Time and Emergence in Grammar: Dislocation, Topicalization, and Hanging Topic in French Talk-in-Interaction by Simona Pekarek Doehler et al

Abstract

Reviews 283 phrase (verb placement, wh-questions, subject clefts), the verbal domain (transitivity, expression of location, motion event construal), and the nominal domain (adjective placement, gender assignment and concord). Well-grounded theoretically, these enlightening studies also help understand practical learning difficulties that students and teachers face in the classroom. Two such examples are Treffer-Daller and Tidball’s study on the acquisition of L2 French (a verb-framed language) by intermediate and advanced Anglophone learners (English being a satellite-framed language), focusing on path, manner, caused motion, and deictic verbs in elicited narratives, and Herschensohn and Arteaga’s investigation of the development of the determiner phrase in the L2 French of three advanced Anglophone learners, focusing on gender and nominal agreement features (absent in English) as well as definite and count features (present in English). The results highlight that the acquisition process undergoes complex interactions of transfer effects, including improperly acquired L1 features and L1 attrition. For instance, in Treffers-Daller and Tidball’s study, path was the only aspect of motion that intermediate learners were able to acquire. Such findings provide further insight into interlanguage as a tangled locus of language processing, far from a linear path from L1 to L2. In this constellation of French-focused L1/L2 language combinations, Frolova’s investigation on direct object omission in child Russian is decidedly not French-centric and seems at odds with the remaining studies. Furthermore, if the lack of a coordinated format across studies may be justified by diverse topics and investigative methods, some (even minimal) signposting would have benefited readers—graduate students and linguists interested in bilingualism and language interface phenomena. This volume is an excellent contribution relating these phenomena to critical questions such as the role of Universal Grammar, transfer, and the interaction between language acquisition and language change. Wake Forest University (NC) Stéphanie Pellet Pekarek Doehler, Simona, Elwys De Stefani, and Anne-Sylvie Horlacher. Time and Emergence in Grammar: Dislocation, Topicalization, and Hanging Topic in French Talk-in-Interaction. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2015. ISBN 978-90-2722638 -9. Pp. vii + 275. Everyday spoken French represents fertile ground for research on word order variation. This volume brings a Conversation Analytic (CA) perspective to several pragmatically marked word orders, including left dislocation (Marie, elle vient), right dislocation (elle vient, Marie), topicalization (ça je t’explique après), and hanging topics (le deuil, il faut un peu de temps). The insights are numerous and valuable, although other aspects of the work troubled this reviewer. These constructions—and dislocations in particular—have generated significant previous research, in both a discourse-functional and a generative perspective. To the former we owe important understandings about how dislocation (for example) signals certain information structural phenomena, such as topic shift. The latter has demonstrated how dislocated and topicalized constituents are affiliated structurally with clauses. This volume mostly casts aside such familiar reference points, focusing instead almost exclusively on interactional aspects, such as turn taking. Although this emphasis on interaction is to be expected in CA research, the reader is sometimes left with the (erroneous) impression that little previous work has been conducted on these topics.As an example, the authors’claim (14) that much previous research has privileged nonconversational or invented data is only partly true, ignoring significant studies on spontaneous spoken data by scholars like Lambrecht, Kerr, or Ashby. The authors convincingly demonstrate how left dislocation often occurs in overlap, allowing a participant to take the floor while demonstrating a link with the prior turn. Other interactional uses of left dislocation include delaying a dispreferred response and proffering an assessment. Right dislocations offer a means of proffering assessments or ending a turn (a point also made by Ashby, 1988). Speakers also use topicalization for assessments (ça je trouve bien), and the authors’ approach nicely captures the subtle difference in epistemic stance between je sais pas (indicating disagreement) and ça je sais pas (indicating genuine uncertainty).Whereas some previous studies would have suggested analyzing hanging topic as a subset of left dislocation, it is treated as a separate construction here; some functions that the authors note include listing, signaling contrast, and, in the case specifically of moi c’est [...], expressing personal points of...