Subjective syntax. Fronted and non-fronted French de nouveau ('again')

While the left periphery of French sentences has been associated with pragmatic functions such as focalization and topicalization, a unified account of fronting phenomena is still lacking. This study examines the fronting of the iterative adverbial de nouveau (‘again’), a construction whose discourse-pragmatic contribution has received little attention. We argue that fronting of de nouveau functions as a syntactic strategy for epistemic reinforcement, strengthening the speaker’s authority over a proposition rather than introducing new information. A quantitative corpus analysis of 21st-century French shows that fronted de nouveau occurs significantly more often in subjective contexts characterized by asymmetric access to evidence between speaker and addressee. By contrast, fronting is comparatively rare in contexts where a person’s or object’s repeated state is publicly observable, suggesting that epistemic reinforcement is interactionally risky in epistemically symmetric environments. A follow-up perception experiment confirms this interpretation: while fronting has little effect on perceived speaker stance in subjective contexts, it leads to more negative evaluations of the utterance in objective contexts. Taken together, the findings indicate that speakers front de nouveau in subjective contexts where such reinforcement is interactionally safe, and that listeners infer corrective or reproachful meanings in objective contexts. We propose that fronting of de nouveau belongs to a broader class of constructions that reinforce the truth of a proposition under conditions of epistemic asymmetry, thereby indexing speaker authority rather than contributing to information structure.