Pragmatèmes au pays de la prosodie

Abstract

The presented text will touch on the issue too often neglected in studies of pragmatemes, namely the role of prosody in determining what is a pragmateme and what is not. First, the analyses of prosody and of its role in the determination and functioning of various linguistic phenomena (informational structure of the sentence, presupposition, relative propositions) are reviewed, then the definitions of pragmatems by I. Mel’čuk and X. Blanco with S. Mejri are presented, to move on, at the end, to analyse the role of prosody in the determination of the pragmatematical or non-pragmatematical status of constructions through analyses of cases of pragmatemes that should not be qualified in this way without precise indications on prosody. The point is that even if mistakes are made in the spelling or transcription, the actual pronunciation of the constructions in a concrete enunciation situation must be suitable for the construction in question to function as a pragmateme. It is a suitable intonation which, with the appropriate context, makes construction a pragmateme — the intonation is thus truly (co-)generating the meaning of the construction — otherwise the construction would have its literal meaning. This finding also invites us to make a detailed study, from this point of view, of as many of the expressions qualified as pragmatems as possible, and to include the decisive prosodic information in dictionary entries of this type of expression.