Prefabricated surprise sentences: towards the elaboration of semantic-syntactic and pragma-semantic patterns reflecting regularities

This article discusses the modelling of prefabricated expressions of interactions, these ready-made sentences such as tu rigoles? ‘you’re kidding?’ or c’est fou! ‘it’s amazing!’ used in language interactions. The study, which focuses on expressing surprise, aims to show that it is possible to identify numerous regularities with these prefabricated expressions. Drawing on a constructional approach, we propose a model with two levels: a) the pragma-semantic level, which is independent of the lexical and syntactic levels (for example, an evocationof a joke to express surprise: are you kidding?/ is this a joke?) and b) a semantic-syntactic level, accounting for the lexical and syntactic variation of a productive paradigm (e.g. [Pro2 Vjoke] corresponding to tu plaisantes?/tu rigoles? ‘you’re kidding?/you’re joking?’. This model helps explain the semantic and pragmatic mechanisms at stake in theprefabricated expressions of interactions and also helps to account for the continuum along frozenness between expressions.