A contrastive corpus study of a semantically neutral French evidential marker: tu dis/vous dites [P] [you say [P]] and its relationship with agreement and disagreement

Using a 20-hour contrastive corpus documenting political debates (public as well on TV) and work meetings, the paper examines functions distributions of specific French evidential: tu dis/vous dites [P] [you say [P]] (n = 108). Reported speech markers have been studied extensively across various languages communicative contexts. However, situation where speakers report their addressee's remains relatively unexplored. Although verb dire [say] is semantically neutral in terms polarity (i.e. it does not express either agreement or disagreement with reported content [P]), analysis shows that expectations related to discourse genres play crucial role pragmatic enrichment: depending genre speaker, frequently works stance-taking marker oriented towards regarding [P]. In besides tokens used for intersubjective objectives (e.g. repair sequences), are massively agreement. debates, especially TV by moderator frame disagreement, debaters disagree each other.