Dutch 'laat staan' and French 'encore moins': Constructional effects

Cappelle, Bert [Université Lille 3] Amiot, Dany [Université Lille 3] Dugas, Edwige [Université Lille 3] Lemmens, Maarten [Université Lille 3] Patin, Cédric [Université Lille 3] Tayalati, Fayssal [Université Lille 3] Van Goethem, Kristel [UCL] et al.[show all]

Dutch laat staan and French encore moins: Constructional effects Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor’s (FKO, 1988) seminal paper on construction grammar, this paper explores various non-compositional effects of the commonest expressions corresponding to let alone in Dutch and French: laat staan (lit. ‘let stand’) and encore moins (lit. ‘still less’), respectively, the latter alternating with the expression encore plus (lit. ‘still more’) in affirmative contexts: (1) a. I can’t walk let alone run. → nl: laat staan; fr: encore moins b. I struggle to walk let alone run. → nl: laat staan; fr: encore plus Drawing extensively on data systematically gathered from corpora (CGN, DPC, GlossaNet, Linguee, Valibel), the web, and sound recordings, we show that these expressions exhibit language-specific idiosyncrasies and must be stored along with detailed knowledge about (i) the syntactic properties of their possible grammatical environments, (ii) the semantico-pragmatic (including information-structural) effects they trigger at clause level and (iii) the prosody of the constituent they occur in. Syntactically, laat staan is often followed by the complementizer dat (‘that’) in spoken Dutch, even when there is no subordinating conjunction in the first conjunct, which renders difficult its analysis (provided by FKO for let alone) as a kind of coordinating conjunction. We further found support for Verhagen and Foolen’s (2003) and Janssen and Van der Leek’s (2009) observation that the phrase/clause preceding laat staan need not be explicitly or even implicitly negative, a possibility which also exists for let alone. Regarding interpretation, we question FKO’s suggestion (1988: 519) that the context then should provide a proposition whose truth the speaker denies or whose level of informativeness the speaker disagrees with. Evidence for non-compositional semantics was also found for French (et) encore moins, specifically in cases where it is used after jamais (‘never’) and/or personne (‘nobody’) in the first conjunct: (2) Dans ma vie, je n’ai jamais attaqué personne, encore moins Pepe et encore moins hier (www) ‘I’ve never attacked anyone in my life, still less Grandpa, and still less yesterday’ Such logically incoherent but common examples can be understood as making use of a conventionalized rhetorical device expressing that a situation’s actualization is unimaginable, even in a counterfactual world. Moreover, encore moins may occur after a conjunct which contains a (merely) conceptually negative element, such as difficile ‘difficult’, rather than an explicit marker of negation: (3) Difficile à croire, encore moins à prouver! (www) (lit.) ‘Hard to believe, still less to prove!’ In such contexts, one would have reasonably expected encore plus. Apparently, encore moins gets extended by some language users as a negative polarity scalar operator, encroaching (à la Himmelmann 2004) on the usage domain of encore plus after syntactically positive but semantically negative contexts. We suggest this may partly be due to the higher relative frequency of encore moins compared to encore plus, as confirmed by their use as translation equivalents of let alone in Linguee (a 4:1 ratio). Prosodically, laat staan and (en)core moins have a L+H* contour and are expected to occur in distinct intonation patterns correlating with information structure. (500 words)   References Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay and Mary Catherine O’Connor. 1988. Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone. Language 64, 501–538. Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2004. Lexicalization and grammaticalization: Opposite or orthogonal? In Walter Bisang, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Björn Wieme (eds.), What Makes Grammaticalization?: A Look From Its Fringes And Its Components, pp. 21–42. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Janssen, Theo A.J.M. and Federike C. van der Leek. 2009. Laat staan in de negatieve en de positieve zin. In: E. Beijk, L. Colman, M. Göbel, F. Heyvaart, T. Schoonheim, R. Tempelaars, V. Waszink (eds.) Fons verborum: feestbundel voor prof. dr. A.M.F.J. (Fons) Moerdijk aangeboden door vrienden en collega’s bij zijn afscheid van het Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie, pp. 431–443. Leiden: Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie. Verhagen, Arie and Ad Foolen. 2003. Hoe kan een woord zijn negatieve lading nou verliezen, laat staan integendeel? Over betekenisverandering bij ontkennende woorden. In: Jan Stroop (ed.) Waar gaat het Nederlands naartoe? Panorama van een taal, pp. 308¬–319. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.