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Description:
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While parentheticals attract constant attention, they very rarely
constitute the main subject of monographs. This book provides a
comprehensive account of reduced parenthetical clauses (RPCs) in three
Romance languages. Typical French RPCs are je crois, disons, je dirais, je
pense, je sais pas, and je trouve. The research draws on 22 corpora of
spoken French, Italian, and Spanish comprising a total amount of 3,975,500
words. Its results consist in a typology of the relevant expressions in the
three languages, in the understanding of their pragmatic function and of
the factors influencing their use, and in the description of their
syntactic and prosodic properties. Other findings are that RPCs are not
restricted to statements but also occur in questions and that belief verbs
are not as frequent as commonly assumed. Although the book is about Romance
parentheticals, its conclusions are relevant for other languages.
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