Introduction: Linguistic marking of the expected vs. unexpected in English and French

In written texts as well as spoken language, some referential values (or linguistic representations) are clearly identified as salient, unexpected, counter-expected, or defined as controversial and associated with a modality of inter-subjective discordance.

The notions of expectedness and unexpectedness imply a cognitive process whereby a past or current situation is revisited and elaborated on with respect to an expectation. The two notions are obviously closely linked but it actually seems easier to try and define the unexpected than the expected. Unexpectedness entails a process of comparison with respect to a reference notion. When one represents an event, a state of affairs, or a situation as unexpected, one also construes (or points at) another (expected) state of affairs taken as a benchmark relative to which it is qualified as concordant or discordant.

Linguistically, the expected can then be viewed in at least two opposite ways:

• • as a prospective representation, projected or predicted from a linguistic source (whether it be a previous predication in context or a subjective origin); or

• • as a benchmark representation for the evaluation of another one as unexpected or counter-expected, in a retrospective, a posteriori dynamic.

In the second configuration (the expected pointed to as a retrospective benchmark), the expected meaning can be retrieved from common ground knowledge, notional semantic features, or even from a third-term implicit semantic zone which is activated as relevant “online” in the linguistic process of meaning construction.

How, then, can we, in the use of languages, set up intermediate/parallel referential spaces (whether explicit or implicit), which serve as counterpoints for these unexpected representations? What is the nature of these semantic zones and what are the linguistic parameters involved in their construal and the elaboration/deviation of their content? How do we account for these semantic “re-routing” processes in linguistics? How to give a unified account of such linguistic processes as opposition and restriction (My brother who lives in England is bald), negation (I’m not your mother), argumentative or controversial reassertion (I do love you), negotiation of meaning, semantic forking, counter orientation (He’s a cop but he isn’t a bastard), etc.?

In all occurrences of these phenomena, at least three questions should be asked:

1. a. What exactly is expected or unexpected within these semantic representations (the actual validation of the predication; the modality of this validation; its location relative to time, space and speakers)?

2. b. To whom is the semantic representation considered unexpected or expected?

3. c. What are the different markers and constructions which instruct these operations and how do these operations interact?

The present bilingual issue addresses these three questions, with a view to providing a better understanding of the linguistic mapping and construal of expected vs. unexpected meaning in English and French. The seven studies presented here adopt an interface linguistic approach to these phenomena, based on authentic corpora. In this issue, the study of the linguistic marking of the expected vs. unexpected in English and French is clarified by means of closely related cognitive and pragmatic-based theoretical approaches to formal linguistics that are widely used by linguists in France: Antoine Culioli’s Théorie des Opérations Enonciatives et Prédicatives (see in particular Culioli 1991 and 1995), Oswald Ducrot and Jean-Claude Anscombre’s pragmatic theory of argumentation in language (Anscombre and Ducrot 1983), and Gustave Guillaume’s Psychomechanics of language (Guillaume 1988, 1991). These theoretical frameworks provide us with interesting tools for the analysis of the dynamic process of meaning construction in language use at the interface between prosody, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (see also Sekali and Trévise 2012).

This collection of articles is organized along a dynamic that starts with the analysis of these phenomena through intra-predicative determination (auxiliaries of reassertion or modality, tenses and aspects, adjectival prefixation) in the first five articles, to move on to inter-predicative modalization in complex constructions with the use of the French connectives et and quitte à in the two final contributions.

The first article, by Graham Ranger, addresses the issue of the construal of unexpected or counter-expected...