The syntactic and discursive status of c’est comme ça que (this is how) in spoken and
written French
Several recent studies devoted to French clefts involving a pronominal/adverbial morpheme such as pour ça (for
that), là (there), ainsi (like this), alors (then) and comme
ça (like this) demonstrate that these are likely to behave in two distinct ways, one of them being somewhat
“non-prototypical” in comparison with the most commonly described narrow focus clefts. The subject of our article is to deepen the
examination of c’est comme ça que sequences (lit: it is like this that,
“this is how”), since they have not yet received detailed attention as to their use in modern French. The
8,600,000 word corpus which was used indicates that such forms are considerably more frequent in spoken than in written data.
After recalling some of the major syntactic characteristics of clefts, we will suggest that two distinct types of c’est
comme ça que sequences must be identified: the first type corresponds to the most prototypical clefts endowed with a
“contrastive” effect related to the expression of manner; the second type, which will be described in greater detail, cannot be
viewed as a cleft but rather as a specific discourse connector, which speakers mostly use in narrative texts, in order to
introduce a consequence of the set of facts previously mentioned.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Topic of the study
- 1.2Data
- 2.Descriptive framework
- 2.1Cleft constructions as a specific “utterance-type”
- 2.2Characterizing the governed elements of a Verb-Phrase
- 3.
C’est comme ca que: Two different types
- 3.1Prototypical clefts
- 3.2A non-prototypical type
- 3.2.1
Comme ça is not governed by a verb: Review of some paradigmatic criteria
- 3.2.2
C’est comme ça que: A formulaic expression
- 3.2.3A few remarks about the sequence placed after que
- 3.2.4Synthesis: C’est comme ça que as a discourse connector
- 3.3Distribution of c’est comme ça que in the corpus
- 4.
C’est comme ça que as a discourse connector
- 4.1Earlier studies
- 4.2Three discursive effects
- 4.2.1Introduction of a consequence
- 4.2.2Introduction of a salient fact
- 4.2.3Introduction of an illustration
- 5.Concluding remarks
- Notes
-
References