Lexical and prosodic routinization in conceptional orality: conversational self-reformulation in French

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe present study investigates the functions and forms of conversational self-reformulation in spoken French. (Self-)Reformulations in general are a typical feature of unplanned and spontaneous conceptional orality (as opposed to conceptional distance; Koch and Oesterreicher, 1985). They exhibit retrospective modification of a reference expression, which is semantically equivalent in paraphrases and semantically different in corrections. The latter are therefore communicatively more problematic with regard to discourse intervention and turn-taking. As for the linguistic marking of self-reformulation, paraphrases are preferably introduced by lexically polyfunctional markers and prosodic deaccentuation, while corrections are marked by lexically monofunctional and prosodically overaccented structures. Since the accessibility to context-dependent forms is specifically related to conceptional orality, a more important linguistic marking of self-reformulation is hypothesized to occur in conceptional orality when compared to conceptional distance. The results of an empirical study contrasting two conceptionally different corpora suggest a generalization of paraphrastic markers in conceptional orality. This tendency is attributed to speaker-strategic routinization in which corrections are re-marked as paraphrases in order to avoid conversational intervention and, as a consequence, turn-taking. When taken over by other speakers, this routine may cause variation and, eventually, linguistic change.