Navigation – Plan du site

Call for papers for a thematic issue: The discourse uses of autonomous verbless predications

Coordinators: Eva Havu & Florence Lefeuvre

The question of verbless sentences has led to many scientific publications, particularly concerning such languages as Arabic, Hebrew, Hungarian and Russian (See Eid 1991, Hengeveld 1992; Nordlinger & Sadler 2006), where verbless copular clauses are standard. For languages where verbal copular clauses are standard, such as German, English, French, Italian etc., this question has been partially addressed or only with regard to the question of ellipsis (see Barton 1990; Greenbaum and al. 1985; Merchant 2004).

Recently however typological research on verbless clauses and utterances has been conducted which does not consider that these verbless constructions are elliptical (Behr & Quintin 1996 for German, Lefeuvre 1999 for French, Delorme 2004 for English); several syntactic and semantic questions have already been closely examined (Behr & Lefeuvre in press, Behr & Lefeuvre 2005, Behr & al. 2004, Lefeuvre (ed .) 2004).

The objective of this thematic issue is to bring to the fore new reflections about the discourse functions of autonomous verbless predications. This question is partially linked to that of the definition of minimal units of discourse (cf. Degand & Simon 2005). Analyses of this type may be carried out on all types of language.

This issue will cover the following questions:

  • Can minimal discourse unities be verbless? How can they be defined? Do verbless utterances have a predicative status in discourse?

  • How can autonomous verbless utterances be analysed? Are they elliptic? What other analyses are possible?

  • In what types of text do verbless predications appear? What functions do they have in these texts? Is there a difference between primary and secondary verbless predications?

  • How do verbless predications structure discourse or ensure its cohesion?

  • Why do texts sometimes prefer structures without verbs to structures with verbs?

  • What about isolated utterances, such as notices? Why do they mainly adopt structures without verbs?

All corpus types are accepted: oral or written corpora, journalistic texts, literature, scientific articles, etc, as well as corpora of isolated utterances such as notices or advertisements.

Submission guidelines

Articles may be written in French, English or in bilingual form. They must comply with the journal's standards, as set out in the instructions to authors. Articles must include an abstract of 1500 characters (including spaces) in French and in English, together with 5 to 8 key words, also in both languages. Where appropriate, the authors should indicate the linguistic markers and/or languages studied which will be indexed separately. Articles should not usually exceed 60000 characters (punctuation and spaces included). For more details, see the submission information and the instructions for authors on the journal website: http://discours.revues.org/

Deadlines

January 10th 2009: submission of abstracts
September 10th 2009: submission of articles for evaluation
October 30th 2009: notification of acceptance (after two anonymous reviews).
December 18th 2009: submission of final versions

Bibliographie

Barton, E.,1990. Nonsentential Constituents, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Behr, I., Quintin, H., 1996. Verblose Sätze im Deutschen, Tübingen: Stauffenburg.

Behr, I., François, J., Lacheret, A., Lefeuvre, F., 2004., Aux Marges de la prédication, Syntaxe et Sémantique, 6. Introduction :7-12.

Behr, I. & Lefeuvre, F., forthcoming.Les énoncés averbaux autonomes entre grammaire et discours, Paris : Ophrys.

Behr, I. & Lefeuvre, F., 2005. La configuration GN GN: comment reconnaître le prédicat?. In I; Behr. J ; François (eds.), Les Constituants prédicatifs et la diversité des langues. Mémoires de la Société linguistique de Paris, tome XIV, Leuven: Peeters: 199-21.

Cresti, E., 1998. Gli enunciati nominali. In M.T. Navarro (ed.), Atti del IV° Convegno internazionale SILFI, (Madrid 27-29 giugno 1996), Pisa, Cesati: 171-191.

Degand, L., Simon, A. C., 2005. Minimal Discourse Units: Can we define them, and why should we? In M. Aurnague, M. Bras, A. Le Draoulec, L. Vieu (eds.), Proceedings of SEM-05. Connectors, discourse framing and discourse structure: from corpus-based and experimental analyses to discourse theories, Biarritz, 14-15 novembre 2005: 65-74.

Delorme, B. 2004. Les énoncés nominaux dans la fiction contemporaine de langue anglaise, implications sémantiques et pragmatiques de la prédication averbale, thèse de doctorat, Paris 4-Sorbonne.

Eid, M., 1991. Verbless Sentences in Arabic and Hebrew, In B. Comrie, M. Eid (eds), Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics III. Papers from the Third Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 31-61.

Greenbaum, S., Quirk, R., Leech, G., Svartvik, J., 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English language, London, Longman.

Havu, E., Pierrard, M. 2007. Prédication seconde et type de discours: les adjoints participiaux dans les médias oraux, In M. Broth, M. Forsgren, C. Noren, F. Sullet-Nylander (eds), Le Français parlé des médias, Actes du colloque de Stockholm, 8-12 juin 2005: 273-288.

Hengeveld, K., 1992. Non-verbal prédication: theory, typology, diachrony. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Lefeuvre, F., 2004 (ed.). La phrase averbale: délimitations et caractéristiques, Verbum, XXVI, 4 (Préface: 265-268).

Lefeuvre, F. 1999. La Phrase averbale en français, Paris, l’Harmattan.

Merchant, J., 2004. Fragments and Ellipsis, Linguistics and Philosophy, 27-6: 661-738.

Nordlinger, R. & Sadler, L., 2006. Verbless Clauses: revealing the structure within (http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~louisa/newpapers/nordlinger-sadler-final.pdf) retrieved 2008.11.10.