Super mais alors super intéressant! Reduplicative coordination constructions with an intensifying meaning in French and Dutch

Van Goethem, Kristel;Dugas, Edwige;Amiot, Dany;Cappelle, Bert;Tayalati, Fayssal;et.al.
(2013) Empirical approaches to multi-modality and to language variation (AFLiCo 5) — Location: Lille, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France (15.May.2013)

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  • Van Goethem, Kristelorcid-logoUCLouvain
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  • Dugas, EdwigeUniversité Lille 3
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  • Amiot, DanyUniversité Lille 3
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  • Cappelle, BertUniversité Lille 3
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  • Tayalati, FayssalUniversité Lille 3
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Abstract
Super mais alors super intéressant! Reduplicative coordination constructions with an emphatic meaning in (spoken) French and Dutch French and Dutch share a construction in which an element X occurs in a reduplicative coordination pattern: [X mais alors X] (lit. 'X but then X') in French and [X maar dan ook X] (lit. 'X but then also X') in Dutch (for Dutch, see Hoeksema (2001) and Cappelle (2012)). In both languages, this pattern can be used to put emphasis on X: (1) je ne comprends pas les la W/ les Wallons mais alors pas-du-tout (Valibel) 'I do not understand the Walloons but then really not ' (2) wij hebben alles maar dan ook alles gedaan om die mensen goed te begeleiden (... ) (CGN, shortened) 'We have done everything but then also everything to guide these people appropriately' Since these patterns combine a fixed sequence (mais alors / maar dan ook) with a variable element X (a (universal) quantifier, a degree adverb, an adjective, etc.) and since their emphatic meaning is not (entirely) predictable from their components, they seem to act like constructional idioms in the Construction Grammar sense (Croft & Cruse 2004, Goldberg 2006, Hoffmann and Trousdale 2013). These constructions should then clearly be distinguished from other instances of the sequences mais alors and maar dan ook with a true compositional (contrastive + consequential) meaning ('but then (also)'): (3) Pour éviter de souffrir, on ne doit pas aimer, mais alors on souffre de ne pas aimer (web) 'To avoid suffering, one should not love, but then one suffers from the lack of love' The parallel between the French construction and its Dutch counterpart, however, is not as perfect as it at first sight might seem to be. For instance, the construction [X mais alors X] cannot only be used to emphasize X, but can also focus on a specific subtype of X, as in (4). In this case, the sequence mais alors cannot be translated by Dutch maar dan ook, but corresponds to maar dan wel (lit. 'but then well'). (4) lui il a: édifié aussi une ville mais alors une ville d'acier (...) (Valibel) 'he also built a city, but then a city of steel' Hence, the question rises if in French, and possibly also in Dutch, different (sub)constructions should be distinguished, each with specific semantic-pragmatic effects. This question should not only be addressed at the semantic, but also at the formal level. Our corpus study, mainly based on the databases Valibel for spoken French and Corpus Gesproken Nederlands for spoken Dutch, indicates, for instance, that X1 and X2 are often not entirely identical (5) and that the (Dutch) construction allows prefixes to be separated from their stems (6). Moreover, since the correct interpretation of our corpus examples in many cases largely depends on the intonation pattern, we will also have a close look at the prosodical properties of the constructions. (5) euh j'étais très à l'aise mais alors vraiment à l' aise / (Valibel) 'I was very relaxed but then really relaxed' (6) ik vind 't zelf een beetje uh oer- maar dan ook een oerlelijk ding. (CGN) 'I think myself that it is rather err a super- but then also a super ugly thing' In sum, the present paper describes in more detail the extent to which the [X mais alors X] and the [X maar dan ook X] patterns are comparable and how they can be described from a constructional point of view, showing how they present a network of related yet different subconstructions each with their own syntactic, prosodic and semantic-pragmatic properties. References Cappelle, B. 2012. Alles- maar dan ook allesbehalve grammaticaal, of hele- maar dan ook helemaal niks mis mee? Over Taal 51(3), 66-67. Croft, W. & Cruse, D. A. 2004. Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldberg, A. 2006. Constructions at Work: the nature of generalization in language. Oxford University Press. Hoeksema, J. 2001. X maar dan ook echt X! : een geval van emfatische reduplicerende nevenschikking. Tabu 31:3/4. 119-140. Hoffmann, T. and G. Trousdale (eds.). 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corpora CGN (Corpus Gesproken Nederlands): http://lands.let.kun.nl/cgn/ Valibel: http://www.uclouvain.be/valibel-corpus.html
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Van Goethem, K., Dugas, E., Amiot, D., Cappelle, B., Lemmens, M., Patin, C., & Tayalati, F. (2013). Super mais alors super intéressant! Reduplicative coordination constructions with an intensifying meaning in French and Dutch. Empirical approaches to multi-modality and to language variation (AFLiCo 5), Lille, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/28873