The Beauty of Chunks: Clefting and Dislocation in French Conversation

What is commonly called basic syntactic order (SVO word order) has been shown to occur very rarely in spoken discourse in French. Cleft structures (for example, in English, “it’s the icing she likes”) and left dislocation of a coreferent noun phrase (“cake, it’s a good thing”) are fronting devices that highlight significant parts of a message. This qualitative study of videorecorded conversations between native speakers of French identifies eight main categories of structures and their pragmatic functions, most of which are unexplained in textbooks. Suggestions are offered for teaching these important features of spoken language at all levels of instruction.