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Tu sais ('you know') and t'sais ('y'know') in spoken French
Abstract
This article examines how French tu sais (you know') is used in everyday talk-in-interaction. In standard grammar, savoir ('to know') is described as a transitive verb. In spoken language, however, the complement of savoir in 2nd person singular is often not realised. Without its complement, tu sais can occur in various positions within a turn-constructional unit. Prior research has shown that the change in position entails a change in function. I adopt the approach of Interactional Linguistics to demonstrate that position is not the only relevant factor when it comes to tu sais. Analysing 43 French conversations, I show that the activities speakers are involved in and the degree of morpho-phonological reduction of tu sais may also be decisive factors for how tu sais contributes to the organization of social interaction. The non-reduced forms occur in activities where knowledge is negotiated whereas the reduced forms occur during assessment activities.
... Excerpt 6.7 'Little efort' (Mer2_2017-03-29) In the initiation of her turn (line 4), Cassandra frst deploys the pronoun ils ('they') but restarts to introduce the referent les suisses ('the Swiss'), thereby specifying that her upcoming talk refers to Swiss people (rather than French speakers in general). Inserting parenthetically tu sais ('you know'), she prefaces the assessment with a phatic element that draws attention to the upcoming talk and serves to enhance the chance of receiving afliative responses (Fiedler, 2020). The assessment proper is introduced with another pronominal reference: ils sont vraiment <nuls> ('they are really bad/stupid/ useless', lines 4-5). ...
This book presents unique insights into the development of L2 interactional competence through the lens of complaining, demonstrating how a closer study of complaining as a social activity can enhance our understanding of certain aspects of language learning with implications for future L2 research.
The volume employs a multimodal, longitudinal conversation analytic (CA) approach in its analysis of data from video-recorded interactions of several elementary and advanced L2 speakers of French as they build their interactional competence, understood as the ability to accomplish social actions and activities in the L2 in context-dependent and recipient-designed ways. Skogmyr Marian calls attention to three key dimensions of complaining in these conversations – its structural organization, the interactional resources people use when they complain, and how speakers’ shared interactional histories and changing social relationships affect complaint practices. The volume underscores the fundamentally multimodal, socially situated, and co-constructed nature of L2 interactional competence and the socialization processes involved in its development, indicating paths for new work on interactional competence and L2 research more broadly.
This book will be of appeal to students and scholars interested in second language acquisition, social interaction, and applied linguistics.
This article presents a longitudinal study of a second language (L2) French speaker’s (Aurelia) use of the construction tu vois (‘you see’) over 15 months. Research on first language (L1) French has shown that tu vois has been subject to grammaticalization, whereby the construction in spoken language frequently serves as a discourse marker rather than a complement-taking predicate construction expressing visual perception. Drawing on longitudinal Conversation Analysis, I qualitatively and quantitatively analyze Aurelia’s use of tu vois in relation to its turn position and interactional purposes. I document a similar change happening in Aurelia’s use of the construction over time as what has been observed in L1 French: While she initially deploys tu vois exclusively in its ‘literal’ sense of visual perception and with a complement (tu vois X, ‘you see X’), she eventually starts using it as a semantically bleached discourse marker for interaction-organizationaland interpersonal purposes. A few ‘hybrid’ cases demonstrate the progressive nature of this change, and indicate further similarities between L2 acquisition and L1 grammaticalization processes. I discuss possible reasons for the documented change and address implications of the findings for research on both the development of L2 grammar-for-interaction and language change more generally.
Linguists generally assume ‘clause’ to be a basic unit for the analysis of grammatical structure. Data from natural conversations, however, suggests that ‘clause’ may not be grammaticized to the same extent across languages. Understanding ‘clause’ as a predicate (plus any arguments, inferred or expressed), we can show that participants do indeed organize their talk around ‘clauses’. I argue that English-speaking participants in everyday interaction do indeed orient to clausal units as so defined, by building their turns around predicates, and that these turns do key interactional work. The data further reveal that these units must be understood as emergent structures, recurrent patterns in a given language that emerge from humans pursuing their ordinary interactional business of communicating information, needs, identities, attitudes, and desires.
This article examines speakers’ use of French chais pas (“dunno”) when they find that their sequence-initial turn has not been responded to by their recipient (roughly: Speaker A: Maybe they’re doing a master’s degree; Speaker B: [no response]; Speaker A: Dunno). Two interactional workings are documented in this precise sequential location: Speakers use chais pas either for withdrawing their just-produced sequence-initial action, thereby canceling the relevance of a response or, on the contrary, for pursuing response while relaxing the preference for a precise type of response. Collection-based analysis shows that these uses differ in their embodied delivery, implementing distinct interactional workings with distinct sequential consequentialities. The findings add to our understanding of how grammar and the body interface in the course of the real-time production of turns and actions and provide evidence for the online malleability of action projection. Data are in French with English translations.
This paper examines the French epistemic marker je sais [I know] in a ten-hour video-recorded corpus of public and TV debates. A statistical survey reveals only a dozen tokens, which appears to be a low frequency both in comparison with other expressions such as on sait [one/you/we know] or je sais pas [I don’t know] and considering the interactional and argumentative properties of debates, as identified by previous research. Bringing together insights from Interactional Linguistics, Enunciative Linguistics and Argumentation Theory, the paper scrutinizes the enunciative and argumentative unfolding of the turn in which je sais operates. The analysis highlights the polyfunctional dimension of the resource, which cannot be reduced to the self-attribution of a state of knowledge.
Many scholars of language have accepted a view of grammar as a clearly delineated and internally coherent structure which is best understood as a self-contained system. The contributors to this volume propose a very different way of approaching and understanding grammar, taking it as part of a broader range of systems which underlie the organisation of social life and emphasising its role in the use of language in everyday interaction and cognition. Taking as their starting-point the position that the very integrity of grammar is bound up with its place in the larger schemes of the organisation of human conduct, particularly with social interaction, their essays explore a rich variety of linkages between interaction and grammar.
Within the general framework of agreement on a state of affairs, the matter of the terms of agreement can remain: determining whose view is the more significant or more authoritative with respect to the matter at hand. In this paper we focus on this issue as it is played out in assessment sequences. We examine four practices through which a second speaker can index the independence of an agreeing assessment from that of a first speaker, and in this way can qualify the agreement. We argue that these practices reduce the responsiveness of the second assessment to the first; in this way they resist any claim to epistemic authority that may be indexed by the first speaker in “going first” in assessing some state of affairs.
This is an overview of ongoing or fashionable grammaticalization processes in different grammatical domains of German at the end of the 20th century, with a glance at some related grammatical changes.
This article considers the role of grammatical form in the construction of social action, focusing on turns that either assert or request information. It is argued that the epistemic status of a speaker consistently takes precedence over a turn's morphosyntactically displayed epistemic stance in the constitution of the action a turn is implementing. Insofar as asserting or requesting information is a fundamental underlying feature of many classes of social action, consideration of the (relative) epistemic statuses of the speaker and hearer are a fundamental and unavoidable element in the construction of social action. A range of examples illustrate patterns of convergence and divergence in the relation between epistemic status and epistemic stance.
Through stories, tellers communicate their stance toward what they are reporting. Story recipients rely on different interactional resources to display alignment with the telling activity and affiliation with the teller's stance. In this article, I examine the communication resources participants to tellings rely on to manage displays of alignment and affiliation during the telling. The primary finding is that whereas vocal continuers simply align with the activity in progress, nods also claim access to the teller's stance toward the events (whether directly or indirectly). In mid-telling, when a recipient nods, she or he claims to have access to the teller's stance toward the event being reported, which in turn conveys preliminary affiliation with the teller's position and that the story is on track toward preferred uptake at story completion. Thus, the concepts of structural alignment and social affiliation are separate interactional issues and are managed by different response tokens in the mid-telling sequential environment.
Giving a compliment involves offering a positive assessment of an attribute, action, or accomplishment for which the recipient is seen to be responsible. In responding to compliments, recipients are subject to multiple, conflicting constraints. Recipients may accept the compliment as a “gift” with a “thank you” and/or they may agree or disagree with the assessment. Quite regularly recipients do not simply accept compliments. Yet either agreeing or disagreeing with a prior compliment poses problems: If recipients agree, they are praising themselves, which is a sanctionable action. If recipients disagree, they fail to acknowledge the compliment as a gift and engender a disagreement sequence. Responses to compliments illustrate the complexities inherent in this sequential environment. The conflicting constraints and complexities as well as the various ways of responding to compliments are analyzed.
This article navigates the findings of conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, and related multimodal studies to summarize what we know about the grammar-body interface. It shows how grammar is fitted to sequences and trajectories of embodied activities, as well as deployed interchangeably with bodily displays, resulting in truly multimodal patterns that emerge in real time. These findings problematize both the paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures documented in verbal-only linguistics. They call for a reconceptualization of grammar as an assembly of routinized methods for the organization of vocal conduct, capable of incorporating aspects of participants’ bodily behavior. Data are in Estonian, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Swedish.
This paper examines the interrelatedness of grammar and social interaction in relation to speakers’ use of the construction je sais pas ‘I don’t know’ in French talk-in-interaction. Based on qualitative and quantitative evidence, the study documents an interconnection between the syntactic and morphophonological properties of the construction, its epistemic meaning, its placement within turn and sequence, and its interactional functioning, specifically elaborating on its use in responses to questions. Syntactically and morphophonologically full forms tend to be used as epistemic disclaimers while reduced forms tend to be discourse marker-like. The latter occur in various sequential environments in mid-turn position, accomplishing interactional purposes such as hedging, floor-holding or indexing approximation. By contrast, in turn-initial and turn-final position, they occur predominantly in responses to questions, and are specifically implicated in the sequential organization of turns and actions: In turn-initial position, they project a non-fitted response; in turn-final position they function as turn-exit devices at a moment when a responsive action has not reached conditional relevance. Results show the grammaticization of je sais pas as an interaction-organizational device that cannot be reduced to the role of epistemic hedge or stance-marker, but is profoundly implicated in the sequential organization of turns and actions.
Si les particules sont le plus souvent décrites - légitimement - à partir d'une approche pragmatique, se contenter de cette approche, c'est les transformer en outils de dimension exclusivement pragmatique, spécialisés notamment dans la gestion de l'interaction et ayant des effets interactionnels variés, alors que leur rôle me semble déborder fréquemment ce cadre. C'est en particulier le cas pour les particules d'origine propositionnelle tu vois/vous voyez (cf. Détrie 2010a) et tu sais / vous savez. Mon objectif est de montrer que la particule interpersonnelle tu sais, qu'on cantonne habituellement à un rôle de gestion de l'interaction, travaille l'accordage intersubjectif et l'alignement cognitif des colocuteurs. Pour ce faire, je pars du sens en langue de la forme verbale, et j'envisage la particule selon un continuum sémantique (dont les deux pôles extrêmes sont l'actualisation d'un sens plénier de tu sais et sa pragmaticalisation achevée), tout en mettant l'accent sur le fait que la particule participe à la fois de et à la construction/projection de la relation interpersonnelle (1.). Je m'interroge ensuite sur le type de savoir mis en scène par cette particule et les positionnements énonciativo-cognitifs qu'elle met en place (2.). Je questionne enfin le format énonciatif induit par tu sais, et j'en propose une modélisation en termes de mode de textualisation (3.). / Even if most often and quite legitimately discourse markers are described from a pragmatic standpoint, it would be mistaken to limit them exclusively to being pragmatic tools, specialised in particular in interaction management with varied interaction effects since their role frequently transgresses this framework. And indeed this is the case for the propositional discourse markers you see (cf. Détrie 2010) and you know. This paper aims to demonstrate that the interpersonal marker you know, which is usually confined to an interaction management role also plays a part in the intersubjective tuning and the cognitive meeting point between interactive speakers. First we place this marker within the semantic continuum of the verbal form you know, running from its full actualisation to its completion as a pragmatic tool while at the same time emphasizing that the marker partakes both in the construction and in the projection of interpersonal relationship (1.). Then we analyse the type of knowledge introduced by this marker and the cognitive position achieved by it (2.). Finally we question the utterance format brought about by you know, and we suggest a shaping of it in terms of wording pattern (3.).
This book essentially argues for the importance of word frequency as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure. In other words, the roles of words and other linguistic phenomena such as morphology, phonology, and syntax are highly influenced by low, medium, or high frequency with which they occur. The book includes three decades of influential research in one thematic source. It provides an introductory overview that traces the development of thinking on this important subject. The discussion covers word frequency in lexical diffusion, morphophonemics, lexical and morphological conditioning of alternations using Spanish verbs as example, rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense, morphological classes as natural categories, regular morphology and lexicon, sequentiality as the basis of constituent structure, and mechanisms of change in grammaticization.
RÉSUMÉ
L'objectif de cet article est de montrer comment le marqueur parenthétique tu vois s'est pragmaticalisé au cours des siècles. Afin de déterminer s'il existe une corrélation entre l'émergence de contextes syntaxiques et l'apparition de sens nouveaux pour ce marqueur, nous avons adopté une méthode d'analyse, en diachronie, de données de corpus pseudo-orales. Après avoir mis en exergue les résultats d'analyse en termes de déplacement sémantique et de complexification syntaxique, l'article montre in fine en quoi le recours à la grammaticalisation semble insuffisant pour expliquer l'évolution des parenthétiques et propose d'inscrire ce processus dans la perspective plus large du changement linguistique.
This article provides a detailed study of the differences between compliment responses collected with two different data collection procedures: naturally occurring data analysed through conversation analytic (CA) methodology, and elicited data collected via a discourse completion task (DCT). The DCT was designed to evoke the same discourse context and preceding cotext observed in the naturally occurring data. The article demonstrates that these data collection procedures do not always yield data that speak equally well to given research questions. It is argued that recording naturally occurring talk-in-interaction enables the researcher to study how language is organized and realized in natural settings, whereas responses from data elicitation procedures such as DCTs indirectly reflect the sum of prior experience with language. Additionally, the article discusses advantages and disadvantages of data collection procedures including questionnaires, recall protocols, role play, field observation, and recordings of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction. The article concludes by discussing the feasibility of generalizing findings generated from the aforementioned data-collection instruments.
▪ Abstract Grammaticalization—the transformation of lexical items and phrases into grammatical forms—has been the focus of considerable study. Two chief directions can be identified. The first involves etymology and the taxonomy of possible changes in language, in which semantic and cognitive accounts of words and categories of words are considered to explain the changes. The second involves the discourse contexts within which grammaticalization occurs. Some researchers have questioned the standard idea of a stable synchronic a priori grammar in which linguistic structure is distinct from discourse, and have sought to replace this with the idea of “emergent grammar” in which repetitions of various kinds in discourse lead to perpetual structuration.
Using a conversation analytic (CA) methodology, this study focuses on the preference organization of compliment sequences in German. The paper compares German and American compliment responses given among families and friends. The data show that while rejections and turns containing certain agreement and disagreement features are constructed similarly in German and American English, it is in agreement sequences that the two languages differ. It is suggested that in such sequences, cross-cultural communication can become problematic. I will then present one such example in which a nonnative speaker of English transferred the format of a German compliment response into American English, resulting in communication problems. Finally, I will discuss the implications of these findings for cross-cultural communication, and suggest the incorporation of pragmatics into foreign and second language teaching.
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