Il n’y a pas à dire, un marqueur discursif du refus de contestation

Abstract

This work presents an analysis of the marker il n’y a pas à dire from different perspectives. First, we study its lexicographical treatment in nine dictionaries and its presence in our corpus of written examples of contemporary French. Then, we consider the morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic attributes that make it an epistemic marker of the indisputable. With il n’y a pas à dire speakers consider the enunciative content as something undeniable: by using this linguistic unit they protect themselves behind the knowledge that is supposed to be shared with the community they belong to, so a personal assertion can be presented as if it were something already accepted, to which there could be no objection. The commitment to the content modalised by il n’y a pas à dire is thus intensified, because the speakers, who are committed to what they are saying, want to be assertive in the eyes of their interlocutors in order to have this content admitted.