A contrastive corpus study of a semantically neutral French evidential marker: tu dis/vous dites [P] [you say [P]] and its relationship with agreement and disagreement

Abstract

Using a 20-hour contrastive corpus documenting political debates (public debates as well as debates on TV) and work meetings, the paper examines the functions and distributions of a specific French evidential: tu dis/vous dites [P] [you say [P]] (n = 108). Reported speech markers have been studied extensively across various languages and communicative contexts. However, the situation where speakers report their addressee's speech remains relatively unexplored. Although the verb dire [say] is semantically neutral in terms of polarity (i.e. it does not express either agreement or disagreement with the reported content [P]), analysis of the corpus shows that expectations related to discourse genres play a crucial role in terms of pragmatic enrichment: depending on the genre and role of the speaker, tu dis/vous dites [P] [you say [P]] frequently works as a stance-taking marker that is either oriented towards agreement or disagreement regarding [P]. In work meetings, besides the neutral tokens used for intersubjective objectives (e.g. repair sequences), tokens are massively oriented towards agreement. In political debates, and especially TV debates, the marker is either used by the moderator to frame the disagreement, or by debaters to disagree with each other.