Abstract :
[en] Adverbial insubordination has been studied for many languages (e.g. Japanese (Horie 2018), Brazilian Portuguese (Bossaglia et al. 2017), French (Debaissieux et al. 2019), English (Lastres-López 2020) or Spanish (Schwenter 2016)), typically with a focus on conditional insubordination (Kaltenböck 2016, Sang 2021, Montolío 2001, Elvira-García et al. 2017). Hypothetical-comparative insubordinate clauses, by contrast, have not received much scholarly attention so far; Brinton’s (2014) study on the exclamatory use of As if! in English and Looji & Minnaert’s (2019) squib on Dutch alsof clauses form notable exceptions. This paper aims to further fill this gap by analysing independent hypothetical-comparative clauses, both in Spanish (como si) and French (comme si), as illustrated in (1) and (2) below.
(1) Sí. Entre los puros que se fuma… Bueno, no son puros, pero como si lo fueran.
(Val.Es.Co)
(2) – C’est ça… “Make America great Again”.
– Comme si en France nous n’avions pas vécu ça!
(Twitter)
Specifically, this paper takes an interactive perspective, seeking to understand how these constructions work in conversation. In (1), for example, the speaker uses the como si clause to invite their interlocutor to agree on the characterisation of an already-mentioned entity (‘These are not cigars, but let’s act as if they were’). In (2), by contrast, the comme si clause is used in an exclamative-sarcastic way involving polarity reversal; the speaker emphatically denies the propositional content encoded in the comme si clause (‘We surely did experience that in France!’).
In the process, this paper casts its nets wide. That is, in order to arrive at a detailed description of the discursive profiles of hypothetical-comparative insubordinate constructions like (1) and (2), it also includes canonical subordinate uses, and investigates which linguistic parameters characterise the insubordinate uses in comparison with their subordinate counterpart, both in French and Spanish. The analytical parameters used pertain to verbal inflection, syntax, semantics, conversational distribution and argumentation. To assess the degree of integration of comme si/como si clauses, for example, we will apply tests like proportionality (Debaissieux 2016) or clefting of the subordinate clause (Smessaert et al. 2005).
In accordance with its discursive-interactional research goals, this paper uses data from conversational, spoken corpora which also include audio recordings in order to enrich the analysis by adding prosody in a later stage of our research. More precisely, we selected the Val.Es.Co corpus (Pons 2019) for Spanish and the Valibel corpus (Dister et al. 2009) for French, and extracted an exhaustive sample for Spanish (16 hits) and a random 20-hit sample for French.
Some preliminary results include the following: (i) concerning the formal features, French and Spanish show differences in TAM marking, but do so across integrated and non-integrated clauses; and (ii) concerning the meanings of the non-integrated (thus, potentially insubordinated) clauses, in addition to the expected hypothetical-comparative meaning, comme si/como si clauses can also convey denial meaning (as in (2)) as well as concessive meanings or an invitation to a hic et nunc agreement for the sake of understanding between the two interlocutors (as in (1)).
References
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Twitter [@Thalie_silence]. (2021/01/06). Lol comme si en France nous n’avions pas vécu ça… [Tweet]. Twitter. https:/twitter.com/Thalie_silence/status/1346915008563834882
