A crosslinguistic comparison of the production of utterances in discourse

Abstract

Functionalist theorists have proposed a number of decisions that a speaker has to make regarding the packaging of messages in response to the knowledge shared by the speaker and the listener in a discourse situation. The present study examined some procedures used by French and English speakers to implement message packaging during sentence formulation. The speech of French and English students talking informally about topics of interest to them was recorded, and hesitations were identified and located in the speech. According to the hesitation data, like English speakers, French speakers organised their thoughts into successive units having a variety of structural characterisations. Sentences, surface clauses, basic clauses and phrases were all found to be output units. In addition, French as well as English speakers output clauses containing new information more independently than clauses either containing presupposed information or satisfying an essential argument of the verb. French speakers also differed from English speakers in several ways. During articulation, phrases acted as more tightly integrated output units for French than for English speakers. French speakers also used different syntactic devices from English speakers for introducing and focussing on topics in the discourse. They did this by means other than the use of lexical subjects, such as left-detached topics and cleft sentences, supporting the hypothesis that spoken French has topic-comment structure, while English has subject-verb-object organisation. The crosslinguistic differences were argued to result largely from the distinct prosodic characteristics of the languages. The results were seen as providing new evidence for the similar and contrasting ways in which speakers of different languages respond to decisions about message packaging.