French

  • Evelyne BERGER (Université de Neuchâtel)
    L’accomplissement interactionnel de la racontabilité : une étude des ouvertures de récits
    2017, Vol. XXII-2, pp. 89-107

    This article explores storytelling practices in French ordinary conversations. While storytelling has been a prolific object of investigation across human and social sciences, our focus here is on the contribution of Conversation Analysis. This line of work has shown how storytellings are interactionnally produced through the speakers and recipients turn-by-turn adjustments. After an overview of the main findings of CA research on storytelling, we present a study of story-openings. The study examines the use of informings as a resource for projecting a storytelling to various extents. The study shows that the tellworthiness of a story-to-be is interactionally established through the design features of the informing and the recipient’s verbal and non-verbal displays of alignment and affiliation.


  • François MANIEZ (Lyon 2)
    A comparative study of online French dictionaries
    2017, Vol. XXII-1, pp. 9-26

    After a brief reminder of the main features of lexicographic resources provided in electronic format, we review the main French online dictionaries, comparing the microstructure of their entries and their coverage of two types of neology: nouns ending in -ing that have been borrowed from English (e.g. dumping) and adjectives that express impossibility (e.g. insociable).


  • Cédric PATIN (Université de Lille)
    Does prosody play a role in the determination of scope? ‘Egalement’ as a case study
    2018, Vol. XXIII-1, pp. 89-102

    The goal of this study is to determine whether prosody contributes to the discrimination of meaning in sentences with French ‘également’, when it is used with the additive function of ‘also’, given the crucial role prosody plays in the use of additive particles in some other languages. In order to verify the role of prosody, we have run an experimental study based on a reading task: 20 native speakers were recorded while reading a set of contextualized sentences with ‘également’ placed in structurally ambiguous positions. The results show the presence of different types of prosodic correlates associated with ‘également’, but also that they are not exploited in a systematic way.


  • Cécile PETITJEAN (Université de Neuchâtel & Université de Lausanne)
    Current developments in Conversation Analysis and studies examining interactions in French
    2017, Vol. XXII-2, pp. 5-14

    In the introduction to this issue, we address current developments in Conversation Analysis, with special attention paid to the contributions emanating from studies on French data. We first offer a short overview of these developments and then present the contributions to the special issue, thereby identifying some of the challenges addressed by current conversation analytic work, such as how the analysis of social interaction can relate to burning social issues, or if and how Conversation Analysis can be combined with other research paradigms, both conceptually and methodologically.