No abstract

Punctors constitute a class of markers that have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. The words we consider to be punctors share a number of structural and functional characteristics: they manifest prosodic assimilation to the preceding phrase; they are almost never preceded by a pause; they show a high degree of phonological reduction; and all punctors have lost their original meaning or function. From the analysis of twelve interviews sampled from the Sankoff-Cedergren corpus, we have isolated the following punctors: là ‘there’, tu sais, vous savez ‘you know’, n'est-ce pas ‘isn't it so’, hein ‘eh’, je veux dire ‘I mean to say’, moi ‘me’, osti ‘[communion] host’, vois-tu ‘do you see’, and il/elle dit, j'ai dit ‘he/she says’, ‘I said’ (used in reported discourse). Our main concern in this article is to present the distribution of punctors, within the sentence and within the discourse, and to suggest an explanation of some aspects of their conditioning in terms of the interaction of etymological, discursive, syntactic, and social constraints.

Reported utterances have often been analyzed with regard to their narrative function. While it is true that this narrative function applies to a large group of cases, we have observed that reported speech can ful®l other functions, which are incompatible with the properties of a narrative utterance. This study, based on spontaneous discourse, will focus on the non-narrative functions of reported speech, that is, the appreciative, the support and the authority functions. We will ®rst de®ne the semantico-pragmatic properties of these functions of reported speech, on the basis of examples that are univocal in their contexts. Next, we will turn to examples more complex, in which there seems to be a con¯ict between functions considered to be incompatible. Finally, we will present the results of a distributional analysis, relating the functions of reported speech to linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The results will lead us to propose hypotheses concerning the strategic diversi®cation of discourse behaviours by speakers.

Exemplification is considered to be a rhetorical procedure used to illustrate a point. In spoken discourse, we can attribute to it an argumentative and pragmatic character. In this study, the data base is constituted of utterances marked by exemplification particles (par exemple, comme, genre, style, mettons, and disons ‘for example’, ‘like’, ‘of the (…) kind’, ‘of the (…) variety’, ‘let's say’) extracted from two corpora of spoken French in Montréal. One goal is to describe the constraints which govern the choice of discourse variant and at the same time to get the deepest insights possible into the procedure that interrelates these constraints. The main objective is to observe to what extent we can have access to the characteristics of a complex rhetorical phenomenon by using sociolinguistic data.

Most of the Linguiste who have recently studied insuit recognise (more or less explicitly) that it cannot be dealt with in a strictly semantic fashion, as pragmatic factors are central to the issue (see for instance Fisher, 1995; Siblot 1995; Lagorgette 2002, 2003; Rosier et Ernotte 2001, etc.). This study focuses on the sociopragmatic, interactional dimension of insults. Our reflection covers on the one hand a very social point of view aiming at spelling out the perception of insults by speakers of Quebec French; our corpus shows that utterances containing either form "insulter" and "insultant" refer more often to actions than to words. On the other hand, a more pragmatic point of view is developed, showing how insulting fomns function within conversational contexts. The absence of an answer when axiological forms are used in family interactions (the items belonging therefore to an interzone between ritual and personal insults) leads to reconsider the status of such exchanges. We propose that it would be theoretically productive to think of insults as a zone within a continuum going from mockery to reproach and accusation (Laforest 2002), which would enable one to understand the different meanings associated by speakers to the feeling of "being insulted". A further advantage would be that threats (as perceived) as a social act could be measured on a scale of intentions rather than on that of vulgarity.