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Discourse Markers
Abstract
IntroductionThe Meaning of DMsDMs and CoherenceNotes
... In light of the above linguistic and empirical considerations (Blakemore, 2005;Iten, 1998Iten, , 2005König & Siemund, 2000;Taboada & Gómez-González, 2012;Xu et al., 2015), we predict that if the processing of concessive meaning is cognitively more demanding than the processing of causal meaning, increased reading time (e.g., more total reading time) should be observed in processing congruent concessive sentences than processing congruent causal sentences, regardless of whether the causal relation was conveyed through an explicit linguistic device or not. Moreover, additional evidence for the dissociation could be provided by the incongruence effect (i.e., incongruent sentence vs. congruent sentence), because the pragmatic incongruence should not be treated identically in concessive and causal relations. ...
... Theoretically, the above-mentioned dissociation between processing concessive versus causal meanings is in line with the fine-grained semantic-pragmatic analysis of discourse makers such as the relevance-theoretic account in Blakemore (2005) and Iten (1998Iten ( , 2005, in which causal and concessive conjunctions encode different pragmatic implications. Although causal conjunctions encode conceptual meaning-it can form part of the communicated message-a concessive conjunction does not encode conceptual meaning. ...
This study investigates the influence of causal and concessive relations on discourse coherence in Chinese by means of eye-movement as well as self-paced reading techniques. We use the sentential structure like “NPHUMAN moved from place A to place B, {because (因为 yinwei) / although (尽管 jinguan) / no conjunction} + pronoun (he/she) + verb (e.g., like) + there (nali)… + NP”. The eye-movement data (Exp. 1) recorded from regions of interest consistently showed that the processing of concessive meaning is much slower than the processing of causal meaning, irrespective of whether the causal relation is explicitly coded through a causal marker (i.e., yinwei [because]) or not. In particular, while sentences containing pragmatic anomalies were processed more slowly than sentences containing no pragmatic anomalies in causal structures, there was no such distinction in concessive structure, indicating that the processing of concessive relation can override that of pragmatic incongruence. Moreover, while the initial place was reread more in concessive compared to causal structures in region one (e.g., place A), there was no difference between them in region two (e.g., place B). The results from self-paced reading (Exp. 2) showed that the difficulties observed from processing concessive compared to causal relations were not caused by the difference in pronoun resolution. These findings suggest that processing concessive meaning is cognitively more demanding than processing causal meaning, a conclusion that is also supported by a fine-grained linguistic, i.e. conceptual and pragmatic, analysis of causal and concessive relations.
... Pour leur part, Dostie, et al., (2007) définissent les MD comme étant des mots principalement employés à l'oral, n'appartenant pas aux catégories grammaticales traditionnelles, et apportant plus d'indices aux interlocuteurs. Selon Schourup, 1999 : 236 ;Brinton, 2017 : 11 ;Blakemore 2006 : 221, les MD regroupent des formes relatives à différentes classes grammaticales, qui pourraient être des adverbes, des locutions adverbiales, des adjectifs, des pronoms, des impératifs, des locutions verbales, … Cette catégorie fonctionnellepragmatique englobe ainsi une variété de classes grammaticales. ...
... An expression with procedural meaning specifies how the segment it introduces is to be interpreted relative to the prior. (Fraser, 1999, p. 944) Se distinguen unidades con significado conceptual, que permiten crear representaciones mentales de un mundo posible, y unidades con significado de procesamiento, 17 Especialmente en las versiones de Blakemore (1987Blakemore ( , 1992Blakemore ( , 2004. El texto básico es el volumen de Sperber y Wilson (1986). ...
El marcador discursivo es un concepto de gran vitalidad en la lingüística moderna y este artículo aboga por la inclusión del griego antiguo en el debate e investigación sobre estas unidades. Se trata, además, de un concepto más amplio que el tradicional de partícula, cuya aplicación a la lingüística griega puede arrojar luz sobre la naturaleza y funcionamiento de esta, así como de otros fenómenos discursivos. Con ese propósito, se abordan aquí algunos de los problemas categoriales de la clase de los marcadores (en cuanto a su forma, sintaxis, semántica, etc.) y se contextualizan en la casuística particular del griego antiguo. Por último, se ofrece un resumen de las principales líneas de investigación que están en marcha.
... For discourse markers (DMs), we find a plethora of terms and a variety of roles in the literature (for an overview see Blakemore 2006), they are described as discourse connectives (see Schourup 1999), discourse markers (Schiffrin 1987, Blakemore 2002, and discourse particles (Aijmer et al. 2006), to name a few. However, DMs are usually accepted to function in one of the following ways: they can (1) express logical relations between units of discourse, creating cohesion (Fraser 1999), or (2) work on different 'planes of discourse,' thus maintaining its coherence, relating not only discourse units to each other but also the attitudes and personal perspectives of the speakers' to the discourse itself (Schiffrin 1987), or (3) guide the process of pragmatic interpretation in utterance comprehension (Blakemore 2002). ...
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This paper investigates the translation and interpretation of the Hungarian discourse marker vajon in the English to Hungarian translation direction. The study seeks to address issues around the translation of discourse markers, and to examine the functions of utterances in which vajon occurs, applying the so-called translation method on data collected from European Parliamentary speeches. The present paper also investigates the techniques of omission and addition as translation solutions, as these could offer insights into the function of discourse markers, as well as the process of translation. Although the small scale of this study does not support broad generalizations, it is found that vajon is without corresponding source forms. This means that the use of vajon is linked to the functions of vajon-utterances in the source texts, and not to individual linguistic forms. The functions of vajon are given a relevance-theoretic account.
... See the extensive lists inFraser (1998Fraser ( : 301, 1999Fraser ( : 932, 2006b,Blakemore (2006) or Fischer (2014), for instance. ...
The intention of this paper is to extend the empirical perspective on the functional acquisition of lexical pragmatic marking in learner English. While previous analyses have mostly focused on speech, and have considered a relatively homogeneous learner population in terms of proficiency, I shed some light on pragmatic marking in written discourse, and at different learner proficiency levels. To this end, I specifically contrast the usage of adversative pragmatic markers (e.g. actually, but, in fact, on the other hand) by beginning/intermediate learners (as represented in the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage) with the one of advanced learners (as represented by material form the International Corpus of Learner English). By way of a quantitative and qualitative analysis, I test when pragmatic markers first emerge in learner language. Factors considered are type of the first language of the learners as well as the patterns of emergence of individual pragmatic markers as well as variation between individual learner groups. In addition, I use data from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays as a further point of reference to determine whether and when native-like usage levels are approximated. The overall findings suggest (1) that different patterns of emergence can be observed for individual pragmatic markers (notably the core item but vs. others); (2) that the first-language background of the learners influences the time and rate of acquisition; and (3) that the development of a diversified system of adversative pragmatic marking represents a challenging feature, which is only mastered by advanced students.
... Asimismo, a través de algunos de ellos, se muestra la actitud o la posición del enunciador ante lo enunciado y hacia su enunciatario (modalización discursiva). En definitiva, se trata de elementos que desempeñan funciones en el plano discursivo, con distintos valores de carácter pragmático (Blakemore, 2006). De acuerdo con la definición de Portolés (1998: 25-26), una de las más citadas en el ámbito de los estudios pragmáticos en lengua española: ...
Los operadores discursivos de concreción o especificación y de refuerzo argumentativo en el Corpus de aprendices de español como lengua extranjera Discourse Operators of Concretion or Specification and of Argumentative Reinforcement in the Corpus de aprendices de español como lengua extranjera FRANCISCO J. RODRÍGUEZ MUÑOZ MARIA DEL MAR RUIZ DOMÍNGUEZ UNIVERSIDAD DE ALMERÍA En el presente trabajo se realiza un análisis de la frecuencia de uso de los operadores discursivos de concreción o especificación, por un lado, y de refuerzo argumentativo, por otro, a partir del material recogido en el Corpus de aprendices de español como lengua extranjera. El objetivo es comprobar si las ocurrencias de estos marcadores se ajustan al nivel de dominio lingüístico que, según el Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes, deben tener adquirido los aprendices de español como lengua extranjera. Por tanto, se analiza la frecuencia de aparición de los operadores en relación con el nivel de dominio que establece el PCIC para cada uno de ellos. Finalmente, es preciso atender a la variabilidad funcional de estos exponentes, así como a aspectos relacionados con la L1 de los aprendices, con las variables sociolingüísticas que condicionan las preferencias de uso de unos sobre otros y con todos aquellos factores que podrían implicar diferencias de dominio. Palabras clave: Corpus de aprendices de español como lengua extranjera; enseñanza de español como lengua extranjera; operador discursivo; tácticas y estrategias pragmáticas. The present paper analyses the frequency of use of discourse operators of concretion or specification, on one hand, and of argumentative reinforcement, on the other hand, from the material collected in the Corpus of learners of Spanish as a foreign language. The aim is to check whether the occurrences of these markers are adjusted to the level that, according to the Plan Curricular del Instituto Cervantes, learners of Spanish as foreign language must have acquired. Thus, the operators frequency of occurrence is analysed in relation to the language proficiency level established in the PCIC for each one. Finally, consideration must be given to these exponents' functional variability, as well as to the aspects related to learners' L1, to sociolinguistic variables that determine usage preferences of some operators over others and to all those factors that might involve differences in language proficiency. Keywords: Corpus of learners of Spanish as a foreign language; teaching of Spanish as a foreign language; discourse operator; pragmatic strategies and tactics.
... (a) La primera postura es la defendida por los investigadores relevantistas 5 . El significado procedimental no se atribuye de manera extensiva a todos los MD; los apposition markers, por ejemplo, portan significado conceptual (Blakemore 1996(Blakemore , 2002(Blakemore , 2004. En palabras de Blakemore (2004: 239), "for not all the expressions that have been classified as DMs can be analyzed as procedural constraints on relevance. ...
Este artículo revisa el origen y desarrollo del concepto de significado procedimental dentro y fuera de la teoría de la Relevancia, en cuanto que se da por sentado que es el significado característico de los marcadores discursivos. Después de señalar sus limitaciones, presenta como alternativa la noción de significado como equivalente a función. Esta propuesta se ha fundamentado en los niveles del lenguaje y en la distinción de lengua y norma de Coseriu y, a diferencia de las anteriores, se concibe en el marco de una semántica lingüística.
... As to coherence, discourse markers are studied as guides to interpretation of utter-ances (Knott and Dale 1994;Sanders and Noordman 2000) and as structural or functional contextual coordinates in the production and designed interpretation of sentences (Schiffrin 1988). In terms of relevance, discourse markers are analysed with reference to the conceptual or procedural cognitive information they signal, i.e. as devices that set a number of constraints on the relevance of utterances rather than on the connection between clauses (Sperber and Wilson 1995;Blakemore 2004). ...
... Confirmationals are discourse markers (in the sense of Blakemore 2004;Fraser 2006) sometimes referred to as invariant tags (Columbus 2010). The latter term reflects the fact that they serve a similar function as tag questions such as those in (6) In terms of their form, the defining feature of the tags we explore here is that they are invariant particles. ...
This volume brings together a number of articles on the form and function of extra-clausal constituents, a group of linguistic elements which have puzzled linguists by defying analysis in terms of ordinary sentence grammar. Given their high frequency and communicative importance, these elements can, however, no longer be dismissed as a marginal linguistic phenomenon. In recent years this awareness has resulted not only in more systematic treatments of extra-clausal constituents, but has also highlighted the need to account for them in grammatical theory. Based on (mainly English) corpus data, the volume investigates the discourse-pragmatic, semantic, syntactic and phonological features of a range of extra-clausal constituents, including discourse markers, free adjuncts, left dislocands, insubordinate clauses and various kinds of adverbials. The individual chapters adopt a number of different perspectives, investigating the diachronic development of extra-clausal constituents, their multi-functionality and their use in bilingual settings, also addressing the question of how they can be incorporated into existing models of grammar.
Given that the United Kingdom (the UK) is seen as a world leader in addressing, mitigating, and prioritising the issue of climate change (Albanese et al., 2025), climate change appears to be a frequent theme in British political discourse. In particular, all major political actors on the UK, inclusive of the Conservative and Labour Parties, have their own agendas associated with the issue of climate change. Currently, however, there are no published studies on climate change discourse by Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party and the incumbent British prime minister. In this light, the article presents a quantitative study whose purpose is to identify, quantify, and discuss discourse markers (henceforth – DMs) in a corpus of speeches on climate change by Keir Starmer. The corpus is analysed in the computer program AntConc (Anthony, 2022) in order to compute the frequency of the occurrence of DMs. The results of the quantitative corpus analysis indicate that the most frequent DMs in the corpus are (i) and, (ii) as, (iii) but, (iv) also, (v) so, and (vi) because. The findings are further discussed and illustrated in the article.
Discourse markers (DMs) are essential for improving the quality of speaking and writing as well as increasing comprehension of spoken and written text. This research aims at investigating the effects of two techniques (textual input enhancement and inputflooding) on students' comprehension and retention of macro/ micro discourse markers functions. 96 EFL University students were randomly chosen from a population of 120 students. The study subjects were split into two experimental groups and one control group and they took part in 8 sessions to teach them L2 DMs, by using two techniques, i.e., textual input enhancement and inputflooding. The students are tested before and after the sessions by the comprehension test of DMs functions. The outcomes showed that all two experimental groups did better than the control group in their post-tests. Moreover, the findings indicated a significant difference in the comprehension test between the two experimental groups in favour of the textual input enhancement group. Moreover, the performance of the Textual Enhancement group on the DMs Posttest is somewhat close to its performance in the retention test. On the other hand, the statistically significant effect of the inputflooding technique on the DMs Posttest is greater than its effect on the retention test. It is recommended to use input enhancement techniques to help the EFL students to master L2 materials effectively.
This collection of original contributions dealing with Hispanic contact linguistics covers an array of Spanish dialects distributed across North, South, and Central America, the Caribbean, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Bosporus. It deals with both native and non-native varieties of the language, and includes both synchronic and diachronic studies. The volume addresses, and challenges, current theoretical assumptions on the nature of language variation and contact-induced change through empirically-based linguistic research. The sustained contact between Spanish and other languages in different parts of the world has given rise to a wide number of changes in the language, which are driven by a concomitance of different linguistic and social processes. This collection of articles provides new insight into such phenomena across the Spanish-speaking world.
This article explores the translation procedures followed in the rendering of the adverbials indeed, in fact, really and actually in a parallel corpus of English texts and their Spanish counterparts in the field of economy. While the adverbials mentioned are all categorized as boosters according to Hyland’s classification of metadiscourse markers (2005) in the source corpus, their Spanish correspondents may fall within other such metadiscourse categories as attitude and hedging markers, for example. The study of these variants contributes to our understanding of the processes involved in the translation of these markers, which seem to correspond to an intention of the translators to provide adequate translated versions so that these texts read as naturally in the target language as possible. Our methodology of inquiry involves corpus linguistics tools in order to interrogate a parallel corpus and retrieve cases of the adverbials indeed, in fact, really and actually. Our approach to discourse markers includes Schiffrin (1987), Fraser (1996), Jucker & Ziv (1998), Aijmer (2002), and especially Buysse (2012), Ghezzi (2014), Carrió-Pastor (2016a, 2016b), and Furkó (2020). Our notion of metadiscourse follows Hyland (2005) from where we have also taken the taxonomy of metadiscourse markers used in the analysis of data to classify findings. The identification and the classification of the translation procedures rely on Cruz-García (2014). Conclusions report on the most frequent translations procedures and the commonest Spanish forms used to translate the adverbial analysed, including their metadiscourse functions.
In an attempt to analyze the effect of different oral tasks on the use of discourse markers (DMs) in second language (L2) Portuguese by first language (L1) Chinese speakers at different L2 proficiency levels, the current study is oriented by two research questions: (1) in what way does L2 proficiency of L1 Chinese speakers influence the use of DMs in Portuguese across tasks in terms of the frequency and variety of different DM classes? (2) how does oral task type affect the use of DMs by L1 Chinese speakers of L2 Portuguese in terms of the frequency and variety of different DM classes? Data for the present study were collected by using two oral tasks, conversation task and narrative task, conducted by 12 Chinese speakers of Portuguese at a lower and higher L2 proficiency levels. Results showed that the Chinese speakers tended to use the DMs in L2 Portuguese at a higher rate and wider variety when they were asked to perform the conversation task and the use of some DM categories seems not to stay correlated with the L2 proficiency levels across tasks.
Corpus linguistics is a long-established method which uses authentic language data, stored in extensive computer corpora, as the basis for linguistic research. Moving away from the traditional intuitive approach to linguistics, which used made-up examples, corpus linguistics has made a significant contribution to all areas of the field. Until very recently, corpus linguistics has focused almost exclusively on syntax and the lexicon; however corpus-based approaches to the other subfields of linguistics are now rapidly emerging, and this is the first handbook on corpus pragmatics as a field. Bringing together a team of leading scholars from around the world, this handbook looks at how the use of corpus data has informed research into different key aspects of pragmatics, including pragmatic principles, pragmatic markers, evaluation, reference, speech acts, and conversational organisation.
This paper discusses how a particular type of recurrent gesture, the holding away gesture, highlights and structures spoken utterances in German and Savosavo, a Papuan language spoken in Solomon Islands in the Southwest Pacific. In particular, the paper poses the following questions: What kinds of discursive functions of this gesture are observable in these speech communities? How do they map onto the two speech communities? Are there cross-linguistic similarities and differences detectable? What motivates similarity and variation across speech communities? Utilizing Fraser’s (1999) pragmatic classification of discourse markers, it is shown that the holding away gesture shows the connection of topics and messages. For both languages, we explore the functional diversity of the gesture. Some functions are found in both data sets, though the proportions differ, while others are exclusively found in one or the other. Finally, we discuss how differences in discourse type and interactional setting may facilitate specific forms and uses of the holding away gesture.
The study looks at the use of conjunctions among L1 Luganda speakers of English as a second language (L2) in Uganda. Using a corpus compiled from oral and written discourse, the study found that the conjunction mostly used among L1 Luganda speakers of English was “and”, followed by “but”, both of which were marginally used as sentence openers, with the written data showing no single incidence of using “and” in this respect. It was also established that a number of English conjunctions were either totally absent or only used sporadically in both types of discourse. For example, correlatives such as “scarcely…when, no sooner…than” were completely absent from our corpus. Substrate influence from Luganda has been seen to have a role, not least in the co-extensive use of “although/though” with “but” in subordination, although analogy appears to work synergistically with substrate influence here (see Andersen, 1983). Innovations involving the rejection of constructions with the conjunction “if” were observed with regard to what appear to be mixed tenses (e.g. If you did not study chemistry at lower levels, you will not understand this concept), although in L1 English such constructions are legitimate since they do not encode the semantic relation of condition (Swan, 2005). Given that L1 Luganda speakers of English are Ugandans, this aspect of the findings in the study lends itself to observations made in earlier studies (e.g. Ssempuuma, Isingoma & Meierkord, 2016; Isingoma, 2021) on the structural nativization of English in Uganda as well as trends towards endonormativity in the sense of Schneider (2007).
This article adopts a relevance-theoretic approach to the study of line divisions in nonmetrical free verse poetry. The article argues that, when positioned at particular points within a poetic text's constituent structure, line divisions can take on procedural-like qualities, in that they perceptually highlight particular elements of the text's linguistically encoded material, thus steering the inferential interpretation process in particular directions. The article also argues that the procedural-like qualities of line divisions can interact with relevance-driven inference, and with the generic convention for interpreting poetic texts in a non-spontaneous fashion, to produce arrays of cognitive effects, which likely would not have been derived had the text been arranged in a less visuospatially segmented manner. Furthermore, the article suggests that the conceptual material relating to these effects may map back onto and adjust the text's lexically encoded content, affecting how particular elements of this content are narrowed and/or broadened, and thus the nature of the resulting ad hoc concepts.
Az ott határozószó redundáns használata (= ahol a mondatban szerepel a nominális helymegjelölés is, vö. Éva ott állt a kapuban versus Éva a kapuban állt ) összevethető a hasonló irányhatározós szerkezetekkel (Éva be lépett a szobába ). Az irányhatározós szerkezetben az ige terminatív igekötővel ( be -) áll. Ennek analógiájára vezeti be É. Kiss Katalin a lokatív igekötő fogalmát (ott/kint/bent stb.), amelynek használata beleilleszkedik az igeidőrendszer fokozatos átalakulásába az ómagyar kortól napjainkig: a nézőponti aspektust hordozó formákat felváltja a szituatív aspektust támogató igekötőrendszer. A dolgozat ezt a tételt próbálja továbbgondolni, különös tekintettel azokra a példákra, amelyekben egy inchoatív jelentésű időhatározó kijelöl egy időbeni vonatkozási pontot, ahonnan egy folyamatra/állapotra rátekintünk. Ez az együttállás kiváltja az ott mint igekötő in statu nascendi létét, és magyarázni tudja azokat az eseteket, amelyekben az ott a nominális helymegjelölés mellett kötelező, valamint azokat is, amelyekben a redundáns ott használatát stratégiai-pragmatikai tények indokolják. Az ott lokális jelentése az érvelésben összekapcsolódik a temporális jelentéssel, a temporális jelentés pedig elvezet a temporális perzisztencia kifejeződéséhez. Ennek sajátos megjelenésével találkozunk az ott mint diskurzuspartikula használata során.
A pilot kutatás elsődleges célja az, hogy a szociálpszichológiai és a pragmatikai megközelítéseket ötvözve létrehozzon egy olyan tesztet, amely alkalmas az énmegjelenítés/benyomáskeltés vizsgálatára. A dolgozatban a magyar anyanyelvű egyetemi hallgatók számára létrehozott, az énmegjelenítési stratégiákat vizsgáló nyílt végű diskurzuskiegészítéses teszt adatgyűjtési módszert ismertetem, illetve annak metodológiai problémáit járom körül. A pilot teszt eredményei alapján megállapítható, hogy egy szituációban nem megjósolhatóak a stratégiák, hanem a különböző társas interakciók esetében vannak kevésbé vagy inkább preferált metódusok, melyeket meghatároznak a benyomáskeltés mögött meghúzódó lehetséges motivációk, az arculatfenyegetettség mértéke, a szociológiai és szociokulturális változók.
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.
span lang="EN-GB">This article explores the translation procedures followed in the rendering of the adverbials indeed , in fact , really and actually in a parallel corpus of English texts and their Spanish counterparts in the field of economy. While the adverbials mentioned are all categorized as boosters according to Hyland’s classification of metadiscourse markers (2005) in the source corpus, their Spanish correspondents may fall within other such metadiscourse categories as attitude and hedging markers, for example. The study of these variants contributes to our understanding of the processes involved in the translation of these markers, which seem to correspond to an intention of the translators to provide adequate translated versions so that these texts read as naturally in the target language as possible. Our methodology of inquiry involves corpus linguistics tools in order to interrogate a parallel corpus and retrieve cases of the adverbials indeed, in fact, really and actually . Our approach to discourse markers includes Schiffrin (1987), Fraser (1996), Jucker & Ziv (1998), Aijmer (2002), and especially Buysse (2012), Ghezzi (2014), Carrió-Pastor (2016a, 2016b), and Furkó (2020). Our notion of metadiscourse follows Hyland (2005) from where we have also taken the taxonomy of metadiscourse markers used in the analysis of data to classify findings. The identification and the classification of the translation procedures rely on Cruz-García (2014). Conclusions report on the most frequent translations procedures and the commonest Spanish forms used to translate the adverbial analysed, including their metadiscourse functions.</span
Having a vital role in organizing conversational interaction, discourse markers (DMs) are considered to be a significant part of communicative competence. From a Relevance Theoretic perspective and combining insights from corpus linguistics and second language acquisition research, this study is an attempt to explore how non-native speakers of English (NNS) use the DMs in their spoken language. Following the framework of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA), this study is based on two specific corpora: Turkish sub-corpus of The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI-TR) for NNS speech and The Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation (LOCNEC) for native speech. The occurrences of DMs in both corpora were determined using inferential and descriptive statistics. The findings of the study are discussed in connection with implications for language practitioners and syllabus designers in the field of language teaching.
This article discusses the diachronic development of the Spanish multifunctional formula EN PLAN (with its variant EN PLAN DE, literally 'in plan (of)' but usually equivalent to English LIKE). The article has two main aims: firstly, to describe the changes that the formula has undergone since its earliest occurrences as a marker in the nineteenth century up to the early 21st century. The diachronic study evinces a process of grammaticalization in three steps: from noun to clause adverbial and then to discourse marker. Secondly, to conduct a contrastive analysis between EN PLAN (DE) and the English markers LIKE and KIND OF/KINDA so as to shed new light on the potential existence of a universal pathway of grammatic-alization in the emergence of discourse markers.
Journal of Pragmatics Research, (JoPR), E-ISSN : 2656-8020 , is published by State Insitute of Islamic Studies Salatiga, Indonesia. it is a forum published every April and October and aimed at developing all aspect of scholarly theories and research on pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Discourse analysis and socio-pragmatics. Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology.
El cuantificador existencial nada puede usarse como partícula discursiva no dependiente del contenido proposicional (cf. RAE & ASALE 2009). Algunas de estas formas funcionan como marcadores de refuerzo conclusivo, los cuales denomino apelativos de cierre por su utilidad para solicitar la complétude interactive. Por su forma / función, los he dividido en dos tipos: apelativos de anulación escalar (AAEsc) y apelativos emuladores de expectativas (AAExp). En este primer estudio analizo los AAEsc (formas con ni/sin) en una micro- diacronía del habla de Caracas (cf. CDHC’87/13 = Guirado 2014) para categorizar su fuerza ilocutiva y establecer una posible correlación con variables diastráticas y diacrónicas. Tras un análisis textual / interactivo, conseguí diferenciar tres funciones: refuerzo de certeza de la información, refuerzo de la actitud del hablante sobre la información y mitigador de duda. El análisis en el CDHC’87/13 confirma la relevancia de este período como marco de gramaticalización general de las partículas modales de intensificación.
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This chapter takes a discourse-pragmatic approach to the use of καί, δέ, γάρ and ἀλλά in the Textus Receptus of the New Testament, as well as to their translation equivalents (or to the motivation behind the lack of a translation equivalent), in a variety of Bible translations. The chapter concludes that discourse markers make an important contribution to the interpretation of various discourse segments in New Testament narratives as well as expository texts and that a primarily discourse-pragmatic, corpus-driven perspective on the functional spectrum of individual discourse markers is a more fruitful approach than either semantic-taxonomic or systemic-functional methods, traditionally adopted in the pertinent New Testament literature.
The English discourse marker after all and the Japanese discourse marker datte have been commonly claimed to give a reason or justification to the preceding utterance, and therefore, these two expressions are regarded as the equivalent translation counterparts to each other. This paper first attempts to propose that such an equated account is motivated by these two discourse markers constructing a similar inferential schema involved in the interpretation of the utterance including them. In fact, datte and after all make manifest similar polyfunctions according to the syntactic position although they encode different lexical information. This is because these two discourse markers are indicators that contribute to the inferential phase of communication by various degrees of modulation of a cognitive gap between two different assumptions. Another aim of this paper is to differentiate a procedural constraint these two indicators encode on the interpretation of the utterance.
This study aims at determining discourse markers used by Turkish teachers and native teachers in EFL classrooms and comparing these items in terms of variety and frequency. To reach the objectives of the present study, two seperate corpora were compiled through audio-recordings collected from two Turkish and two native EFL teachers" lectures. AntConc (2014), a specific concordance program designed for text analysis, was utilized in the analysis of the corpus data. Corpus-driven research results indicated that Turkish teachers used 29 different discourse markers and native teachers used 37 different discourse markers in their classroom discourse. It was also seen that Turkish teachers underused most discourse markers compared to native teachers in EFL classrooms. In the light of these findings, notable implications were suggested for English language teaching.
This study analyzes discourse marker (DM) kok (why) in colloquial Jakartan Indonesian. Co-occurences of markers are noticeable features. It focuses on examining the emotive and textual functions of the co-occurences of kok and other markers. This study applied corpus methods. It was found that there are 7 markers co-occur with kok namely lho, eh, oh, lha, wah, ah, and ih that always appear on the left side of kok. Only DM sih occurs on the right side. In emotive functions, the co-occurrences were used to show shock, disappointment, and disgust. Three markers might occur together in one utterance which cause more complex senses. Some utterances with kok appear repeatedly in the form of questions. It seems that in questions with kok, the speakers feel more curious and demand more responses. In textual functions, the speakers use the co-occurrences to raise a topic, emphasize, demand answers, and negotiate. Moreover, it was also used when the speakers have just noticed something and tried to make the interlocutors notice.
Linguistic exchanges between two people can be conceived as processes of continuous negotiation of the message between speakers and their interlocutors. Therefore, communication cannot be defined simply as a transfer of information from an individual A to an individual B, but as a set of linguistic acts that can be analysed from the pragmatic, semantic, and psychological points of view. From a functional and multidimensional perspective, the discursive markers are placed in an area of contact between different linguistic disciplines playing an important role as an empirical basis for testing the interaction between various disciplines (e.g. between pragmatics and semantics and between psychology and semantics). In this Working Paper, the discursive markers of European Portuguese are presented as linguistic devices that work at the textual and interactional levels of discourse, sometimes overlapping these two planes, sometimes distinguishing the subgroup of the discursive connectors and that of the interactional markers. This perspective thus allows the inclusion of empty expressions and interjections into the group of discursive markers and proposes a vision of linguistic production in a textual perspective characterized by a diamesic and diaphasic variation. The analysis is carried out following a pragmatic and interactional approach to present a general framework on these linguistic devices during the production of the message by the speaker and the reception by his interlocutor. Starting from previous works on the discursive markers of Portuguese, in its European and Brazilian variants, and on other European languages, this work proposes a pragmatic-linguistic and interactional consideration to promote a development of interactional linguistic studies about European Portuguese.
This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form, meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages, along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts, often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collected in this volume also discuss different factors at play in processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, which include contact-induced change and pragmatic borrowing, socio-interactional functional pressures and sociopragmatic indexicalities, constraints of cognitive processing, together with regularities in semantic change. Putting the traditional issues concerning the status, delimitation and categorization of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles somewhat off the stage, the eighteen articles collected in this volume deal instead with general questions concerning the development and use of such procedural elements, explored from different approaches, both formal and functional, and from a variety of perspectives – including corpus-based, sociolinguistic, and contrastive perspectives – and offering language-specific synchronic and diachronic studies.
Introduction Talk, taken out of context, has little meaning. For those who participate in it, talk reveals its full and specific meanings only against the background of the context in which it occurs (Goodwin and Duranti 1992: 3): the said requires, for its interpretation and its analysis, the frame of the unsaid (Goffman 1974). This unsaid can take many different guises: what speakers said earlier (previous text), what they know of the world (world knowledge), of their culture (cultural knowledge) and of each other (social knowledge), how they interact non-verbally (non-verbal behavior), and what they intend to communicate (illocutionary act), to name only a few. Another central component of the contextual frame is the spatio-temporal situation in which an utterance is made. While most other contextual components remain in the background (that is, in the unsaid), the situational context does come to the fore in the said. It becomes apparent in deixis. Deixis comprises “those features of language which refer directly to the personal, temporal or locational characteristics of a situation within which an utterance takes place” (Crystal 2003: 127). Deixis is linguistic evidence of how what is said is grounded in the context of the situation in which it is said. It provides an interface linking language and situational context (Hanks 1992: 48; see also Lyons 1977: 636; Hanks 2011: 315). In Section 12.2 we characterize deixis in some more detail. Section 12.3 reports on a case study on what is called “introductory this,” a usage of this which is specific to conversational narrative. While Section 12.2 uses examples collected from a wide range of corpus sources, the case study in Section 12.3 is based on, and illustrated by, data from the Narrative Corpus, a corpus of conversational narratives (see Rühlemann and O’Donnell 2012). Section 12.4, finally, presents some conclusions and points for future development.
Introduction Corpus pragmatics is a relative newcomer on the pragmatic and the corpus-linguistic scene. For a long time pragmatics and corpus linguistics were regarded as ‘parallel but often mutually exclusive’ (Romero-Trillo 2008: 2). However, in recent years corpus linguists and pragmaticists have actively begun exploring their common ground. This is attested, for example, by the 2004 special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics dedicated to corpus linguistics, the 2007 IPrA conference on ‘Pragmatics, corpora and computational linguistics’, the 2008 ICAME conference on ‘Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse’, and a number of recent monographs and edited collections (e.g., Adolphs 2008, Romero-Trillo 2008, Felder et al. 2011, Jucker and Taavitsainen 2014). In this introduction we will discuss how pragmatics and corpus linguistics can profit from each other. The focus will be on the methodologies that are key to the two fields and how they can be integrated into corpus-pragmatic research. To begin with, our use of the term pragmatics needs to be defined (Section 0.2). This will be followed in Section 0.3 by a discussion of the basic characteristics of corpus linguistics. In Section 0.4 we outline how corpus pragmatics can be seen as an intersection of corpus linguistics and pragmatics. In the last section, Section 0.5, we aim to introduce the individual contributions to this handbook in brief detail.
Discourse markers are a special category of words or expressions which have been shown to pose challenges during the translation process. This article adopts a relevance-theoretic perspective and, based on the two English translations of the Chinese play Leiyu ( Thunderstorm ), explores the use of the discourse marker well in translation from Chinese into English. The findings show that the discourse marker well in translation from Chinese into English is added in two scenarios: to intensify weaker forms of a similar Chinese discourse marker or as an addition when omitted in Chinese. Moreover, interlingual pragmatic enrichment will ensue and the English translations, in comparison with their Chinese originals, become more determinate. Based on this study, we can conclude that discourse markers are important pragmatic elements in translation from Chinese into English. Likewise, contrastive pragmatics is shown to be of potential in the process of translation.
This paper presents an analysis of the structures the discourse marker vajon forms in translated Hungarian fiction. Although translation data has been deployed in the study of discourse markers (Aijmer & Simon- Vandenbergen, 2004), such studies do not account for translation-specific phenomena which can influence the data of their analysis. In addition, translated discourse markers could offer insights into the idiosyncratic properties of translated texts as well as the culturally defined norms of translation that guide the creation of target texts. The analysis presented in this paper extends the cross-linguistic approach beyond contrastive analysis with a detailed investigation of two corpora of translated texts in order to identify patterns which could be a sign of translation or genre norms impacting the target texts. As a result, a distinct, diverging pattern emerges between the two corpora: patterns of explicit polarity show a marked difference. However, further research is needed to clarify whether these are due to language, genre, or translation norms.
Introduction Corpus investigation is particularly important for the study of interjections for several reasons: interjections are not integrated into the grammatical structure of utterances/clauses; they can stand alone as independent units in their own right; they tend to have functions rather than meanings; they differ by national, regional and personal variety. Corpus research is necessary to reveal their distribution and range of functions. Analysis of interjections in corpora shows them occurring with special types of constructions (namely exclamatives) and with characteristic types of discourse (namely dialogue). These constructions and functions have not received significant attention in past publications because corpus techniques have not yet been systematically applied to the study of interjections. Characteristic constructions and functions for interjections will be featured in the present essay in order to illustrate both possibilities and limitations in current corpus research. In Chapter 7 of the present volume, Aijmer mentions interjections as a sub-class of pragmatic markers, and in Chapter 14 Tottie, in her discussion of the turn-taking system, mentions the classification of uh and um as interjections and their functional labels filled pauses, fillers and hesitation markers. Interjections present special problems for corpus research. Common examples like boy, man, hell, damn and shit fulfill functions as members of major word classes along with their occurrences as interjections. Various interjections are familiar in such diverse functions as discourse markers, continuers, attention signals, hesitators, expletives and so on (see e.g. Quirk et al. 1985). They are roughly the same as the inserts of Biber et al. (1999), but they are not consistently characterized or marked in corpora.
Definitions Terminology Ever since its arrival on the scene of lexical grammar, the concept of prosodic meaning has been fraught with complications. Even its name is much debated. It has usually been referred to in the literature as semantic prosody, after its ideators Sinclair (1987) and Louw (1993). Stubbs, however, has mused that pragmatic prosody might have been a better choice, or perhaps discourse prosody (Stubbs 2001), though this latter is somewhat tautological, whilst Bublitz (2003) has suggested emotive prosody. Here it is argued that perhaps the most descriptive denomination would be evaluative prosody. The term prosody, borrowed from phonology, is used to describe a language phenomenon expressed over more than a single linguistic unit. To explain why we might specify evaluative prosody, we need to examine the notion of evaluation as realized in communicative discourse. All the examples in this chapter derive from SiBol 05, a 150-million word corpus of UK broadsheet newspaper texts from 2005. Newspapers have several advantages for this kind of study; in particular, they contain a wide variety of discourse types and of evaluating voices. Evaluation Although extremely complex in its application in real-life communicative contexts (Hunston 2010: 10–24), evaluation is intended here in the essentialist dualistic, bi-dimensional sense of ‘the indication of whether the speaker thinks that something (a person, thing, action, event, situation, idea, etc.) is good or bad’ (Thompson 1996: 65; also Hunston 2004: 157); ‘restricting the term to something like “desirable or undesirable”’ also has the advantage of emphasizing ‘areas of agreement’ among various differing but overlapping theories (Hunston 2010: 13). Goodness and badness can, of course, come in many forms.
Introduction One of the contributions which spoken corpus research has made to our picture of spoken language has been to provide fuller descriptions of certain non-canonical grammatical features which have often been consigned to the periphery of descriptive grammars or been absent from prescriptive grammars. Quantitative corpus research has often been able to show that such features are more systematic, more frequent and more socially widespread than hitherto thought (McCarthy and Carter 1995). At the same time, qualitative spoken language research has offered more general insights into the nature and purposes of conversation. This kind of research has revealed inter alia the central role that evaluation plays in conversation (Pomerantz 1984, Hunston and Thompson 2000, Aijmer 2005). This chapter draws on both quantitative and qualitative corpus research to investigate a specific non-canonical feature: tails (or right dislocation) and its pragmatic functions, prominent among which, as we shall see, is an association with evaluation. The structure is illustrated in the example below (from the British National Corpus): People said they’d never, never catch on, teabags. (British National Corpus) The structure is analysed in detail below, but we can note from this example that it involves an element placed after the conventional clause – ‘teabags’ – which is co-referential with the subject in the previous clause – ‘they’.
Corpus linguistics is a long-established method which uses authentic language data, stored in extensive computer corpora, as the basis for linguistic research. Moving away from the traditional intuitive approach to linguistics, which used made-up examples, corpus linguistics has made a significant contribution to all areas of the field. Until very recently, corpus linguistics has focused almost exclusively on syntax and the lexicon; however corpus-based approaches to the other subfields of linguistics are now rapidly emerging, and this is the first handbook on corpus pragmatics as a field. Bringing together a team of leading scholars from around the world, this handbook looks at how the use of corpus data has informed research into different key aspects of pragmatics, including pragmatic principles, pragmatic markers, evaluation, reference, speech acts, and conversational organisation.
Relevance theory is a framework for the study of cognition, proposed primarily in order to provide a psychologically realistic account of communication. This paper (1) presents relevance theory’s central commitments in detail and explains the theoretical motivations behind them; and (2) shows some of the ways in which these core principles are brought to bear on empirical problems. The core of relevance theory can be divided into two sets of assumptions. Assumptions relating to cognition in general include the definition of relevance as a trade-off between effort and effects, and the claim that cognition tends to maximise relevance. Assumptions about communication include the claims that understanding an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker’s communicative and informative intentions; and that the communicative principle of relevance and the presumption of optimal relevance mandate the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure, a heuristic that guides the search for the intended interpretation of utterances. Relevance theorists model communication in terms of the working of this comprehension procedure. There are, in addition, several strategies that guide the explanation of phenomena in relevance theory, including: (1) a stronger form of Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor, (2) the possibility of dividing what is linguistically encoded between conceptual and procedural information; (3) the interpretive/descriptive distinction; (4) the use of ad hoc concepts.
This article analyses semantically-equivalent discourse markers (YOU KNOW/FIOS AGAD and ANYWAY/CO-DHIÙ) of two languages in contact-Scottish Gaelic and English-as a platform for investigating Auer's (1999) 'Code-Switching-Language Mixing-Fused Lect' continuum. Using a corpus of approximately ten hours of speech of older (over 50 years of age) Gaelic-English bilinguals, this paper shows how the use of English language discourse markers in salient positions and the subsequent salience bleaching of these discourse markers illustrates movement along Auer's continuum. However, the paper then discusses how rapid language shift and the emergence of 'new' speakers of Gaelic challenge Auer's assertion that contact may only progress, not regress, along the continuum.
Corpus linguistics is a long-established method which uses authentic language data, stored in extensive computer corpora, as the basis for linguistic research. Moving away from the traditional intuitive approach to linguistics, which used made-up examples, corpus linguistics has made a significant contribution to all areas of the field. Until very recently, corpus linguistics has focused almost exclusively on syntax and the lexicon; however corpus-based approaches to the other subfields of linguistics are now rapidly emerging, and this is the first handbook on corpus pragmatics as a field. Bringing together a team of leading scholars from around the world, this handbook looks at how the use of corpus data has informed research into different key aspects of pragmatics, including pragmatic principles, pragmatic markers, evaluation, reference, speech acts, and conversational organisation.
Introduction Any type of linguistic annotation is a highly complex and interpretive process, but none more so than pragmatic annotation. The complexity inherent in this task (Leech et al. 2000) is mainly due to the fact that this type of annotation, unlike, for example, POS (part-of-speech) or semantic tagging/annotation, almost always needs to take into account levels above the individual word and may even need to refer to contextual information beyond those textual units that are commonly referred to as a ‘sentence’ or ‘utterance’. This is also why, in order to be able to produce large-scale and consistently annotated corpora, it is highly advisable to automate such an annotation process. This chapter, apart from providing an overview of, and guidelines for, representing and annotating pragmatic and other, ‘pragmatics-relevant’ information, will do so in the form of research into which means may be available to improve existing techniques (e.g. Stolcke et al. 2000 and Weisser 2002, 2003, 2004) for manual and automatic pragmatic annotation of corpora from different domains. One major part of this will be to try and determine the extent to which it is possible to improve the identification and subsequent annotation of pragmatics-related phenomena, based on insights gained from attempts at manual and automatic annotation. In so doing, I shall draw on a small set of materials from a number of annotated corpora that are freely available online, conducting an in-depth analysis of one file from each corpus (filenames provided below), with additional data from the corpora being consulted as and when necessary.
The absence of a simple one-to-one mapping between linguistic form and a speaker's intended interpretation is perhaps most evident in the case of referring expressions. This is true for pronouns (e.g., she, that), which encode little if any conceptual content, as well as for full nominal expressions such as the papers in this volume, the woman in the red dress, all of which can refer to different entities in different contexts of use. This chapter examines the use of referring expressions in spontaneous conversation by children aged 3 and younger, with specific focus on determiners/ pronouns which constrain possible interpretations by encoding procedural information about how the referent is to be mentally accessed (i.e., whether it is in focus, activated, familiar, uniquely identifiable, referential, or type identifiable). I argue that the procedural nature of the meaning of these forms explains why children are able to use them appropriately before they exhibit the representational ability to correctly assess the mental states of others that is measured by standard theory of mind tests.
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