« Ce n’est pas très beau ce que vous avez dit ! » The activation of resonance in French parliamentary debates

Autor: Elisabeth Zima, Geert Brône, Kurt Feyaerts, Paul Sambre
Jazyk: English<br />French
Rok vydání: 2009
Předmět:
Zdroj: Discours, Vol 4 (2009)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1963-1723
DOI: 10.4000/discours.7337
Popis: Speakers who engage in the joint activity of a conversation tend to align their utterances with those of their interlocutors by reusing, reinterpreting, hence playing with co-present linguistic material. One dimension of alignment is the activation of resonance, as recently developed within the model of ‘dialogic syntax’ (Du Bois, 2001). When speakers establish cross-turn parallelisms in the form of structural mapping relations, they engage with the form of other speakers’ utterances and activate resonance. The present paper focuses on resonance activation in one particular discourse genre: dialogic sequences evolving around interruptive comments in French parliamentary debates. In line with recent observations within the cognitive-functional context of dialogic syntax (Du Bois, 2001; Sakita, 2006; Zima et al, submitted) and psycholinguistic research on interactive alignment (Pickering & Garrod, 2004, 2006), we demonstrate that resonance can be activated both through explicit repetition of linguistic form and implicit echoing of semantic-pragmatic meaning. With regard to the specific discourse genre of parliamentary debates, we argue that parallelisms at all levels of linguistic organization are witti(ng)ly exploited to serve dissociative pragmatic purposes whereby socio-political positions and power relations are negotiated.
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