Les fonctions communicatives des reprises propositionnelles dans un corpus de discussions à visée philosophique

Abstract

Our study is based on a corpus of ‘philosophical discussions' held in a school context and involving French speakers. The analysis of grammatical subject forms shows, firstly, that in pupils' speech acts the canonical nominal form (e.g. les animaux) is much rarer than the ‘reinforced' form (e.g. les animaux ils). Secondly, that the simple nominal form appears mostly in quoted utterances whereas the reinforced nominal form (as well as the pronominal one) is used in original speech acts. We relate this observation to our hypothesis that the reinforced nominal form marks the focalized status of a clause, compared to the simple nominal form which marks a non-focalized status. In the repetitions/reformulations offered by the teachers, both forms appear; the choice of one or the other is shown to be related to the functional-communicative type of the quoted utterance: ‘relaunch' (focalized) or ‘acknowledgement' (non-focalized).