The grammar of dialogue

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter reconsiders the discursive contribution of the Romance illocutionary complementizer identified here as dialogic que, which is traditionally understood to introduce a ‘speech act’ causal clause. On the basis of a range of syntactic tests for various clause-combining operations (viz. clausal complementation, co-ordination, adverbial subordination, and adjunction) in addition to diachronic and comparative evidence, it is argued that dialogic que constructions are syntactically autonomous utterances which serve primarily to build discourse coherence between the complementizer construction and a salient linguistic antecedent or non-linguistic stimulus. On this view, the complementizer’s insertion enables the speaker to implement an act of grammatically configured ostension, akin to an act of declarative pointing, beyond the utterance it introduces. The role of silence is held to be formally significant, such that an obligatory prosodic break licenses a clause-initial expletive utterance topic whose null status ensures the continuity of the utterance context configuration.