Project

Markers of agreement in present-day French

Code
bof/baf/4y/2024/01/857
Duration
01 January 2024 → 31 December 2025
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund
Research disciplines
  • Humanities and the arts
    • Pragmatics
    • Conversation analysis
Keywords
agreement discourse markers French constructions
 
Project description

In dialogue, speakers have a wide range of expressions at their disposal to express their affiliation or agreement with their interlocutor, such as oui ‘yes’, d’accord ‘alright’ or c’est vrai ‘that’s true’ in French. The inventory is actually much larger than these well-known prototypes, and ecological data in a variety of interactive settings reveals what is potentially a very productive paradigm. Yet, few studies have tackled this question for French (see e.g. Tobback & Lauwers 2014) or have only focused on individual markers (e.g. Lefeuvre 2021). This project first seeks to draw up an exhaustive, corpus-based inventory of markers of agreement in spoken present-day French and to structure it along various syntactic and semantic-pragmatic dimensions. Then, an analysis in terms of productivity and semantic potential of these markers will shed light on their recruitment process, in order to identify the necessary features of expressions of agreement and to even predict future pragmatic developments. Perception and attitudes towards these markers are another avenue of this project, as sociolinguistic studies on pragmatic expressions in French remain scarce to this day.