The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French

Abstract

Left detachment constructions (LDs) (e.g. <i>un buffet de campagne, c’est un meuble</i>) are examined in a corpus of informal spontaneous conversation between educated native speakers of French. The overwhelming majority of these constructions are shown to have a clearly pragmatic motivation. The author’s observations support a view of LD in French as a particular type of paratactic structure which should be seen primarily as a feature of unplanned discourse. The analysis partly builds on views expressed by Knud Lambrecht in an earlier contribution tot this series.