On the Emergent and Interactive Character of Grammatical Resources in Interaction: a Single-Case Analysis of a Left Dislocation in Spoken French

Abstract

This article examines the left dislocation in naturally-occurring French interaction from a sequential and interactional perspective. Drawing on the single case of an incomplete left dislocation, it shows that, whilst topic promotion, a jUnction generally advanced by the discourse functionalist literature, cannot be rejected for the case under consideration, a characterisation of this structure purely in terms of information structure underspecifies our understanding of what it is used to accomplished. The analysis shows that a sequential trajectory characterised by resistance contributes to the situated deployment of the left dislocation that is used to manage resistance and cross-cutting preference structures and to accomplish identity work and orient to disaffiliation and disagreement, to which the incompleteness of the turn is also sensitive. In this way, the analysis emphasises the emergent and interactive character of the left dislocation and calls into question a sentence topic understanding of the structure.