The pragmatic and textual dimensions of French in Côte d'Ivoire: functions of ke in colloquial conversation

Abstract

By focusing on discourse markers, this article aims to show that the appropriation of French in Côte d'Ivoire is manifested from a pragmatic-textual perspective. It contributes to the extension of the tradition of work already done on French in this country. I argue that ke as a morpheme borrowed from African languages is a marker of intensification with different communicative values in Ivorian French. My analysis is based on a corpus of spontaneous oral data and on interactional approaches developed in the framework of contact linguistics.