Discourse Markers
Abstract
Discourse markers - the particles oh, well, now, then, you know and I mean, and the connectives so, because, and, but and or - perform important functions in conversation. Dr Schiffrin's approach is firmly interdisciplinary, within linguistics and sociology, and her rigourous analysis clearly demonstrates that neither the markers, nor the discourse within which they function, can be understood from one point of view alone, but only as an integration of structural, semantic, pragmatic, and social factors. The core of the book is a comparative analysis of markers within conversational discourse collected by Dr Schiffrin during sociolinguistic fieldwork. The study concludes that markers provide contextual coordinates which aid in the production and interpretation of coherent conversation at both local and global levels of organization. It raises a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues important to discourse analysis - including the relationship between meaning and use, the role of qualitative and quantitative analyses - and the insights it offers will be of particular value to readers confronting the very substantial problems presented by the search for a model of discourse which is based on what people actually say, mean, and do with words in everyday social interaction.
Bringing together cutting-edge research from a group of international scholars, this innovative volume examines how people with dementia interact with others in a variety of social contexts, ranging from everyday conversation to clinical settings. Drawing on methods from conversation analysis, it sheds light on how people with dementia accomplish relevant goals in interaction, as well as how changes in an individual's discursive abilities may affect how conversationalists negotiate a world in common and continue to build their social relationships. By exploring interaction, this book breaks new ground in challenging the commonplace assumptions about what constitutes typical or atypical interactions in communication involving people with dementia, and further demonstrates the unique and creative strategies all speakers employ to facilitate better and more collaborative communication. It is essential reading for academic researchers and advanced students across sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics and conversational analysis, as well as health care practitioners.
This qualitative case study delved into students’ understanding and positioning while they participated in solving an authentic, conceptually‐based problem in a high‐school chemistry class. Verbal and nonverbal cues, particularly gestures, offered broader awareness of students’ engagement in sensemaking during the learning experience. The chemistry classroom emerged as a dynamic space where intricate scientific thinking unfolded during this experience, and our embodied, multimodal analysis focused on unraveling this complexity. Our analysis determined the ways that various features of the contextual configuration—the intersection of different semiotic fields in the social setting—affected student thinking and participation. For example, the lack of specific reference to semiotic resources and the lack of attention to a key gesture influenced the way ideas evolved in the solution generation phase. The analysis also revealed the teacher's impact on the contextual configuration at critical junctures, including her influence on the use of semiotic resources and on student positioning. Finally, the embodied and multimodal analysis provided insights into the affordances and constraints of the activity structure and modes of communication on student's involvement in scientific practices. These insights highlighted the importance of educators recognizing diverse forms of student expression, including gestures, as essential for nurturing scientific sensemaking and supporting students in utilizing different modalities productively. Our approach can assist researchers in holistically investigating pedagogical strategies that can facilitate reform‐based science teaching. It can also assist teachers in fostering effective communication—both verbal and non‐verbal, while simultaneously guiding positioning within and between student groups, establishing an environment conducive to equitable sensemaking.
The forms and functions of okay have been investigated extensively in contexts where interlocutors speak the same language (e.g., German, Hungarian, and Swedish). Conversely, comparatively few studies have been conducted on how okay is used among people who do not share the same first language, such as lingua franca encounters. This article narrows this gap by investigating the use of okay in face‐to‐face tandem language learning between Chinese Expanding Circle users of English and British Inner Circle users of English. Using applied conversation analysis on a large corpus of 36 h of video recordings, the findings demonstrate that okay is used by both groups of speakers to manage comprehension in two ways: (1) okay is used to display sufficient understanding and (2) okay is used to display insufficient understanding. Although both groups of speakers use okay to claim sufficient and insufficient understanding, there are small, nuanced ways that the British Inner Circle users of English and Chinese Expanding Circle users of English differ in the use of discourse markers. These findings suggest that much more work is needed to fully understand how discourse markers are used in lingua franca interactions and world Englishes contexts.
This study reports quantitative findings from a study of 205 Hebrew request for confirmation (RfC) sequences, as part of a comparative Pragmatic Typological project across ten languages. Based on video recordings of casual conversation, this is the first systematic survey of such sequences in Hebrew. We examine linguistic and embodied resources for making an RfC (syntactic and prosodic design; polarity; use of modulation, inference marking, connectives, and tag questions) and for responding to it (response type; use, type, and position of response tokens (RTs); (non)minimal responses; repeat strategies; nodding and headshakes). We find that Hebrew RfCs lack interrogative syntax and are overwhelmingly marked by rising final intonation, frequently marked as inferences, rich in types of connectives and modulators, but infrequently feature tag questions. In responses to RfCs, Hebrew presents a comparatively high rate of disconfirmation, which is often also relatively unmitigated, corroborating Linguistic Anthropological descriptions of Hebrew conversational style. RTs are used in over half of responses, while full repeats are relatively rare. Occasionally, nods and headshakes are found unaccompanied by speech, as exclusively embodied responses. We expand on two negating RTs: the dental click (an areal feature) and the forceful ma pit'om ‘of course not’ (lit. ‘what suddenly’).
Esta pesquisa visa a analisar o emprego do marcador discursivo “depois” na língua brasileira de sinais (Libras) e as funções que desempenha na conversação entre pessoas surdas. O arcabouço teórico está fundamentado nos conceitos da Análise da Conversação, e o corpus é formado por vídeos disponíveis na internet pelo projeto da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina denominado Corpus de Libras. Para a transcrição e análise dos dados, utilizamos um software desenvolvido pelo Max Plank Institute, o qual se encontra disponível de forma livre e recebe o nome de Sistema de Anotação Eudico Annotator – ELAN. De acordo com os resultados, observamos que, assim como ocorre nas línguas orais auditivas, na Libras, o marcador “depois” contribui para organizar e estruturar o texto conversacional, operando como indicador de sucessão temporal entre o discurso anterior e o próximo, como forma de sequenciar os eventos narrados. Além disso, esse elemento possui, ainda, um valor pragmático e, em muitos casos, pode sugerir uma mudança no foco da conversação.
Purpose
This systematic review covers the current stage of research on subtle cognitive impairment with connected speech. It aims at surveying the linguistic features in use to single out those that can best identify patients with mild neurocognitive disorders (mNCDs), whose cognitive changes remain underdiagnosed.
Method
We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses guidelines and proposed a full definition of features for the analysis of speech features. Fifty-one studies met the inclusion criteria. Most of them focused on age-related progressive diseases and included fewer than 30 subjects.
Results
A total of 384 features labeled with 335 different names was retrieved, yielding various results in discriminating individuals with mNCDs from controls.
Conclusions
This finding highlights the need for harmonized labels to further investigate mNCDs with linguistic markers. We suggest two different ways of assessing a feature's reliability. We also point out potential methodological issues that remain to be resolved, along with recommendations for reproducible research in the field.
The goal of the paper is to examine the use of the particle üldse ‘at all; ever; generally; absolutely (not)’ in questions in Estonian everyday face-to-face and telephone conversations. The analysis is based on the methodological framework of interactional linguistics.
The particle üldse is found to serve three central functions in questions: (a) marking topic shifts and topic changes, (b) intensifying doubt or challenges, (c) emphasizing someone’s norm-violating behavior. Questions containing the particle üldse can be divided into two groups: neutral information-seeking questions and multifunctional questions that perform several social actions simultaneously. The particle üldse is commonly backward looking and serves both interpersonal and textual functions. Its use is often associated with non-preference, disagreement, or contradiction.
This study serves as an example of Conversation Analytic (CA) research with a focus on the interactional management of learning in classroom interactions, while simultaneously illustrating the several steps and procedures used for conducting these analyses. In this case, the method of CA is used to study students’ ‘oh’-prefaced utterances in one-to-one classroom interactions centred around explanations. The interactions are studied from the participants’ perspective by means of a turn-by-turn analysis of the selected fragments on the basis of video recordings and detailed transcripts, as is common practice in CA. This study aligns with previous CA research focusing on the details of classroom interaction relating to students’ learning processes. The results of the close analysis of the data provide insight into the orientation teachers and students show to interactionally exhibited knowledge displays in relation to the entire explanation activity they are involved in. This detailed analysis of one-to-one explanation interactions in secondary school classrooms provides insight into students’ learning processes as well as into the accompanying teacher practices.
This paper reflects on interjections in English. An interjection is a word or phrase that is used to express strong emotions, often suddenly, like oops when a small mistake happens, as in Oops ! I typed two Ls by mistake . To provide a new picture of interjections, it embeds the analysis in Cognitive Grammar. In this regard, it attempts to verify three claims of Cognitive Grammar. One claim describes a linguistic expression as a cluster of distinct but related senses. In light of this claim, the paper argues that an interjection forms a category of numerous senses organized around a central one. Another claim characterizes the meanings of linguistic expressions with respect to the fields to which they belong. In virtue of this claim, the paper argues that interjections form domains in which they stand for a general concept but differ in specifics. A further claim ascribes the use of a linguistic expression to the particular construal imposed on its content. Given this claim, the paper argues that the use of an interjection results from the particular perspective in which the speaker takes on a situation. The aim is to highlight the extra touch of meaning that interjections flavor the utterances in which they occur. The gist is that interjections are purposeful choices for expressing sentiments.
Understanding the discourse marker usage of Arabic-speaking English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners is necessary to help improve their writing competence. However, previous studies focusing on this area have used small corpora for comparison. To make up for this, this study aimed to determine the frequency of use of discourse markers in Saudi EFL argumentative writing by examining large corpora. Hypothesizing that Saudi EFL learners would overuse discourse markers, this study compared a corpus of argumentative essays written by Saudi students majoring in English (comprising 42,560 words) to a sub-corpus of the LOCNESS corpus containing argumentative essays by American and British students (comprising 43,025 words). The frequency of each group’s use of discourse markers were calculated and treated with statistical tests. In both corpora, elaborative discourse markers (EDMs) and temporal discourse markers (TDMs) had the highest and lowest frequencies, respectively. In the Saudi students’ writings, EDMs represented the highest portion of discourse markers (51.3%), followed by contrastive discourse markers (CDMs) (30.7%) and inferential discourse markers (IDMs) (12.7%). These patterns were observed among native speakers as well, with 56.1% of their discourse markers in the elaborative category, followed by CDMs (31%) and IDMs (9.5%). Temporal discourse markers were the least frequently utilized category in both corpora (native corpus: 3.5%; non-native corpus: 5.2%). Based on the study findings, recommendations are provided to strengthen Arabic EFL learners' proficiency in the use of discourse markers.
A well-written work is not only grammatically correct but also cohesive and coherent. Conjunctions are fundamental to the cohesion of a text and should be taught in writing classes. This study explores the role of conjunctions in creating cohesive and coherent writing and their impact on EFL students' written production. The research first assessed 62 students' attitudes toward learning and using conjunctions through a questionnaire, revealing their understanding of conjunctions' importance and a willingness to learn. The primary goal was to examine if teaching conjunctions would enhance students' ability to write cohesive texts. A pre- and post- test design with 50 students from an English center in Ho Chi Minh City showed improved conjunction use and higher mean scores after instruction. The study's findings offer recommendations for teaching conjunctions and suggest further research into cohesion elements in language instruction.
This study reports quantitative findings from a study of 205 Hebrew request for confirmation (RfC) sequences, as part of a comparative Pragmatic Typological project across ten languages. Based on video recordings of casual conversation, this is the first systematic survey of such sequences in Hebrew. We examine linguistic and embodied resources for making a RfC (syntactic and prosodic design; polarity; use of modulation, inference marking, connectives, and tag questions) and for responding to it (response type; use, type, and position of response tokens; (non)minimal responses; repeat strategies; nodding and headshakes). We find that Hebrew RfCs lack interrogative syntax, are overwhelmingly marked by rising final intonation, frequently marked as inferences, rich in types of connectives and modulators, but infrequently feature tag questions. In responses to RfCs, Hebrew presents a comparatively high rate of disconfirmation, which is often also relatively unmitigated, corroborating Linguistic Anthropological descriptions of Hebrew conversational style. Response tokens are used in over half of responses, while full repeats are relatively rare. Occasionally, nods and headshakes are found unaccompanied by speech, as exclusively embodied responses. We expand on two negating response tokens: the dental click (an areal feature) and the forceful ma pit'om 'of course not' (lit. 'what suddenly').
Recent statistics reveal alarming flaws in the Criminal Justice System’s (CJS) handling of rape cases, undermining the pursuit of justice for complainants seeking legal redress. This paper takes a novel approach to explore police rape stereotype use in interviews with rape complainants, utilising critical discourse analysis and conversation analysis and discursive psychology to understand and critique the balance of power within an interview and how this might impact attrition and prosecution decisions. Ten police interviews with rape complainants were analysed with several suspect discursive constructions present throughout, including the interviewer constructing the suspect as misunderstanding, the complainant as miscommunicating non-consent, or agentless and passive talk. A significant and original finding was the way constructions interacted with the spectrum of stranger-to-partner rapes. In stranger rape cases, passive language often obscures the suspect and emphasises the complainant’s behaviour. Acquaintance rapes frequently involved misunderstandings centred on visible distress and mixed signals. Partner rapes highlighted issues around consent and coercion, with officers often ignorant of coercive control and domestic abuse. These findings align with Operation Bluestone Soteria (OSB); thus, the recommendations align with those made by OSB’s Pillar One.
Dans cet article, nous centrerons notre réflexion sur le marqueur c’est vite dit en français contemporain et nous proposerons une étude contrastive avec la forme espagnole (que) se dice pronto. Au délà d’une certaine parenté formelle et autres points de convergence, il n’est pas moins vrai que leur degré de figement et la diversité des effets de sens qu’on rencontre en discours attirent notre attention sur les points de divergence. Notre intérêt est de montrer que c’est vite dit et(que) se dice pronto se prêtent à une analyse en tant que commentaires métalinguistiques participant au fait autonymique en discours. Or, leurs respectives stratégies discursives les éloignent dans la mesure où c’est vite dit marque l’anti-orientation argumentative, alors que (que) se dice pronto fait entrer en ligne le réajustement de la force argumentative. Afin de justifier nos hypothèses, nous proposerons une série de criteres, tant distributionnels que sémantico-pragmatiques, pour montrer les différentes stratégies discursives mises en place.
This research investigates the utilization of the discourse marker (DM) “but” by interviewees (IEs) from a socio-pragmatic standpoint, focusing on its frequency and function through the analysis of a corpus comprising political interviews aired on BBC’s HARDtalk . The IEs are categorized into three demographic cohorts: those from eastern versus western cultures, non-native English-speaking IEs versus native English speakers, and female IEs versus their male counterparts. The study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitatively, no statistically significant difference is found in the overall frequency of “but” usage among the three groups. Qualitatively, the analysis reveals the polyfunctionality of the DM “but”, with the most prevalent function being “contrast”, consistently employed across all demographic cohorts, although lacking statistical significance. Additionally, statistically higher usage of various function types is observed among IEs from the western culture and native English speakers compared to their counterparts. Female IEs exhibit a statistically higher frequency in the deployment of the “topic” function than males. Overall, while the frequency and the use of the “contrast” function show no significant difference, the study highlights the nuanced impact of culture, first language, and gender on the multifaceted functions of the DM “but” in political discourse. These findings contribute to our understanding of how socio-pragmatic factors subtly shape the usage of discourse markers like the DM “but” among varied interviewee demographics, as well as its role in shaping public perception and political narratives within the context of political interviews.
This article presents a comparative analysis of the functional roles of the pragmatic markers utilized in the documentation of the Kosovo and Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts. Grounded in the postulate that the pragmatic markers employed in Kosovo's documentation were stronger and contributed to a favorable outcome, namely the attainment of Kosovo's independence, the study contrasts this with the case of Nagorno-Karabakh. According to our postulate, similar markers in Nagorno-Karabakh were less effective and were one of the reasons for the inability to achieve peace through diplomatic negotiations. The disparity in the utilization and effectiveness of pragmatic markers in the documentation of two conflicts, underscores their significance in influencing international recognition, support, and ultimately, the success of diplomatic negotiations.
The aim of the article is to analyze the calls to the Estonian Emergency Response Centre, focusing on instances where callers reduce the severity of incident or emergency in their first turn. The data comprise 39 calls from the Corpus of Emergency Calls of the University of Tartu. The analysis reveals that callers employ mitigating words and negative turn-initial utterances to reduce the severity. These words indicate the caller’s uncertainty about the information provided or suggest that the reported incident or emergency is minor. The utterances are syntactically and semantically (but not prosodically) completed clauses followed by a second part of the clause construction containing specific information about the caller’s issue. Functionally, these utterances serve as assessments falling into three groups based on the information they project. Some assessments project uncertain information, explicitly expressing uncertainty about the information or using the epistemic marker ma=i=tea ‘I don’t know’. The second group of assessments project information about an incident that the caller does not qualify as an emergency. The last group projects a potential incident or emergency using variants of the utterance ei juhtund midagi ‘nothing happened’. In addition, we offer explanations for why callers reduce the severity of the incident or emergency and demonstrate that reducing severity does not lower the probability of sending assistance. This indicates that call-takers do not rely on callers’ assessments when deciding whether the help is needed.
Machine-readable inventories of connectives that provide information on multiple levels are a useful resource for automated discourse parsing, machine translation, text summarization and argumentation mining, etc. Despite Chinese being one of the world’s most widely spoken languages and having a wealth of annotated corpora, such a lexicon for Chinese still remains absent. In contrast, lexicons for many other languages have long been established. In this paper, we present 226 Chinese discourse connectives, augmented with morphological variations, syntactic (part-of-speech) and semantic (PDBT3.0 sense inventory) information, usage examples and English translations. The resulting lexicon, Chinese-DiMLex, is made publicly available in XML format, and is included in connective-lex.info, a platform specifically designed for human-friendly browsing of connective lexicons across languages. We describe the creation process of the lexicon, and discuss several Chinese-specific considerations and issues arising and discussed in the process. By demonstrating the process, we hope not only to contribute to research and educational purposes, but also to inspire researchers to use our method as a reference for building lexicons for their (native) language(s).
This collection of original papers illustrates recent trends and new perspectives for future research in Interactional Linguistics (IL). Since the research program was started around the turn of the century, it has prospered internationally. Recently, however, new developments have opened up new perspectives for interactional linguistic research. IL continues to study the details of talk in social interaction, with a focus on linguistic resources and structures of verbal and vocal interaction in bodily-visible interactional settings. Increasingly, though, it embraces methods supported by new technology and broadens its data and research questions to applications in teaching, therapy, etc. The volume comprises three parts with 14 contributions: (1) Studying linguistic resources in social interaction; (2) Studying linguistic resources in embodied social interaction; and (3) Studying social interaction in institutional contexts and involving speakers with specific proficiencies.
This paper explores five borrowed discourse-pragmatic features—wena, mna/mina, yazi, phela, and ke—which are transferred from indigenous South African languages into South African English, with the objective of investigating their frequency, position, collocational patterns, and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are taken from the South African component of the Global Web-based English corpus, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic framework. The results show that the discourse-pragmatic features are generally infrequent, orthographically stable, and prefer the clause-initial position. The paper indicates that wena is used as an address term to call for the addressee’s attention, mna/mina is used to emphasise personal identity, while yazi seeks confirmation of and signals shared knowledge. Phela is an emphasis marker, while ke indicates contrast, textual coherence, and emphasis. This study underscores the contributions of indigenous South African languages to the discourse-pragmatic features of South African English.
This study employs a corpus-based approach to examine and compare the use of two discourse markers (DMs), “you know” and “I mean”, within the context of two mediatised English political interviews. The analysis encompasses frequencies, functions, co-occurrences, and positional distributions of these DMs. The study utilizes specialized corpora from two political interview programs: CGTN’s The Point with Liu Xin and BBC’s HARDtalk. The frequency analysis reveals that “you know” is statistically more prevalent than “I mean” in both programs, reflecting the spontaneity, interactivity, and need for clarification characteristic of political interviews. Notably, the Chinese interviewer (IR) uses “you know” more extensively, possibly due to a cultural preference for ensuring mutual understanding and engaging the audience, while the British IR employs “I mean” slightly more frequently, likely reflecting a tendency to clarify or reframe statements for precision. Functionally, these DMs serve diverse purposes such as hedging, agreeing, and monitoring across various domains including interpersonal, sequential, and rhetorical. Positional analysis shows “you know” typically appearing medially and “I mean” often in initial positions. These results underscore the distinctive interviewing styles of the two IRs and the pivotal role of these DMs in fulfilling a spectrum of communicative functions. This research offers valuable insights into the interviewer’s perspective in political interviews.
This paper investigates attitudes toward prefacing the answer to a question from an interlocutor with the discourse marker so, which has been tentatively found to be on the rise since the 1990s. Functions of this form, informally referred to as “backstory so,” include marking added background or length that is unexpected by the questioner. This paper presents (i) evidence in the popular media that it is perceived as new and overtly associated with negative attributes (annoying, condescending) and differing stereotypes (scientific experts, Valley Girls); and (ii) findings of a matched guise that investigated whether those associations remain indexed by so-prefacing answers when attitudes are elicited implicitly. Statistically significant results of t-tests and a principal component analysis suggest that so-prefacing answers was perceived more negatively than a control discourse marker, well, in both a female and male voice, on a status axis (e.g., less Educated and Intelligent), as expected. On a solidarity axis, the male so guise also earned poorer evaluations than the control but the female so guise was not evaluated quite as negatively, which had not been reflected in the overt attitudes. The so guises were also more linked to Valley Girl and Tech Bro speech.
Discourse markers are omnipresent in language and are gaining more attention, especially, in audiovisual translation studies. This study aimed at examining the strategies used by translators in rendering six commonly used English discourse markers into Arabic. Moreover, it shed light on the discourse markers found in seven children's animated movies and seeks to investigate the differences between three renditions of these movies: Arabic subtitles, Modern Standard Arabic dubbed version and colloquial Egyptian Arabic dubbed version. It also focused on the effect that the two audiovisual modes, subtitling and dubbing, have on the translation of these devices and the choices of translation strategies. The data consisted of 944 instances of the six discourse markers extracted from the movies' original scripts and their equivalents taken from the Arabic subtitled and dubbed versions of the movies. The findings reveal that the avoidance of SL discourse marker strategy was used by translators in both modes of (1) College audiovisual translation. Moreover, the equivalents found in the colloquial Egyptian Arabic dubbed version were more diverse compared to the other two translations (the subtitled version and MSA dubbed version).
A successful communication is evaluated by the ability of the audience to effectively comprehend the essence of a communication and to respond accordingly. Meanwhile, a communicative discourse is considered effective in its characteristics of demonstrating natural pauses and fillers, among others, which helps to communicate ideas more easily and naturally. Engaging any kind of discourse in coherent and fluent manners to enhance effective communication is sacrosanct to a communicator. This study focuses on the system of how discourse markers are instrumental to text fluency, coherence and, above all, how they function and are consciously structured to aid effective interpretations of a discourse. The study also attempts to examine the functional complexity of discourse markers in cohesive texts. The work relies on the views of many discourse and stylistic analysts not only to investigate the relationship between discourse markers and textual composition but to also address how instrumental they are to the effective comprehension of a text. The study reveals that Discourse Markers are not only characterised with linguistic devices that enhance textual coherence and fluency but also provide discourse clues that are instrumental to effective organisation of ideas and effective comprehension of meanings in a text.
L’étude porte sur un emploi spécifique du marqueur only, à savoir son emploi en tant que ligateur interpropositionnel et transphrastique (permettant de conjoindre des propositions ou même des phrases entre elles). Le statut syntaxique précis de only dans cet emploi est discuté, afin de déterminer s’il s’agit d’une conjonction à proprement parler ou d’un adverbe de liaison. C’est ensuite son statut discursif qui est questionné, en mettant en contraste les propriétés d’un connecteur et celles d’un marqueur de discours. Ce faisant, c’est également la dimension argumentative de only dans cet emploi qui est mise en lumière. Ses effets de sens en contexte sont examinés, en lien avec les configurations d’accueil, puis ils sont ramenés à un dénominateur commun, à savoir sa valeur fondamentale. Les facteurs conduisant aux différentes interprétations possibles de only dans cet emploi sont enfin passés au crible.
In the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, the vernacular prose romance became popular throughout Europe. This new genre brought about the functional expansion of vernacular languages into the realm of prose, which had previously been primarily the preserve of Latin. This paper discusses coherence-making strategies in prose romances from a diachronic perspective. In a case study of the Renaut de Montauban, also called The Four Sons of Aymon, we explore a number of linguistic devices used to convey narrative coherence in the chanson de geste tradition and what happens to these patterns when the matter is transposed from verse into prose and across languages, from French into English. We focus on copula constructions with initial intensifiers, the discourse markers lors, adonc, or and si (and their English counterparts), as well as the narrative formula commonly referred to as entrelacement or interlacement. By combining linguistic observations with a narratological framework borrowed from literary analysis, we aim to shed light on further research possibilities into the realm of comparative medieval literature which considers new generic (prose), material (print), and linguistic (French-English) contexts. Our results show that the change in form from verse to prose causes word order patterns with sentence-initial intensifiers to decline in favour of a general preference for discourse markers. These became the preferred way of establishing coherence in long prose texts. Their varied use in French and the English translation of the Renaut show a definite awareness of the significance of this resource for plot progression and the management of shifts between narrative levels. Furthermore, the combination of discourse markers with other narrative formulae, like interlacement, and typographical features underscore the deliberate use of these linguistic features as coherence-making elements in the prose Renaut tradition.
Although a common topic for some time, the idea of discourse markers has been hampered by the difficulty of providing an operative definition to the corresponding notion, in view of the very heterogeneous nature of the linguistic entities at stake. Starting from the different parameters regularly evoked in the study of such markers, this work aims at characterizing them as a class of operators likely to assume various functions according to their syntactic and/or semantic links within the discourse.
En este trabajo, abordamos los usos de provided that como marcador interoracional con el fin de orientar posibles soluciones de traducción. Adams (2004) plantea que esta expresión constituye una dificultad traductora, dado que suele asociarse unívocamente con un valor condicional. A partir del relevamiento bibliográfico y del análisis de un corpus, ilustramos casos en los que provided that expresa valores condicionales y no condicionales. Estos usos no siempre son reconocibles a primera vista, pero pueden comprenderse cabalmente si se consideran pistas formales y conceptuales que evidencian la contribución semántico-pragmática de la expresión.
в статье рассматриваются функциональные и семантические особенности дискурсивных маркеров (ДМ) в русском языке. Актуальность исследования обусловлена недостаточной изученностью ДМ в русистике и необходимостью системного анализа их роли в организации дискурса. Цель работы – выявить и описать функции и семантику ДМ в различных типах дискурса. Материалом исследования послужили данные Национального корпуса русского языка (НКРЯ), включающие 1500 контекстов употребления 20 наиболее частотных ДМ (например, "ну", "вот", "так", "же", "ведь"). Методологической базой выступают дискурсивный анализ, корпусные методы, элементы семантического и прагматического анализа. В результате исследования установлено, что ДМ в русском языке полифункциональны и способны выполнять текстообразующую, фатическую, модальную, экспрессивную функции. Выявлены доминирующие функции отдельных ДМ: для "ну" характерна хезитативная функция (35% случаев), "вот" чаще используется для фокусирования внимания (28%), "так" типично маркирует логические связи между фрагментами дискурса (41%). Определены ядерные и периферийные семантические компоненты ДМ, описаны механизмы их прагматикализации. Установлена связь функционирования ДМ с типом дискурса: в неформальном общении чаще используются ДМ с фатической и хезитативной функциями, в институциональном дискурсе преобладают ДМ с текстообразующей и модальной семантикой. Сделан вывод о дискурсивной обусловленности реализации функционального потенциала ДМ и градуальном характере их семантики. Результаты исследования вносят вклад в теорию дискурсивных слов, дополняют научные представления о специфике русской дискурсивной практики, имеют прикладную значимость для преподавания РКИ, дискурсивного анализа текста, моделирования диалоговых систем.
the article examines the functional and semantic features of discursive markers (DM) in the Russian language. The relevance of the study is due to the insufficient knowledge of DM in Russian studies and the need for a systematic analysis of their role in the organization of discourse. The purpose of the work is to identify and describe the functions and semantics of DM in various types of discourse. The research material was data from the National Corpus of the Russian Language (NCRL), which includes 1,500 contexts of the use of the 20 most frequent DM (for example, "well", "here", "so", "same", "after all"). The methodological basis is discursive analysis, corpus methods, elements of semantic and pragmatic analysis. As a result of the study, it was found that DM in the Russian language are multifunctional and capable of performing text-forming, phatic, modal, expressive functions. The dominant functions of individual DM are revealed: "well" is characterized by a hesitative function (35% of cases), "here" is more often used to focus attention (28%), "so" typically marks logical connections between fragments of discourse (41%). The nuclear and peripheral semantic components of DM are defined, and the mechanisms of their pragmatization are described. The connection between the functioning of DM and the type of discourse has been established: in informal communication, DM with phatic and hesitative functions are more often used, DM with text-forming and modal semantics prevail in institutional discourse. The conclusion is made about the discursive conditionality of the realization of the functional potential of DM and the graduated nature of their semantics. The results of the research contribute to the theory of discursive words, complement scientific ideas about the specifics of Russian discursive practice, and have applied significance for teaching RFL, discursive text analysis, and modeling of dialogical systems.
This article discusses the properties of interrogative structures biased in the set of their possible answers by the particle po in Camuno. In declarative structures, po signals that according to the speaker, a proposition p is surprisingly controversial in the utterance world w. In interrogative structures, the same particle identifies the only subset of 〚 p 〛 f [\kern-2pt[ {p]\kern-2pt] }^{f} , the set of focus alternatives to p, that can satisfy the existential presupposition introduced by the question. However, po additionally signals that such a subset is non-factual, i.e., controversial, in w. A characterization of po as an element operating on sets of alternatives offers an important tool to investigate the numerous pragmatic readings conveyed by po and account for the restrictions in its distribution. The semantic properties of the po-interrogatives can, in fact, capture the mirative and counterfactual readings also attested in cognate forms in neighboring varieties. Thus, this analysis represents an important step in exploring a possible unified account.
Aviation English (AE), a specialized register of English, prioritizes precision, brevity and clarity to maximize aviation safety. While there has been a growing focus within the linguistics community on AE training and assessment since the release of a set of standards and recommended practices, its linguistic properties remain comparatively underexplored. Drawing upon Biber’s (1988) multi-dimensional (MD) analysis framework, the present study conducted a corpus-based comparative MD analysis to investigate the multi-dimensional linguistic profile of AE vs. casual conversational English (CE) and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to extract and interpret the co-occurring linguistic features of routine AE and non-routine AE. The comparative MD analysis shows that the AE exhibits more informational condensation, less authorial stance and technicality, and fewer features of online information elaboration compared to CE. The EFA shows variations in the linguistic and textual composition of the discourse of two sub-registers of AE across the two dimensions. Non-routine AE demonstrates a present-focused, viewpoint/intention-oriented approach, involving higher levels of integrative information flow compared to routine AE. Routine AE is characterized by a higher degree of information condensation and is marked by a planned, procedural, and intensive use of standard phraseology. Some pedagogical implications are then proposed for enhancing AE training to cultivate pilots’ and air traffic controllers’ language competence for precise, unambiguous communication tailored to both routine and non-routine operational contexts.
Pragmatic markers (PMs) are multifunctional elements that allow language users to organize and coordinate discourse and to express their attitudes and cognitive states. This study compares the discourse-pragmatic functions and distributional features of four PMs in Kwéyòl Donmnik (konsa ‘so’, èben ‘well’, papa/Bondyé ‘papa/God’, la ‘there’) with those of their etyma in French, Kwéyòl’s lexifier ((ou) comme ça, (eh) ben, bon Dieu, là), and with their counterparts in English, the colonial source language with which it has been in contact for more than two centuries (so, well, oh my God, there). The properties of the Kwéyòl PMs are determined through a corpus analysis and are then compared to descriptions of the French and English PMs in previous studies. Each of the four Kwéyòl PM’s has functions in common with its French etymon and its English counterpart as well as its own unique functions. In addition, English so performs functions in the Kwéyòl data that are unique to Kwéyòl konsa ‘so’, suggesting that so is being integrated into Kwéyòl. This study expands the limited body of work on Kwéyòl and deepens our understanding of language contact and Creole emergence at the discourse-pragmatic level, particularly in cases involving a second, non-lexifier colonial source language.
Teaching pragmatics, that is, language in use, is one of the most difficult and consequently neglected tasks in many English as a Second Language classrooms. This Element aims to address a gap in the scholarly debate about Shakespeare and pedagogy, combining pragmatic considerations about how to approach Shakespeare's language today in ESL classes, and practical applications in the shape of ready-made lesson plans for both university and secondary school students. Its originality consists in both its structure and the methodology adopted. Three main sections cover different aspects of pragmatics: performative speech acts, discourse markers, and (im)politeness strategies. Each section is introduced by an overview of the topic and state of the art, then details are provided about how to approach Shakespeare's plays through a given pragmatic method. Finally, an example of an interactive, ready-made lesson plan is provided.
One of the most exciting moments in a prenatal ultrasound session is learning the sex of the baby.Following a conversation analysis perspective, we present a multimodal analysis of sequences of interaction between patient and practitioner at the time the foetus’ sex is the focus of attention. Based on video data collected from maternity wards and private practitioners, we report on two types of sequences, which illustrate the different ways of responding to the perceptually-occasioned formulation of the foetus’ sex: as a telling or as a noticing (in which case participants orient towards jointly seeing). While the possibility of both response is inherent to the sequential properties of noticing-based claims in general, we will discuss how the production of both types of sequences is sensitive and articulated to the distribution of epistemic authority as a practical achievement in this medical setting, along two dimensions: expert versus ordinary knowledge, and professional vision versus lay gaze.
Tags, compared to other types of pragmatic markers (PMs), are typically considered as separate yet related phenomena and are usually differentiated by their syntactic positions and discourse functions, among other factors. The current work explores this differentiation utilizing 36 sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish-English bilinguals in southern Arizona, USA. Standard language variation and change (LVC) methodologies were used in the extraction, coding, and statistical analyses of this dataset (n = 591), with four PM variants identified for study through an exploratory methodology: the tags no and qué no and the discourse markers (DMs) you know and saber. The results of our analyses indicate that, while utterance position, self-reported gender, and length of residence were all significant in the multivariate analysis, discourse function was dropped from the statistical model. Therefore, we interpret this finding as an indication that functional differences between these two pragmatic resources have been levelled through grammaticalization, demonstrating that for Arizona Spanish, tags and DMs belong in the same functional category of PMs. Furthermore, an analysis of codeswitching behavior triggered by the incoming variant you know demonstrates that it is becoming incorporated into the Spanish pragmatic system, patterning similarly to its counterpart saber in terms of function and position, without attrition of the native variant.
Although many issues about the use of transcripts for studying classroom interactions have been addressed in other studies, little attention has been given to the use of transcripts to study student teachers’ classroom interactions. To achieve a deeper understanding of student teachers’ perspectives and permit the formulation of a more appropriate framework, it is crucial to hear from student teachers and investigate their experiences about the use of transcripts. Therefore, in the study reported on here we used 7 focus-group interviews of approximately 6 Saudi EFL (English as a foreign language) student teachers in each group to investigate their perceptions on the use of transcripts for studying their classroom interactions. The data were thematically analysed. Three themes that represented the participants’ experiences of using transcripts to study their classroom interactions emerged: using the transcript analysis, learning from the transcript analysis, and committing to using the transcript analysis. The findings reveal that most participants felt they had autonomy in using transcripts to study their classroom interactions, but experienced some challenges. Most students were determined to change their classroom interaction based on their analyses of classroom interactions but only a few demonstrated the determination to continue using the transcript analysis approach.
The Belgrade Forest Project explores the history of a 5,550-ha forest in the northern suburbs of European Istanbul. The first stage of the project involved creating a reproducible strategy for extracting place names and their geographic locations from 100+ travel narratives that reference the forest area. In this article, we share the initial outcomes of a collaboration between researchers in forestry, geography, and linguistics, as well as a documented methodology, coding protocol, and an open, reusable, and interoperable research dataset of tagged place names. We describe a grounded, pragmatic, reflexive, iterative and communicative approach for interdisciplinary research in spatial humanities. Future project stages will enhance the narrative collection with data from other archival materials, such as maps and historical photographs. Outputs will include a multilingual, geolocated data collection of historical landscape features, places, and agents. The results of the project will enhance our understanding of the forest’s historic and ongoing significance to the region.
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