Super mais alors super intéressant! Reduplicative coordination constructions with an emphatic meaning in (spoken) French and Dutch French and Dutch share a construction in which an element X occurs in a reduplicative coordination pattern: [X mais alors X] (lit. 'X but then X') in French and [X maar dan ook X] (lit. 'X but then also X') in Dutch (for Dutch, see Hoeksema (2001) and Cappelle (2012)). In both languages, this pattern can be used to put emphasis on X: (1) je ne comprends pas les la W/ les Wallons mais alors pas-du-tout (Valibel) 'I do not understand the Walloons but then really not ' (2) wij hebben alles maar dan ook alles gedaan om die mensen goed te begeleiden (. ) (CGN, shortened) 'We have done everything but then also everything to guide these people appropriately' Since these patterns combine a fixed sequence (mais alors / maar dan ook) with a variable element X (a (universal) quantifier, a degree adverb, an adjective, etc.) and since their emphatic meaning is not (entirely) predictable from their components, they seem to act like constructional idioms in the Construction Grammar sense (Croft & Cruse 2004, Goldberg 2006, Hoffmann and Trousdale 2013). These constructions should then clearly be distinguished from other instances of the sequences mais alors and maar dan ook with a true compositional (contrastive + consequential) meaning ('but then (also)'): (3) Pour éviter de souffrir, on ne doit pas aimer, mais alors on souffre de ne pas aimer (web) 'To avoid suffering, one should not love, but then one suffers from the lack of love' The parallel between the French construction and its Dutch counterpart, however, is not as perfect as it at first sight might seem to be. For instance, the construction [X mais alors X] cannot only be used to emphasize X, but can also focus on a specific subtype of X, as in (4). In this case, the sequence mais alors cannot be translated by Dutch maar dan ook, but corresponds to maar dan wel (lit. 'but then well'). (4) lui il a: édifié aussi une ville mais alors ...