La construction présentative clivée dans la gestion des tours de parole: Le cas des interactions adulte – enfant

The purpose of this contribution is to study a syntactic construction, the presentational ya-cleft construction (il y a un cygne qu'a mordu les fesses à mon grand-papa\ 'there's a swan which bit my grand-father in the buttock\'), from an interactional linguistics background (Ford, 2004; Helasvuo, 2004; Ochs et al., 1996; Ono & Thompson, 1996) inspired by conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, 1974). Our analyses bear on interactions between adults and children, with or without Specific Language Impairment (Leonard, 2000). It is mostly the informational properties of this syntactic construction that have been studied (Lambrecht, 1986, 1988). Interactional Linguistics suggests that grammar and linguistic units are shaped step by step through the turn exchange and that these units detain functionalities in conversation. Little has been said about the functionalities of presentational ya-cleft construction in conversation. Our analysis, taking into account temporality and prosody, has shown that the first part of this construction permits to expand the speaker's turn, projecting the final part of a compound TCU (cf. Lerner, 1991, 1996). The study of young children's data with or without language impairment underlines the online configuration of grammar in interaction (Auer, 1996) and illustrates how this kind of compound UCT furnishes possibilities of scaffolding (Bruner, 1983) by the adult speaker to the child.