This monograph on left-dislocation (LD), right-dislocation (RD), topicalization (TOP) and hanging topics (HT) in French focuses on a number of constructions all of which involve peripheral constituents. The analysis is based on recorded discussions between a researcher and a group of participants on bilingualism in their everyday lives in the French-speaking part of Switzerland (15), and the interactional analysis crucially rests on concepts such as grammar-in-interaction, temporal unfolding of talk, turn-taking and sequential organization of actions.
The authors argue against the view that the linguistic phenomena at issue are pre-existing constructions, holding instead that there is a mutual relation between grammar and interaction. Structures of language are used as ‘resources for organizing and coordinating actions’ and, in turn, are ‘shaped in response to this organization’ (5); they play a role not only in the organization of information structure within the sentence (as is argued by discourse-functional analyses), but also in the organization of the participants’ actions, which they help make explicit. The main hypothesis is that ‘speakers orient selectively toward information structure and action organization, so that at times action organization may override issues of topic management, or more generally of the organization of informational contents’ (68).
Chapter 2 provides a detailed overview of discourse-functional approaches to the subject. Descriptive generalizations from previous literature are illustrated with examples found in the conversational corpus, and it is shown how an information-processing perspective differs from a conversation-analytic one. A useful synopsis is given for each construction. A noticeable omission is De Cat (Reference De Cat2007), which is the most recent monograph on dislocation in French, also based on a corpus of spontaneous production (besides elicitation experiments).
From an empirical point of view, the main interest of this volume lies in the fact that it complements existing discourse-functional analyses with detailed descriptions of the role played in conversation by LD (chapter 3), RD (chapter 4), TOP (chapter 5) and HT (chapter 6). The findings are illustrated by numerous corpus examples, which are discussed in great detail. Although the analyses of individual examples might sometimes feel a bit wordy, this is compensated by the fact that each chapter provides a concise summary of the findings. The volume also includes a chapter on hybrid forms (chapter 7) that are not amenable to unambiguous instances of LD, RD, TOP and HT, but supposedly emerge in grammar and illustrate that grammatical constructions are adapted to respond to the needs of the conversation as it unfolds.
The authors have definitely succeeded in presenting new and interesting empirical findings: they show that the constructions at hand have a wider array of functions and display more formal variation than assumed before, that these constructions come in two shapes, either as instantiations of a pre-existing pattern or as configurations that emerge ‘on the fly’ (160), and they sometimes even provide a new explanation for previously observed properties (49). Personally, I particularly like the hypothesis that ‘what speakers get accomplished in talk-in-interaction by means of LD [. . .] is not inherent in the construction but crucially hinges on its local sequential embeddedness in joint courses of action, as well as on co-occurring linguistic, prosodic and embodied means’ (131), and also the description of the way in which RD differs from LD. Another strong point in the analysis relates to HT. Not only do the authors confirm that all the constructions they found ‘set the frame within which the clause is understood’ and, hence, function as previously described in the literature, they also convincingly show that the ‘framing is not done by the extra-clausal constituent alone, but emerges out of the temporal unfolding’ of the talk (214).
Although the analysis is clearly data-driven and said to rest on rich data, the corpus is used for illustrative purposes only, which might be a disappointment for some readers. For instance, the authors say that they ‘identified all occurrences of LD, RD, TOP and HT in the main corpus’ (15), but they do not add how many instances were identified. Hence, the reader does not have any idea about the number of examples this study is based on. Similarly, the authors often comment on the frequency of a construction or function (e.g. ‘a most recurrent use of LD in our data relates to [. . .]’ (115), ‘is only found exceptionally in the data’ (161), ‘makes up the large majority of the occurrences we find in our data’ (182), ‘document the four most recurrent uses of HT found in our data’ (185), ‘LD [. . .] is much more frequent than RD’ (222), ‘the tendency of HT and TOP to occur as (semi-)fixed formats’ (247)). However, they do not provide a single explicit indication of the frequency of constructions and their functions, and this might be felt as a missed opportunity. Another question that could have been addressed is the potential influence of German on the French data, i.e. the specific realization of the four constructions, especially because the authors themselves argue that German uses other strategies than French for the management of interaction (18), and that dislocation is more frequent in French than in German (29).
Notwithstanding the criticisms above, the decision to study LD, RD, TOP and HT from an interactionist perspective is highly commendable, and will be attractive both to researchers with a discourse-functional (i.e. information structure) background and to conversationalists. As such, this volume serves as a testing ground for interactional linguistics, which has so far not often been applied to Romance languages.
