say is likely to take on these pragmatic roles, whereas j’allais dire is rather rare in affiliation and inexistent in topic shifting. These pragmatic differences are correlated with syntactic features, especially the fact that I was going to say tends to be fixed in initial position and that it has mainly scope over entire clauses. One last issue needs to be addressed: the way these various uses relate to the non-pragmaticalised grammatical uses of the sequences j’allais dire and I was going to say. As noted for on va dire and shall we say in Chapter 4, the morphosyntactic features of j’allais dire and I was going to say may be conducive to an analysis in terms of “shields” (Caffi 1999). This category of mitigators designates markers or constructions that mitigate statements by

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“displacing” and blurring the origin of commitment and/or the moment of speech. In the case of j’allais dire and I was going to say, the first parameter is not relevant: it is the speaker who is explicitly presented as the origin of commitment. This entails that the “displacement” only concerns the past tense of the DMs. In line with Caffi’s framework, it may be provisionally assumed that commitment does not occur at the moment of speech but is displaced to a past or to a hypothetical moment (given that both the imparfait in French and the preterite in English may refer to irrealis). As explained in Chapter 4, this assumption relies on metaphorical processes that are not compatible with the framework adopted here. In my view, commitment does take place at the moment of speech but it is low or incomplete. This does not entail, however, that the original semantic components do not persist in the discourse uses. In order to understand the link posited here between these semantic components and the discourse uses, I shall first re-examine the grammatical use of aller + infinitive and be going to in the past tense. As mentioned in Chapter 3, several meanings may be distinguished. The markers may express evidence-based future-in-the-past (e.g. I saw that she was going to cry) or express past intention (e.g. she said she was going to quit smoking ). Furthermore, I have insisted on the fact that future-in-the-past may give rise to a specific use—which does not exist in the present tense— sometimes referred to as “avertive” meaning, illustrated by the following translated example: (32) Il allait s’éloigner de la galerie quand se profila au bout de la rue une silhouette. (J. Echenoz, Je m’en vais, 1999). (32a) He was going to walk away from the gallery when a figure appeared […]

My contention is that the pragmaticalisation of the sequences j’allais dire and I was going to say started out of this avertive meaning. By definition, avertive meaning relies on the co-existence of the two values p and nonp: p is contemplated (s’éloigner/walk out ) but it is non-p which is finally actualised. I have shown that this wavering between p and non-p is at the core of the semantic characterisation of DMs j’allais dire and I was going to say. In the “de-formulation” uses examined at the beginning of the chapter

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(Sect. 5.2), this avertive component is salient. By contrast, when the DMs are used as reformulation markers or as planning markers signalling the speaker’s linguistic difficulties, the avertive meaning is backgrounded. It might therefore be relevant to posit the existence of a pragmaticalisation cline, ranging from de-formulation uses to planning functions through reformulation uses. As for topic shifting and affiliation, it might be assumed that they originally developed out of the intentional meaning. I have indeed argued that in such functions I was going to say is close to I would like to say. Past intention is also linked to p/p instability, since it usually implies that p was not actualised. The hypothesis formulated here entails that two different pragmaticalisation paths have to be distinguished: one leading from avertive meaning to metalinguistic comment, another leading from intention to topic shifting and affiliation. I was going to say has developed along both paths, while j’allais dire is for now mostly restricted to metalinguistic comment—at least in my data. Future research is needed to shed light on j’allais dire as topic shifter and affiliation marker in spoken French. Despite obvious differences, I assume that the three functions rely on a close association with the original grammatical uses, since in all of them the DMs retain their abstract semantic representation (subjective commitment failing to stabilise p).

Notes 1. Let us note, however, that in his article on DM well Heritage (forthcoming) quotes a token of DM I was going to say co-occurring with well but does not analyse it. 2. See Steuckardt (2016), who claims that j’allais dire expresses the speaker’s “renunciation to say X” (“renoncement à dire” in French). 3. For the tables provided in this subsection, the total only takes into account tokens of metalinguistic comment, leaving aside topic shifting and affiliation. In the latter functions, the DMs do not collocate with opposition markers or epistemic and degree markers.

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4. As regards affiliation in French, the phrase c’est ce que j’allais dire seems a better candidate than j’allais dire alone, but future research is clearly needed in this area. 5. I chose to select the first 200 occurrences, that is to say the most recent ones, since the uses examined may well be incipient uses. 6. The presence of what as the most frequent collocate (in what I was going to say, for instance) is not surprising if we keep in mind that many of the tokens of I was going to say automatically retrieved do not correspond to discourse uses. 7. Heritage’s approach sees DMs as marking the speaker’s epistemic stance. In this light, well is considered highly subjective, since it introduces personal opinions.

References Aijmer, K. (2016). Pragmatic markers as constructions. The case of anyway. In G. Kaltenböck, E. Keizer, & A. Lohmann (Eds.), Outside the clause: Form and function of extra-clausal constituents (pp. 29–58). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Beeching, K., & Detges, U. (2014). Discourse functions at the right and left periphery: Crosslinguistic investigations of language use and language change. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Caffi, C. (1999). On mitigation. Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 881–909. Chuquet, H., & Paillard, M. (1987). Approche linguistique des problèmes de traduction. Paris: Ophrys. Chuquet, H., & Paillard, M. (2017). Glossaire de linguistique contrastive. Paris: Ophrys. Degand, L., & Fagard, B. (2011). Alors between discourse and grammar: The role of syntactic position. Functions of Language, 18(1), 19–56. Fraser, B. (2009). Topic orientation markers. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 892–898. Guillemin-Flescher, J. (1981). Syntaxe comparée du français et de l’anglais. Problèmes de traduction. Paris: Ophrys. Guillemin-Flescher, J. (1984). “Traduire l’inattestable”. Cahiers Charles V, tome 6 Linguistique comparée et Traduction: le statut modal de l’énoncé. Université Paris VII. 131–151.

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Heritage, J. (forthcoming). Turn-initial particles in English: The cases of oh and well. Jucker, A. H., & Smith, S. W. (1998). And people just you know like “wow”: Discourse markers as negotiating strategies. In A. H. Jucker & Y. Ziv (Eds.), Discourse markers: Descriptions and theory (pp. 171–202). John Benjamins: Amsterdam and Philadelphia. Kahane, S., & Pietrandrea, P. (2009). Les parenthétiques comme ‘Unités Illocutoires Associées’. Une perspective macrosyntaxique. Linx [online]. https:// doi.org/10.4000/linx.1334. Lambertz, K. (2011). Back-channelling: The use of yeah and mm to portray engaged listenership. Griffith Working Papers in Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication, 4 (1/2), 11–18. Lansari, L. (2017). I was going to say/j’allais dire as discourse markers in contemporary English and French. Languages in Contrast, 17 (2), 205–228. Lansari, L. (2018). J’allais dire: de la périphrase verbale au marqueur discursif. In G. Dostie & F. Lefeuvre (Eds.), Lexique, grammaire, discours: les marqueurs discursifs (pp. 433–452). Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. (« Travaux de stylistique et de linguistique françaises »). Lindström, A., & Sorjonen, M.-L. (2013). Affiliation in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 350–369). Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell. Riou, M. (2015). The grammar of topic transition in American English conversation. Topic transition design and management in typical and atypical conversations (schizophrenia) (PhD dissertation). University Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, University Paris Diderot (Paris 7). Schneider, S. (2007). Reduced parenthetical clauses as mitigators: A corpus study of spoken French, Italian and Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Steuckardt, A. (2014). Polyphonie et médiativité dans un marqueur émergent: on va dire. In J.-Cl. Anscombre, E. Oppermann-Marsaux, & A. Rodriguez Somolinos (Eds.), Médiativité, polyphonie et modalité en français: études synchroniques et diachroniques (pp. 67–84). Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Steuckardt, A. (2016). A la recherche du consensus: on va dire, on va dire ça, on va dire ça comme ça. In L. Rouanne & J.-Cl. Anscombre (Eds.), Histoires de dire. Petit glossaire des marqueurs formés sur le verbe dire (pp. 293–313). Bern: Peter Lang. Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment, and affiliation during storytelling: When nodding is a token of affiliation. Research on Language in Social Interaction, 41(1), 31–57.

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Tottie, G. (2011). Uh and Um as sociolinguistic markers in British English. In G. Gilquin & S. De Cock (Eds.), Errors and disfluencies in spoken corpora (pp. 173–197). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

References of the Corpora British National Corpus (BNC). (1995). Oxford University Computing Services. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/. Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), Mark Davies, Brigham Young University. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/. TenTen, available on line via SketchEngine. https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/.

6 Conclusion: Summary and Perspectives

This chapter has a twofold goal. First, it summarises the main results and re-examines the main common points and divergences between the four DMs chosen for the study. It shows that all four DMs have undergone pragmaticalisation, developing new discourse functions that correlate with new syntactic features, but it also highlights that the nature and degree of pragmaticalisation is different for each DM. Secondly, it seeks to open up future research paths for the study of DMs, particularly for DMs of saying. Section 6.1 focuses on the DM status of the DMs examined in the present book and seeks to assess the nature and degree of pragmaticalisation for each DM. Section 6.2 discusses the common uses of the four DMs, concentrating on reformulation issues, while Sect. 6.3 outlines possible research avenues for the future.

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Development of DM Status

6.1.1 Discourse Marking and DMs of Saying One of the research questions raised by the comparison undertaken here dealt with the DM status of the units examined: How do they fit into the class of DMs? Answering this question is all the more difficult as defining a class of DMs remains a much disputed issue in the literature, despite more than thirty years of research in this area. My own approach draws on French “énonciation” theories and more particularly on Ranger’s (2018) recent attempt to capture the very nature of discourse marking. In the wake of Ranger’s definition, I assume that discourse marking deals with utterance regulation: the construction of reference—i.e. word-world relationships—and of intersubjective relationships is so difficult that the speaker needs to resort to specific items signalling this complex process and highlighting his/her attempts to deal with it. This focus on discourse marking as an abstract operation rather than on individual DMs implies that in my view DMs do not constitute a closed syntactic class: any type of marker may play a role in discourse marking, irrespective of its syntactic category. This allows for an inclusive and gradual approach to DMs and implies that emergent markers escaping traditional classification may easily be included. The data examined has shown that on va dire, shall we say, j’allais dire and I was going to say do play a role in this complex utterance regulation. In some of their uses, they cease to function as exponents of futurity (or future-in-the-past) to acquire discourse functions, or conflate futurity marking and discourse marking. The four DMs under scrutiny suggest that DMs of saying regulate discourse in terms of speaker commitment. The presence of the verbum dicendi signals that commitment is at stake: the speaker indicates that commitment is problematic in some way, hence the need to comment on it. This feature might actually be the common denominator to a hypothetical class of DMs of saying. Of course, not all of them function as metalinguistic mitigators, but it seems that they are all connected to commitment modality in some way. For instance, DMs such as comme on dit or on dirait in French, which are analysed in evidential terms (GÒmez-Jordana Ferary 2015), raise the issue of the

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origin of commitment. Future research is therefore needed to shed light on this potential class and assess whether commitment modality might provide a relevant framework to make sense of all the diverse DMs of saying in English and French. Further research must also be conducted to understand the higher productivity of DMs of saying in French compared to English.

6.1.2 Different Degrees of Pragmaticalisation? Assessing the DMs in terms of degrees of pragmaticalisation poses an important challenge, since pragmaticalisation is a multifaceted phenomenon involving both semantic-pragmatic criteria and syntactic ones. In keeping with this multi-level phenomenon, the linguistic analysis conducted here sought to bridge the gap between a semanticpragmatic approach of the four DMs under study and a syntactic classification. Methodologically speaking, however, prominence was given to the semantic-pragmatic identification of the discourse functions of the markers under discussion. This justified my choice not to exclude cases where the DMs were followed by that/que clauses, cases that are traditionally ruled out from studies on “parentheticals” (Schneider 2007). This initial decision led to the gathering of rather heterogeneous tokens, some belonging to the class of “Associated Illocutionary Units” (AIUs) defined by Kahane and Pietrandrea (2009), others with the properties of “weak governing verbs”. On the basis of this syntactic divergence, it may be assumed that there exist two different degrees of pragmaticalisation for the uses under scrutiny. The uses where the four DMs behave as AIUs constitute highly pragmaticalised uses, whereas the other uses correspond to a lesser degree of pragmaticalisation. Interestingly, on va dire is the only DM that exhibits many uses as “weak governing verb” (in the on va dire que configuration). The other three DMs almost exclusively function as AIUs. This implies that j’allais dire, I was going to say and shall we say rely on a strong correlation between development of discourse functions and change of paradigm, from exponents of futurity to AIUs. For on va dire, the change of paradigm seems more gradual.

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If we now turn to the semantic-pragmatic analysis of the DMs, another question needs to be raised: Do the corpus findings make it possible to assign a specific degree of pragmaticalisation to each DM? Chapter 5 has shown that in most of its uses, I was going to say retains its “avertive” meaning (I was going to say p but …), be it in the “de-formulation” use or when it stands as a topic shifter or affiliation marker. This would tend to show that I was going to say is less pragmaticalised than the other three DMs examined. The fact that the ratio of discourse uses in the TenTen sample is very low for this DM supposedly corroborates this hypothesis. The hypothesis formulated here may nevertheless seem too weak, since it may be argued conversely that the acquisition of several discourse functions corresponds to a higher degree of pragmaticalisation for I was going to say. I therefore contend that, at this stage of my research, it is more relevant to analyse the findings in terms of types of pragmaticalisation (rather than degrees of pragmaticalisation). In this light, the conclusion to be drawn is that I was going to say has developed discourse functions following various pragmaticalisation paths, the others only serving as metalinguistic mitigators. It should be noted, however, that j’allais dire might be acquiring an affiliative function similar to that of I was going to say, and future research is clearly needed in that direction (see Sect. 6.3). Let us now re-examine one specific context where the four DMs appear: reformulation.

6.2

Reformulation

As Chapters 4 and 5 have shown, my bottom-up approach of specific DMs has led me to concentrate on a linguistic category that has been extensively studied in the French tradition: the category of reformulation. Contrary to works that adopt a top-down approach and take reformulation as a starting point for the analysis (Rossari 1997; Del Saz Rubio 2007), my own study did not posit any a priori link between the four DMs and reformulation marking. Following the definition of assertion in the Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations, I simply examined the relationship between p, the propositional content endorsed (although minimally) by the speaker, and other possibilities p . The annotation of

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this relationship revealed that the four DMs display different types of relationship between p and p . Broadly speaking, j’allais dire and I was going to say tend to associate p and p , whereas on va dire and shall we say are more likely to stabilise p. When p and p coexist, three cases need to be distinguished: a. Cases of “de-formulation”, which are only licensed by j’allais dire and I was going to say and are illustrated by examples (1) and (2) below: (1) Alooooors Pour Izaiah je suis d’accord, il vaut mieux le laisser de côté vu qu’une relation (j’allais dire « liaison » mais c’est un peu tendancieux, quand même) ne semble pas vraiment logique. (1 ) Soooo for Izaiah I agree, it’s best to leave him aside given that a relationship (I was going to say [j’allais dire] “affair” but it’s not really neutral, is it?) does not really seem logical. (2) Let me know if you want to swap any seeds or anything. If you can keep the slugs off and give them enough water, courgettes grow very easily (I was going to say they grow themselves, but all plants do that!).

In the parentheses, the speaker goes back to a choice, p , she/he deems inadequate, in order to legitimise his/her choice of p. Semantically speaking, the DMs keep their “avertive” use, since one value is contemplated (p ) but another one is actualised (p). Pragmatically, however, such instances reveal the speaker’s metalinguistic awareness. In case a, replacing the DMs with on va dire and shall we say gives rise to very odd utterances: (1a) ?? Alooooors Pour Izaiah je suis d’accord, il vaut mieux le laisser de côté vu qu’une relation (on va dire« liaison » mais c’est un peu tendancieux, quand même) ne semble pas vraiment logique. (2a) ?? Let me know if you want to swap any seeds or anything. If you can keep the slugs off and give them enough water, courgettes grow very easily. (shall we say they grow themselves, but all plants do that!)

b. Cases of reformulation where p and p do not correspond to the same viewpoint. Among these cases, I have paid special attention to the case labelled “subjective revision”, since it is liable to be expressed by all

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four DMs. Subjective revision corresponds to a reformulation strategy whereby p reformulates p in a more subjective, less expected way. Let us re-examine some examples already quoted in Chapters 4 and 5: (3) Même sur le vélo, je pense que je m’entraine différemment d’avant . On va dire …plus efficacement! (3 ) Even on my bike, I think I exercise differently from before. Let’s say [on va dire]…more efficiently! (4)

Max Cady (maks - kA-dE) Not confined by the boundaries of rock, punk, garage, pop or metal, but call it whatever you like. We like to call it rock-n-roll, or shall we say rawk-n-roll.

(5) Une succession de coups de force, de fraude et de falsification organisés dans l’impunité la plus totale, j’allais dire la plus durable et la plus chronique. (5 ) A succession of forceful fraud and falsification actions organised in the utmost impunity, I was going to say [j’allais dire] in the most lasting and rampant impunity. (6) There is nothing new in sequels, of course; they are generally safe investments for an industry increasingly adverse (I was going to say “creatively bankrupt”) to anything new and untried.

It is in this context of subjective revision that the four DMs are most comparable in their behaviour, as evidenced by the manipulations below: (3 ) Même sur le vélo, je pense que je m’entraine différemment d’avant . j’allais dire…plus efficacement! (4 )

Max Cady (maks - kA-dE) Not confined by the boundaries of rock, punk, garage, pop or metal, but call it whatever you like. We like to call it rock-n-roll, I was going to say rawk-n-roll.

(5 ) Une succession de coups de force, de fraude et de falsification organisés dans l’impunité la plus totale, on va dire la plus durable et la plus chronique.

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(6 ) There is nothing new in sequels, of course; they are generally safe investments for an industry increasingly adverse (or shall we say “creatively bankrupt”) to anything new and untried.

Substituting one DM for another therefore seems possible. It should be stressed however that this does not imply that they are interchangeable or strictly equivalent. With j’allais dire and I was going to, instability is foregrounded, while with on va dire the utterance sounds more final. Moreover, in example (6), adding the conjunction or seems necessary to obtain a plausible utterance, which suggests that shall we say may not reformulate by itself (see Chapter 4). When reformulation does not correspond to “subjective revision” but is related to euphemistic strategies as may be the case for on va dire and shall we say, it is not possible to use j’allais dire and I was going to say instead: (7) Exactement, encore hier je me suis “engueulé” (le mot est un peu fort, mais bon on a bien débattu on va dire) avec un mec à ce sujet, GD a encore beaucoup de choses à nous faire découvrir comme tu dis, ils nous réservent beaucoup de surprises. (7a) ?? Exactement, encore hier je me suis “engueulé” (le mot est un peu fort, mais bon on a bien débattu j’allais dire) avec un mec à ce sujet, GD a encore beaucoup de choses à nous faire découvrir comme tu dis, ils nous réservent beaucoup de surprises.

It must be borne in mind that euphemism is specific to on va dire and shall we say (even in the absence of reformulation). In the example below, where only one linguistic choice is mentioned, shall we say has an ironic overtone and replacing it with I was going to say is not possible: (8) Cressie is often described as “free spirited” and “bohemian” which may or may not explain her usually rather, shall we say , un-u-su-al sartorial selections (sequinned jacket over a maxi dress avec flower clipped in one’s hair for an English wedding anyone?)…… (8a) ?? Cressie is often described as “free spirited” and “bohemian” which may or may not explain her usually rather, I was going to say, un-u-su-al

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sartorial selections (sequinned jacket over a maxi dress avec flower clipped in one’s hair for an English wedding anyone?)……

c. Cases of “total revision” where reformulation has a closure function. These cases are only attested with on va dire que configurations, as in example (9) below: (9) et bien j’ai “ upload ” pas moins de 5 photos sans trouver le moindre petit point commun avec une star…aucune ressemblance avec une star (tout genre confondu) probablement qu’ET n’y est pas… enfin ˆˆ on va dire que j’ai qd meme qq pt commun ˆˆ du genre deux yeux , un nez, une bouche :) (9 ) ok well I’ve uploaded no fewer than 5 photos without finding the slightest common point with a star… no resemblance with any star (male or female) ET may not be in the list…anyway ˆˆ let’s say [on va dire] after all I do have common points ˆˆ like eyes, nose and mouth :)

This kind of reformulation relies on a strong alterity between p and p and is often used within ironic or humorous intersubjective strategies. My data indicates that only on va dire is liable to occur in such contexts. The preceding lines show that it is in case b.—reformulation as “subjective revision”—that the four DMs are closest to one another. The manipulations proposed above in examples (3 ) to (6 ) nonetheless highlight that it would be irrelevant to posit strict equivalence between the four DMs even in this context. Each DM has its own discursive profile, which explains the specific overtones observed in the examples. These different types of relationship between p and p actually raise two major theoretical issues. First, they reveal that reformulation as an umbrella term refers to very heterogeneous phenomena. Researchers agree that reformulation must not be restricted to paraphrastic reformulation and must account for more complex reformulations where p and p are not strictly equivalent. The limits of reformulation, however, remain unclear: Does “de-formulation” count as reformulation? Does adopting the opposite stance, as in cases of “total revision”, still correspond to reformulation? It may actually be contended that the label “reformulation” itself is questionable. The more extreme cases mentioned here may be better accounted for in terms of “formulation search” rather than “reformulation”.1 Secondly, some of the utterances examined have led me to question the term “reformulation markers”, since there are many cases where the

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DMs do not reformulate by themselves. They simply appear with other markers—such as or/ou, enfin, donc —whose role is to reformulate. This means that the DMs under study seldom have a reformulation function, but have special affinity with reformulation strategies. The most plausible assumption is that searching for the right formulation prompts the speaker to mitigate his/her statement by specifically using a DM of saying.

6.3

Future Research: DMs Across Genres

As explained in Chapter 2, the choice of relying on comparable web data was originally linked to the lack of sufficient data in other available corpora (especially in French). What was a default choice actually raises interesting questions related to genre: To what extent do the findings of the study conducted here reflect genre-related constraints? In other words, would an analysis based on different genres (spoken data, press, etc.) lead to similar results? One answer was provided by the analysis of I was going to say in spoken American English. In comparison with the web data, the spoken data suggests that I was going to say is frequently attested as topic shifter and affiliation marker. This means that the DMs are dependent on the genres in which they occur, presumably in terms of both frequency and pragmatic behaviour. I therefore assume that a more systematic comparison with spoken data would be especially fruitful. It might shed light on j’allais dire as an affiliation marker, and more generally speaking it would enrich our understanding of the syntactic behaviour of the DMs under scrutiny. Publications on clausal DMs in spoken French and English reveal that they may function as autonomous prosodic units (Avanzi 2009; Dehé 2010). Combining the levels of analysis tackled in the present book (semanticpragmatic, syntactic and collocational features) with a prosodic analysis would thus provide a fuller picture of the DMs under discussion. Another interesting research path deals more specifically with web data. As mentioned in Chapter 2, web corpora represent very heterogeneous data, including data from Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). A fine-grained analysis based on different CMC genres, encompassing both asynchronous modes of communication such as email and syn-

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chronous ones (for instance online chats), might uncover specific features of the DMs under scrutiny. In synchronous CMC, the role played by DMs of saying in terms of expressivity and speaker stance (in association with devices such as emoticons and capitalisation) is worth examining in detail. From a wider French-English contrastive perspective, I believe that the study of emergent DMs of saying might open up new avenues for research into the stylistic divergences between the two languages. Several publications have already established that French and English display major stylistic differences in academic writing and journalistic texts in terms of speaker stance (Fløttum et al. 2006; Rowley-Jolivet and CarterThomas 2014; Celle 2009). It would therefore be relevant to see whether similar claims can be made for CMC.

Note 1. In a specific syntactic framework defined for spoken French, Kahane and Pietrandrea (2012) argue that the term “entassement” in French (which may be translated by “accumulation”) is more adequate to capture the phenomena at stake: in order to find the right formulation, speakers tend to add up several linguistic items.

References Avanzi, M. (2009). La prosodie des verbes parenthétiques en français parlé. Linx [online]. http://journals.openedition.org/linx/1344. https://doi.org/10. 4000/linx.1344. Celle, A. (2009). The intersubjective function of modal adverbs: A contrastive English-French study of adverbials in journalistic discourse. Languages in Contrast, 9 (1), 23–36. Dehé, N. (2010). Parentheticals. In L. Cummings (Ed.), The Routledge pragmatics encyclopedia (pp. 307–308). London and New York: Routledge. Del Saz Rubio, M. M. (2007). English discourse markers of reformulation. Bern: Peter Lang.

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Fløttum, K., Dahl, T., & Kinn, T. (2006). Academic voices across languages and disciplines. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. GÒmez-Jordana Ferary, S. (2015). Dans la famille des comme on dit, qui dit quoi? Polyphonie et médiativité chez comme qui dirait, comme disait l’autre, comme tu dis. Langue Française, 186 (2) (Dire et ses marqueurs), 65–86. Kahane, S., & Pietrandrea, P. (2009). Les parenthétiques comme ‘Unités Illocutoires Associées’. Une perspective macrosyntaxique. Linx [online]. https:// doi.org/10.4000/linx.1334. Kahane, S., & Pietrandrea, P. (2012). La typologie des entassements en français. Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française – CMLF 2012. SHS Web of Conferences. 1809–1828. Ranger, G. (2018). Discourse markers: An enunciative approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rossari, C. (1997). Les opérations de reformulation : analyse du processus et des marques dans une perspective contrastive français-italien (Deuxième édition). Bern: Peter Lang. Rowley-Jolivet, E., & Carter-Thomas, S. (2014). Citation practices of expert French writers of English: Issues of attribution and stance. In A. Lyda & K. Warchal (Eds.), Occupying niches: Interculturality, cross-culturality and aculturality in academic research (pp. 17–34.) Cham: Springer. Schneider, S. (2007). Reduced parenthetical clauses as mitigators: A corpus study of spoken French, Italian and Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Reference of the Corpora TenTen, available on line via SketchEngine. https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/.

Index

A

Affiliation 77, 78, 81, 100–102, 106, 175–180, 195, 197–200, 205–207, 210, 212, 213, 220, 225 Approximation 57, 116, 121–125, 142, 162 Avertive 74, 185, 186, 188–191, 194, 211, 212, 220, 221

181, 189, 192, 203, 205–207, 210–212, 218, 219 Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) 39, 63–65, 86, 96, 109, 110, 146, 148–150, 192, 225, 226 Connective 6, 7, 14, 15, 18, 27, 38

D C

Comment clause 4, 11, 12, 25, 38, 54, 80, 111, 150, 151 Commitment 3, 8, 9, 29–34, 37, 38, 49, 51–53, 55, 57, 58, 60–62, 78, 81, 86, 95–97, 100, 102, 109, 112, 115, 116, 118–120, 124, 137, 142, 144, 147, 157, 160–165, 168, 175, 177,

Dire 25–27, 32, 34, 35, 37–40, 49–51, 54, 75, 80, 125, 132, 153, 197, 208

E

“énonciation” 2, 5, 8, 16–18, 27, 33, 38, 59, 60, 87, 218 Epistemic 9, 20, 29, 30, 65, 70, 86, 96, 100, 109, 120, 121, 134,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 L. Lansari, A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24896-3

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Index

151, 188, 192–194, 198, 206, 210, 212, 213 Expressive 13, 39, 66, 149, 150 Expressivity 65, 149, 226 Extra-clausal 54, 150, 151

175, 178–181, 183, 188–190, 199–201, 210 Pragmaticalisation 2, 10–15, 25, 26, 33, 50, 60, 62, 63, 68, 79, 81, 102, 131, 161, 166, 175, 177, 204, 207, 211, 212, 217, 219, 220

G

Grammaticalisation 10–15, 26, 34, 68, 190 M

Metalinguistic 27, 28, 33, 35–37, 39, 51, 53, 75, 76, 81, 95, 97–101, 112, 115, 116, 118, 120–125, 127, 128, 132, 133, 144, 145, 148, 155, 157, 159–161, 165, 167, 175–178, 181, 184, 186, 189, 190, 194, 197, 200, 204, 207, 210, 212, 218, 220, 221 Mitigation 8, 9, 12, 38, 116, 119, 120, 124, 130, 141, 147, 152, 162 “Modalisation” 28, 29 P

Parenthetical 4, 9, 11–14, 38, 54, 69, 80, 84, 85, 109, 111, 126, 150–154, 156, 162, 168, 209, 219 Position 4, 5, 15, 26, 30, 38, 54, 55, 59–63, 71, 82–84, 95, 96, 102, 105–107, 111, 118, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131, 133–135, 152, 153, 159, 161, 163,

R

Reformulation 21, 22, 56, 76, 139–144, 158, 176, 185–190, 195, 212, 217, 220–225 Regulation 19, 20, 22, 24, 28, 33, 57, 58, 62, 95, 102, 111, 119, 128, 137, 181, 218 Repair 7, 20–22, 55, 56, 76, 87, 140

S

Say 25, 32, 35, 37, 40, 49–52, 54, 75, 80, 115, 125, 130, 153, 175, 197, 208 Scope 1, 10, 14, 15, 54, 62, 68, 82, 83, 88, 95, 96, 102–106, 108, 118, 125, 128–131, 135, 149, 156–158, 168, 180, 181, 206, 208–210

T

Topic shifting 51, 77, 78, 81, 84, 101, 102, 175–179, 195, 197–200, 203, 204, 206, 207, 210, 212 Turn-taking 5, 7, 20, 84, 102, 107, 134, 179, 180, 199, 200