Contenu du sommaire : Descriptions du français parlé. Hommage à Claire Blanche-Benveniste

This article focuses on parenthetical formulas constructed with the verb dire and their discourse functions in spoken scientific discourse. As part of a more extensive study on the phraseology in spoken scientific discourse, our objective is to demonstrate the specificity of the genre of oral scientific presentations as a distinct register, more particularly by a comparison with the register of interview interactions. The results show that the genre of oral scientific presentations involves a specific distribution of dire-related formulas, with some functions being overrepresented. In this respect, the genre of oral scientific presentations is found to differ from other oral registers.

The present article investigates reporting formats in French with three quotatives: être là (‹to be there›), faire (à quelqu'un) (‹to do (to somebody)›), and se dire (‹to say to oneself›). These quotatives “introduce” almost exclusively direct quotation, which can take various shapes: sounds, complete clauses, and/or body movements. Pioneer research on French spoken language does not agree on the syntactic status of quotes: While Blanche-Benveniste (1988) argues for direct quotes being grammatically “without form”, de Cornulier (1978) does not exclude their status as complement. Investigating 12h of video recordings of everyday talk, this article illustrates that, in the case of direct reported speech/thought, the integration of bodily conduct into a grammar of spoken language may be useful. Drawing on Interactional Linguistics, I illustrate that être là, faire (à quelqu'un) and se dire are functionally distributed in interaction.

This article investigates independent if-clauses (if you have someone available) used as requests in emergency calls to the police. These structures have been grammatically described as free conditionals (a “complete” structure would be [if-X, (then) Y]) in which the subordinate clause is not followed by a main clause; they can hence be interpreted as pertaining to insubordination. Our analysis focuses on the functional dimension of independent if-clauses. We document that, by producing an if-request, the citizen indexes his own reduced deontic authority and offers himself possible reasons for a non-granting of the request by the call-operator, who can precisely deny the existence of the sine qua non conditions mentioned in the if-clause. The study demonstrates how an interactional approach can deepen our understanding of the functional motivations of insubordination.

This article presents a study of the active/passive alternation in spoken French using a quantitative, multifactorial and probabilistic approach. Three corpora from the orféo project were used (Debaisieux & Benzitoun 2020). A sample of 400 utterances (200 active and 200 passive) was extracted and annotated, and date were then analyzed with a mixed-effects logistic regression. A predictive model of the alternation between active and passive is constructed. It shows the effect of multiple constraints on construction choice: end-weight constraint, harmonic coding constraint, effects of verbal semantics and priming. Those factors are also involved in written French (da Cunha & Abeillé 2020) and English active/passive alternation, bringing evidence for a unified description of the alternation across languages and genres.

The paper deals with où- (‹where›) relatives in contemporary spoken French. Their analysis confirms that locative relatives are widely represented. However, a minority of our examples present difficulties of analysis: The grammatical link between the SN and the verb of the relative is complex –or impossible– to establish. We propose to consider that these atypical structures establish a discursive –rather than syntactic– relationship between the SN and the subsequent part, which can be described on the basis of certain semantic values such as characterization, specification or definition.