Word order in the light of pragmatics
During the new four-year period beginning in 2023, the Pragmatics team will be working on a new project focusing on word order.
The question of word order, which lies at the intersection of syntax, textual linguistics and pragmatics, has important implications for the effects produced by texts and discourse in context. The question requires moving away from a purely structural view of utterances to take into account not only their topological component (at each point in the utterance there are âplacesâ or âzonesâ that carry meaning), but also their temporal component (at each point in discourse, there is a âbeforeâ and an âafterâ, as well as a certain distance between syntactically linked words).
We will focus on the contextual study of linguistic facts that are subject to free variation â rather than lexical and syntactic constraints, which have already been well studied. Variation involves pragmatic choices and effects in terms of expressiveness â a concept that overlaps with word order, which could be studied in greater depth: as an indexical phenomenon, expressed rather than signified, expressiveness can relate to the informational structure and arrangement of groups. The challenge would be to articulate expressiveness and syntax by positing that expressiveness is not expressed but shown through particular linguistic forms and syntactic constructions: beyond the lexicon, expressiveness is linked to the structure of the sentence.
The phenomena concerned will therefore include, for French, certain postpositions of the subject, certain antepositions of verb complements, topicalisation/focalisation structures, and finally the position of appositives, circumstantials and, more broadly, all detached phrases (adjuncts). Some of these variations are often considered deviations from a canonical structural order; we prefer to see them as a regular product of the language system, but correlated with other constraints and effects.
In particular, we examine the following questions:
- The relationship between word order and informational structure, with regard to their pragmatic implications in context.
- The relationship between word order and the genre of texts, their pragmatic aims and, more broadly, their context, particularly from a stylistic perspective.
- The cognitive effects of word order on real-time reading.
- Another fundamental element at the pragmatic/syntactic interface, prosody plays a major role in the ordering of phrases â and vice versa.
This project will involve interaction with the Logometry team, particularly in the context of thesis supervision, as well as with the Language and Cognition team.
Current or planned achievements:
Symposium âDoes word order have style?â, October 2024; issue of Français moderne on word order; psycholinguistic experiment on the relationship between word order and emotions (Neuromod, BCL (L&C and Pragmatics teams)); symposium on translation and word order.