Fragmented adverbial clauses as resources for negotiating alignment: concessive repair patterns in French talk-in-interaction

Abstract

The study presented in this paper aims at investigating the French adverbial conjunction mais ‘but’/‘although’ by means of a recently compiled corpus of World French. The study will describe and analyze two types of turn-final mais used in concessive repair constructions which have not been described in research on French syntax so far. These two uses of concessive mais exhibit subtle differences in their syntactic make-up but also in their sequential behavior in interaction (other-initiated down-toning of an overstatement vs. self-initiated down-toning of the relevance of an argument). Both the constructional and the sequential characteristics of the two patterns with turn-final mais will be discussed against the backdrop of a cross-linguistic comparison with English but and Finnish mutta ‘but’, with regard to similarities and differences between the uses of this lexical item in different languages. Both the analysis of French mais and its comparison with its English and Finnish counterparts support the conclusion that fragmented adverbial clauses can be used as resources for negotiating alignment in talk-in-interaction.