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(avec F. Gachet) "Moi, me moquer !" Une construction infinitive à valeur exclamative
Our paper presents an analysis of an exclamative construction made up of a disjunctive pronoun and an infinitive verb phrase, such as "Moi, me moquer !". We show how this interrogative structure is interpreted as an exclamation. Then we establish the construction’s polyphonic nature and implicit negative orientation ("Me, mock you !" means ‘I’m not laughing at all’). Finally, we compare our structure with the “Constructions” properties. We wonder whether there is an intrinsic link between its meaning and its form and whether its interpretation is rather compositional or inferential.
Exclamatives échoïques : rendement fonctionnel et réalisations prosodiques
Our paper presents a semantic and prosodic analysis of exclamative utterances such as « Moi, me railler de vous ? » in this excerpt of Molière’s Dom Juan : CHARLOTTE. – Monsieur, cela vous plaît à dire, et je ne sais pas si c’est pour vous railler de moi. DOM JUAN. – Moi, me railler de vous ? Dieu m’en garde ! Je vous aime trop pour cela, et c’est du fond du coeur que je vous parle. (Molière, Dom Juan, 1673) This structure, better known in English as « Mad Magazine sentence » (« What, me worry ? » ; see Akmajian 1984), is made of a disjunctive pronoun and an infinitive verb phrase. It is optionally followed by a refutative segment (« Dieu m’en garde ! » in the excerpt above). We show first that our structure consists in a syntactic pattern that can be realised in several ways. Our paper deals then with the pragmatic effects of the structure, its polyphonic nature, its negative orientation and its exclamative value. In the last part of the paper, we study prosodic properties of the structure when performed by stage actors. We attempt to relate the prosodic realisations of the structure with its pragmatic purposes. Our structure being very much used in theatre repertoire, our data come mostly from plays from French literature database Frantext.