Published: 2020-12-23

“Oh no, I do not speak English. I’m French!” A contribution to the typology of pragmatems

Ruth de Oliveira Logo ORCID

Abstract

This work presents and discusses the development of the hypothesis according to which clitic doubling (pronominal reduplication), as seen in the sentence “Je ne parle pas anglais moi. / I do not speak English [me]”, has the fundamental structural and pragmatic parameters of the pragmatem (R. D e O l i v e i r a, 2018). Structural, because it is a compositional construction but selected as a whole by the speaker to respond to a communication goal associated with a precise utterance situation (G. F l é c h o n et al., 2012); pragmatic, since this device is a means of acting on the interlocutive context, allowing the accomplishment of a certain number of specific acts (I. M e l’č u k, 2013). In this sense, we argue that, like the pragmatem, the devise called French clitic doubling simultaneously has the following three characteristics, it is (i) fixed, (ii) compositional, and (iii) associated with a specific utterance situation.

Citation rules

de Oliveira, R. (2020). “Oh no, I do not speak English. I’m French!” A contribution to the typology of pragmatems. Neophilologica, 32, 132–145. https://doi.org/10.31261/NEO.2020.32.07

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Vol. 32 (2020)
Published: 2020-12-23


ISSN: 0208-5550
eISSN: 2353-088X
Ikona DOI 10.31261/NEO

Publisher
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

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