Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 60(2): 101-106, 2015
Introduction
Linguistic marking of the expected vs.
unexpected in English and French
MARTINE SEKALI
Universite Paris Ouest Nanterre, EA CREA-GReG
ANNE TREVISE
Universite Paris Ouest Nanterre, MoDyCo
In written texts as well as spoken language, some referential values (or linguistic
representations) are clearly identified as salient, unexpected, counter-expected, or
defined as controversial and associated with a modality of inter-subjective discordance.
The notions of expectedness and unexpectedness imply a cognitive process
whereby a past or current situation is revisited and elaborated on with respect to
an expectation. The two notions are obviously closely linked but it actually seems
easier to try and define the unexpected than the expected. Unexpectedness entails a
process of comparison with respect to a reference notion. When one represents an
event, a state of affairs, or a situation as unexpected, one also construes (or points
at) another (expected) state of affairs taken as a benchmark relative to which it is
qualified as concordant or discordant.
Linguistically, the expected can then be viewed in at least two opposite ways:
. • as a prospective representation, projected or predicted from a linguistic source
(whether it be a previous predication in context or a subjective origin); or
• as a benchmark representation for the evaluation of another one as unexpected
or counter-expected, in a retrospective, a posteriori dynamic.
In the second configuration (the expected pointed to as a retrospective benchmark),
the expected meaning can be retrieved from common ground knowledge, notional
semantic features, or even from a third-term implicit semantic zone which is activated
as relevant "online" in the linguistic process of meaning construction.
How, then, can we, in the use of languages, set up intermediate/parallel referential spaces (whether explicit or implicit), which serve as counterpoints for these
unexpected representations? What is the nature of these semantic zones and what
are the linguistic parameters involved in their construal and the elaboration/deviation
of their content? How do we account for these semantic "re-routing" processes in
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linguistics? How to give a unified account of such linguistic processes as opposition
and restriction (My brother who lives in England is bald), negation (I'm not your
mother), argumentative or controversial reassertion (7 do love you), negotiation of
meaning, semantic forking, counter orientation (He's a cop but he isn 't a bastard),
etc.?
In all occurrences of these phenomena, at least three questions should be asked:
a. What exactly is expected or unexpected within these semantic representations
(the actual validation of the predication; the modality of this validation; its
location relative to time, space and speakers)?
b. To whom is the semantic representation considered unexpected or expected?
c. What are the different markers and constructions which instruct these operations and how do these operations interact?
The present bilingual issue addresses these three questions, with a view to providing a better understanding of the linguistic mapping and construal of expected vs.
unexpected meaning in English and French. The seven studies presented here adopt
an interface linguistic approach to these phenomena, based on authentic corpora.
In this issue, the study of the linguistic marking of the expected vs. unexpected in
English and French is clarified by means of closely related cognitive and pragmaticbased theoretical approaches to formal linguistics that are widely used by linguists in
France: Antoine Culioli's Theorie des Operations Enonciatives et Predicatives (see
in particular Culioli 1991 and 1995), Oswald Ducrot and Jean-Claude Anscombre's
pragmatic theory of argumentation in language (Anscombre and Ducrot 1983), and
Gustave Guillaume's Psychomechanics of language (Guillaume 1988, 1991). These
theoretical frameworks provide us with interesting tools for the analysis of the dynamic process of meaning construction in language use at the interface between
prosody, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (see also Sekali and Trevise 2012).
This collection of articles is organized along a dynamic that starts with the
analysis of these phenomena through intra-predicative determination (auxiliaries of
reassertion or modality, tenses and aspects, adjectival prefixation) in the first five articles, to move on to inter-predicative modalization in complex constructions with
the use of the French connectives et and quitte a in the two final contributions.
The first article, by Graham Ranger, addresses the issue of the construal of
unexpected or counter-expected meaning in English with the use of the so called
"emphatic" or "contradictory" do auxiliary in dialogic affirmative contexts (/ do like
him; They may be extremely rare but they do exist). Ruling out the idea that do might
be a meaningless structural tool, Ranger considers the auxiliary as a full-fledged
linguistic operator and proposes a schematic operational template for the auxiliary,
which may provide a unified account of all its uses. The author explores both dialogal and monologal contexts of occurrences of affirmative S + do + predicate,
in spoken and written corpora, taking into account contextual prosodic and grammatical marking. Ranger shows that "contradictory" do, although often considered
prototypical, actually represents only one of the possible configurations. Other values of do in affirmative contexts are retrieved, including quasi-exclamative uses (You
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INTRODUCTION
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do talk a lot of shit sometimes, John; They do smell very nice!), non-polemical use in
dialogue (Yes, he does look marvellous, doesn 't he?), or gnomic confirmation (Accidents do happen; Remember first impressions do count). Ranger offers fined-grained
analyses of the corpus as evidence for his claim that the construal of these various
interpretations do not belong to do alone but are the result of complex constructions:
the interaction of a core operation marked by the auxiliary do with specific (and
categorized) contextual parameters. Ranger thus argues that affirmative do marks
explicit speaker endorsement of the predication where non-auxiliaried affirmative
utterances do not. Variation in its interpretations is explained and modelled by taking
into account other contextual markers which define a grounded (or "preconstructed")
position on the predication, as well as the speaker's stance (opposition or alignment)
with respect to other subjective instances: mainly the speaker himself, the co-speaker,
or a generic doxa.
The second article, by Susan Moore and Olivier Polge, also explores the intrapredicative expression of the unexpected through a study of English adjectives and
participles prefixed by un-, where un- refers to a value that is complementary to the
expected value of the base. The corpus used is The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar
Wilde, as well as two of its translations into French, and two audio versions read
by native speakers of English. Moore and Polge here adopt an original method by
linking the syntactico-semantic features of the adjective/participle (predicative vs.
attributive function; gradable vs. ungradable), to their prosodic characteristics in the
audio versions (relative duration, intensity, and pitch of the prefix and the base) as
well as to their translations, the translations serving as a basis for the analysis of the
various linguistic processes at work in the expression of the expected or "otherness".
Two main modes of expression of the unexpected are retrieved: a dual opposition
between the expected and effective values, with participles and some adjectives, and
a gradient between the two values, with adjectives. The article sheds an interesting
light on the role of stress and intonation as traces of linguistic operations interacting
with syntactic and discursive parameters in the construction of unexpected meaning.
Moore and Polge's analysis of English prefixed adjectives is followed by Yves
Bardiere's article on English verbal determination and its contribution to the construal of unexpected linguistic representations. The author here addresses the issue
of the interpretative processes involved in the treatment of ambiguity, subjective
discordance, and chronological dislocation in polyphonic narratives and discourse.
Bardiere uses the theoretical tools provided by Guillaume's psychomechanic linguistics (Guillaume 1965,1988,1991) to analyse the linguistic clues/markers responsible
for the unexpected re-routing of temporal and subjective landmarks. The author exploits representative data taken from Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and other literary
sources to make a detailed analysis of the way English tenses, aspects, and modal
auxiliaries interact in the elaboration of a complex and moving (re)organization of
events and subjective perspectives. Bardiere's contribution concludes on the crucial
distinction (and sometimes discrepancy) between experience of the world and linguistic representation and sheds substantial light on the way the verbal determination
system both creates and helps the reader to process the gap between the two.
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CJL/RCL 60(2), 2015
The following two articles also consider the topic of expected/unexpected meaning as it is construed by English modals and pseudo-modals, focusing on the retrieval
of distinctive operational profiles for must, have to, and should. Pauline Serpault thus
claims that the pseudo-modal have to is not simply an alternative form of must in
past contexts but that it displays specific features retrievable from its composite aspect (the localizer have and the prospective operator to). Thus the entity denoted by
the grammatical subject is shown to be expected to actualize the process denoted
by the predicate it is associated with. The author examines occurrences of the composite pseudo-modal in large corpora and demonstrates that the generally accepted
dichotomy of "objective" vs. "subjective" necessity, where "have to denies the involvement of the speaker" (Palmer 1990:11), is in fact due to the grounded value of
the expectedness, which turns it into a necessity whose modal/subjective source is
no longer an issue, and therefore irrelevant. Serpault thus claims that have to can be
analysed as a "preconstructed" must on a paradigmatic cline rather than in a clearcut dichotomy. The article brings in new insights on the issue of the grammatical
construal of expectedness and its evaluation as granted or salient.
The fifth article, by Valerie Bourdier, makes a nice transition between the former
three articles addressing adjectives and modals and the last two which bear on the
analysis of connectives in complex sentences. In this article, Bourdier examines the
interplay of English modal should, adjectives (jussive or emotional), and hypotactic markers in the expression of expected or unexpected representations, in common
sequences such as It is surprising that he should say that. The author shows that
although the deontic modality operated by should mostly expresses an expected scenario, it can also convey the unexpected in such hypotactic structures. Comparing this
configuration with its infinitival or assertive counterparts (It is important for him to
gollt is important that he gollt is important that he goes), Bourdier demonstrates that
they are not synonymous and argues that in the finite configuration with should, the
validation and non-validation of the content clause are considered together (whether
the predicative relation is actualized or not) and commented upon as discordant in
terms of expectedness from the speaker's viewpoint: the validation is evaluated as
expected as opposed to its non-validation, which is represented as counter-expected.
This double discordance (on the notional domain and in subjective endorsements)
cannot be construed with the other non-finite and finite configurations. This article is
an important contribution to our knowledge of the English modality system and its
complex interaction with semantic and syntactic parameters in context.
The following two articles in this issue examine the case of inter-predicative
construction of unexpectedness in French.
In the sixth article, Claude Guimier follows on from a previous study of the operational schema of the complex preposition quitte a (Guimier 2011) to show how this
locution also contributes to processing unexpected representations. Analyzing a large
corpus of French (the Frantext Corpus), Guimier shows that in the pattern P, quitte
a Q (J'aurais pu dire "out', quitte a me retracter ensuite; II eut envie de demander
sa route a un passant, quitte a ne pas la suivre), quitte a introduces a metalinguistic
exit, or solution, to a problematic state of affairs presented in P: although the process
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INTRODUCTION
105
in Q (or its consequences) is marked as incompatible with the process in P (or its expected inferences), and therefore its validation is construed as unexpected regarding
P, Q is formatted by the complex preposition as one of the arguments in favour of the
subject's (or the speaker's) decision to validate P. In this article, Guimier accounts
for the extraordinary argumentative process at stake with quitte a, which in a same
movement highlights a discordant relation between P and Q and re-establishes Q as
an argument for P.
In the final article, Gilles Corminboeuf also deals with the inter-predicative
marking of the unexpected and examines the uses of the French coordinator et in
constructions which are interpreted as a denial of expectation, as in Vous etes devot
et vous vous emportez! These adversative constructions are characterized by the author as "unmarked"—contrary to constructions with mais, the adversative relation
with et is not included in the connective's profile and has to be inferred from the connected clauses — but they are syndetic, as opposed to asyndetic, juxtaposed clauses.
This article makes a significant contribution to the existing art as it evidences a
quantitatively prominent phenomenon which is rarely analyzed: the difference between asyndetic adversative constructions and syndetic adversative constructions
with et. The study also extends the usually written data of analysis to spoken corpora. The notion of expectedness is defined as a highly plausible prediction and
Corminboeuf introduces the concept of "clause projection" to explain pragmatic expectedness counteracted with et in a second clause. The author claims that talking
about an "adversative" et is inappropriate and proceeds to show that the counterexpectation effect derives from the iconic (and non necessarily symmetric) ordering
of the specific projecting features of the coordinates. In addition to that, drawing on
Anscombre's (2002) distinction between direct and indirect counter-argumentation,
Corminboeuf's analysis shows that unmarked direct counter-expected relations are
syndetic by default (coordinated with et), while unmarked indirect ones are for the
vast majority asyndetic and juxtaposed.
To conclude, the collection of articles included in this issue should be of value
to all linguists interested in interface analyses of linguistic representations. We hope
that it moves us a step closer to understanding the complex multidimensional process
of meaning construction and that it will inspire further research and collaborations
on this fascinating topic.
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Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008413100026050