34.668, Review: Linguistic Theories, Pragmatics: Van Olmen, Šinkūnienė (2021)

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Subject: 34.668, Review: Linguistic Theories, Pragmatics: Van Olmen, Šinkūnienė (2021)

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Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2023 21:14:51
From: Mary Brody [gajill at lsu.edu]
Subject: Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-3985.html

EDITOR: Daniël  Van Olmen
EDITOR: Jolanta  Šinkūnienė
TITLE: Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 325
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Mary Jill Brody, Louisiana State University

SUMMARY

In the Introduction to this 15-chapter book, editors Van Olmen and Šinkūnienė
base their orientation to pragmatic makers (PMs) on Fraser’s (2009) view of PM
being an umbrella term that includes not only those linguistic elements that
indicate social and interpersonal cohesion (e.g., thanks), but also those
marking stance orientation (e.g., really) and illocutionary force (e.g.,
please). Discourse markers (DMs) of textual cohesion and unspecified particles
are also analyzed in several of the papers, as will be noted. The editors also
present the controversial Subjectivity Intersubjectivity Peripheries
Hypothesis (Salameh et al. 2018), where PMs at the left periphery (LP) are
subjective in orientation and right-periphery (RP) PMs indicate
intersubjectivity, an idea which is addressed by many but not all the papers
in the volume. The editors note that the concepts of subjectivity and
intersubjectivity are often differently defined.
Part I. Defining the periphery is dedicated to the concept of periphery and
contains two chapters. In Ch. 1 “Discourse markers at the peripheries of
syntax, intonation and turns: Towards a cognitive-functional unit of
segmentation”, by Liesbeth Degand and Ludivine Crible, the authors are
concerned with comparing the distribution of types of DMs at the peripheries
of clauses and medially, across grammatical units, intonation units, and
interactional turns. They use the categories of Haselow’s (2017) cognitive
discourse model to identify which type of unit accounts best for the
distribution of DMs. Data are from the LOCAS-F(rench) corpus. Each unit type
reflects different discourse segmentation. Findings include that clauses and
turns both tend to have sequential DMs at the LP and interpersonal DMs at the
RP, while intonation units tend toward having more rhetorical DMs at the LP
and sequential ones at the RP; however, both LP and RP DMs have multiple
functions. The clause turns out to be the unit demonstrating the most
systematic distribution of DMs. Ch. 2 is “Dutch pragmatic markers in the left
periphery” by Ton van der Wouden and Ad Foolen, which complicates the notion
of LP; the paper is a complement to van der Wouden and Foolen (2015) on Dutch
RP. Data are from the Corpus of Spoken Dutch, supplemented by internet and
newspaper sources. After providing an inventory of Dutch PMs, the authors use
grammatically based criteria to identify four locations for LP PMs:
pre-fronted, fronted, initial, and post-initial (they use different labels for
these positions); “middle-field” - preceding finite Vs in declarative clauses
- and RP are the other possible locations for PMs. Focusing on the subjective
and intersubjective functions of PMs, the same PM may have different functions
in different positions. Those PMs in Haselow’s (2019) functional category of
“interaction” appear at the farthest LPs and RPs, including within LP PM
clusters. 
Part II Left and right periphery on their own presents two studies that focus
on one periphery only. Ch. 3,“Presentation followed by negotiation: Final
pragmatic particle sequencing in Ainu” by Katsunobu Izutsu and Mitsuko Narita
Izutsu, uses data from a spoken corpus of two sisters conversing.Taking the
utterance or sentence as the basic unit, the focus is on the meaning and
function of four of the ten RP PMs and their sequencing; three pairs of Ainu
RP PMs occur. The authors differentiate the RP PMs’ “discourse-pragmatic
characteristics” (89) using speech acts, stance type and orientation (Du Bois
2007), and speech act management (Weigand 2010); the two categories of
presentation and negotiation of speech act management distinguish the Ainu RP
discourse particles. The ordering of sequenced RP particles is 1) presentation
and; 2) negotiation, which corresponds with similar elements in other East
Asian languages. The extensive examples in this chapter also provide us with a
reminder that in linguistic fieldwork, interactions that take place before or
after the intended elicitation can provide invaluable data. Ch. 4, by Nicole
Nau, is entitled “Another ‘look?’: The Latvian particle lūk in parliamentary
discourse”, draws on a Latvian parliamentary discourse corpus of audio
recordings, video recordings, and shorthand transcripts; the latter differs in
discourse-significant fashion (both in commission and omission) from
transcripts made of the audio recording.Video recordings were used for
complementary gestures and gaze. Turn, syntax, content, and prosody are all
considered initial boundary metrics, though Nau does not engage the concept of
periphery. Comparison with the more colloquial and less frequently occurring
dictionary-synonymous particle re reveals that they have a strong tendency to
be functionally distinct from one another in the parliamentary register, with
re serving more as a directive to look, an expressive directive, and a
quotation initial marker; lūk is more of a directive to consider, an
argumentation marker, and a hesitation filler. Lūk is also used in cases of
situational and textual deixis (which are oriented toward retrospection),
discourse organization (most frequently oriented toward prospective use), and
to represent speech and viewpoint.
Part III Left versus right periphery is the longest section of the volume,
containing six chapters that each compare RP and LP DPs. Ch. 5, by Linda
Badan, is “Verb-based discourse markers in Italian: Garda, vedi, garda te,
vedi te”, using data specifically from the Veneto regional variety of Italian.
Despite all being second person singular present tense imperative forms and
sharing some properties of expressing speaker attitude, the four forms are
distinct in functions and LP / RP distribution. This chapter is a
methodological outlier, in that data were collected through a grammatical
acceptability judgment task in the form of dialogue contexts of RP, LP, and
isolation; the fifteen participating speakers were also asked to select an
associated function (from the set of surprise, warning, phatic, adversative,
obviousness) appropriate to the DM. Judgments for the large part concurred
across participants. Surprise, warning, and obviousness are restricted to LP,
while phatic and adversative can occur in both LP and RP. The LP is associated
with speaker attitude toward the utterance and LP DMs are more independent of
context. RP and LP DMs are highly context-dependent to dialogue, with a role
of reinforcement and interaction. Only surprise, warning, and obviousness DMs
can be linked using a complementizer to the following sentence – with
obviousness being further restricted to a repetitive link with preceding
discourse - and thus appear to be more grammatically integrated than phatic
and adversative DMs. Ch. 6 is by Doriana Cimmino, titled “Interactions between
distribution and functional uses in Italian adversative pragmatic markers: A
corpus-based and multilevel approach”. The PMs investigated are ma and però,
which are the highest frequency coordinating markers in Italian and which link
utterance-internally and across turns; both are translatable as English but,
yet their origins, meanings, and distributional patterns differ. Ma occurs
much more frequently, and carries “corrective”, “concessive”, and
“counter-expectative” contrasts (172), while però only carries the latter two
types. They both can appear in LP and medially linking two clauses, but only
però can occur RP and only ma introduces new topics. The corpus used consists
of recorded and transcribed monologues and dialogues, and peripheries of
utterances were established by prosodic cues. Using the Language into Act
Theory (Cresti 2020), which divides utterances into a core unit of Comment
with LP and RP optional textual and dialogic units, the author identifies five
possible placements of the adversative particles: detached RP, detached LP, RP
of core, LP of core, and center of core (for Multiple Comment Intonational
Units an additional internal position exists). From this perspective, ma is
most frequent at the beginning of the textual core unit while però is more
frequent in dialogue, more prosodically autonomous, and serves a turn-taking
function. This multi-level perspective highlights the polyfunctionality of the
two PMs in relation to information status and contextual factors as well as
their positional distribution.
The next two papers in this section focus on Lithuanian. Erika
Jasiontė-Mikučionienė authored Ch. 7 “The Lithuanian focus particles net
‘even’ and tik ‘only’ and clause peripheries”, which uses the Corpus of Spoken
Lithuanian. These two particles are found mostly medially, and secondarily at
the LP. Medially, both are scalar focus particles, with net marking highly
likely and tik marking least likely expectation within a clause. At the LP
(one fifth of usages) the particles operate semantically on the relation
between clauses, in the illocutionary domain, and the propositional content of
the utterance; they function as DMs to mark the speaker’s viewpoint or to
modify the illocutionary force of the utterance (more than half of peripheral
net use is negative). Ch 8, “Žinai ‘you know’ in Lithuanian discourse:
Distributional features and functional profile” is by Jolanta Šinkūnienė and
is based on three corpora: spoken, interview, and fiction. Only address forms,
interjections, and connectives can precede žinai in its function as a PM at
the LP outside the dependency structure of the clause; it can also occur at
the RP and medially. In the spoken corpus, it appears mostly medially and,
finally, in the interview corpus it is mostly medial and in the fiction corpus
it is 100% LP; its general function is to index common interactive ground.
Medially, it shows hesitation, maintains discourse coherence, and
reformulates. In the LP, žinai introduces an argument or new information,
while in the RP, it has an impersonal meaning of seeking common ground.
Functionally, the spoken and interview corpora map closely; but the fictional
corpus, with its exclusive LP topic introduction, does not match the other
corpora.
Ch. 9 is by Daniël Van Olmen and is entitled “Second person parentheticals of
unintentional visual perception in British English”. Parenthetical units are
syntactically autonomous, may be positionally flexible, and contribute
semantically not to the predicate but rather to the situation of utterance.
PMs may be parenthetical, and parentheticals may function pragmatically. The
British National Corpus of 2014 was used because British English reportedly
uses you see more frequently than other varieties of English; the forms you
see (most frequent), see, and do you see (least frequent) were sought in the
corpus, but only the most frequently used were examined in depth. Very
generally speaking, you see is used most frequently by older, upper
middle-class educated males, but more refined research is needed. There is a
tendency for you see to occur slightly more often at RP, and almost never
medially. A large part of the paper is given over to classification and
discussion of the uses of the three parentheticals which are overlapping in
function and individual cases are sometimes ambiguous. While do you see is
infrequently used, it seems to function most in questions about comprehension.
The more commonly used you see has multiple functions with the explanatory,
attention-getting, and cooperation-enlisting ones being most frequent, while
see takes mostly the attention-getting and explanatory functions. As for the
position of the parentheticals, see and you see in the explanatory function
appear equally at LP and RP. Cooperation-enlisting and question of visual
perception and comprehension functions all occur at the RP, while triumphal
uses are LP. These results lead the author to conclude that the hypothesis
that LP is for subjectified meaning and RP for intersubjectified meaning needs
to be re-analyzed or even abandoned for understanding these parentheticals,
which seem to be going out of fashion.
Ch. 10 shifts in modality with “Emoji as graphic discourse markers: Functional
and positional associations in German WhatsApp® messages” by Heike Wiese and
Annika Labrenz. Investigating WhatsApp® messages allows for examining the
informal register in the absence of formal and standardized restrictions. The
authors consider emojis to be DMs with three functions: textual, subjective,
and intersubjective. The core unit is the sentence. They find a semantic
bleaching of the emoji in use as DMs and emphasize the need to take context
into consideration; context of emoji was rated positive, neutral, or negative.
They used a stimulus elicited corpus and eliminated punctuation, filled
pauses, and referential emoji from consideration for those contributions that
used emojis. The emojis appeared exclusively RP, and mostly after negative
content, which may serve to soften that content. Face emojis are associated
with a subjective function but may also function intersubjectively. The
authors conducted an experiment involving 22 student participants to test for
subjective and intersubjective interpretations of LP and RP emojis using
neutral content sentences. Evaluators interpreted the emojis as largely
subjective. 
Part IV Peripheries across time begins with Ch. 11, by Yinchun Bai entitled
“Functional asymmetry and left-to-right movement: Speaking of peripheries”.
Using spoken corpus media data from 1990 - 2015, it investigates the DM
speaking of X, which has been identified as a LP topic or sub-topic change
marker; it also has a gerundial use and a participial use. In its DM function,
speaking of X serves mostly to change or expand on (in nearly equal numbers) a
discursive topic, with infrequent use as a speech act adverbial and in
commenting. For the most part, speaking of X functions to initiate a topic
based on a discursive pretext, while only infrequently depending on a
pragmatic pretext.  In relation to periphery, speaking of X can occur medially
and LP; the former is associated with topic expansion, while the latter is
associated with its function as a speech act adverbial. Charted over the 25
years of the corpus, speaking of X increases in use as a marker of topic
change, while decreasing in its use as topic expansion. Over time, the use of
the DM has increased. LP continues to be its location, with no left-to-right
movement seen through time. Ch. 12 is “The diachronic origin of English I mean
and German ich meine”, written by Daniela Kolbe-Hanna and Natalia Filatkina.
The authors examine these similar but not equivalent PMs/DMs diachronically
from the perspective of Construction Grammar. While the PM functions of I mean
appear in English dictionaries, that is not the case for (ich) miene in German
dictionaries, although its pragmatics are attested to in spoken corpora. It
appears to have gone through three stages: 1) as a matrix clause, functioning
to repair or provide an introduction; 2) an intermediate stage; and 3) as a DM
to introduce explanation or summary conclusions. For the diachronic
development of I mean as a PM, the authors do not find evidence of it coming
from a matrix clause, but rather from the pairing of I with mean; the absence
of conversational data in the historical corpora used is problematic. For the
German, the metalinguistic pragmatic meaning of increasing precision appears
earlier, while the English meaning is ambiguous.   
The author of Ch. 13, “Pragmatic markers at the periphery and discourse
prominence: The case of English of course” is Diana M. Lewis. She examines the
interactions between the PM position and the “information-packaging” (351)
function of of course, focusing on its diachronic development from
prepositional phrase, adverbial connector, and modal adverb to PM. The time
frame considered spans 1730-1913 (the Old Bailey Corpus of transcribed court
proceedings) to the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (transcribed
spontaneous conversation from 2010); interestingly, the latter lacks audio,
but for both, context serves to disambiguate functions. The Old Bailey Corpus
shows a diminution of RP use, an increase of LP use, and relatively steady
internal usage. The first attested of course used as a response particle dates
from 1798. Assertive use of the PM has increased over time, while
expectational use has declined from an early preponderance to comprise half of
occurrences. The recent reduction to course may indicate grammaticalization in
process. Chapter 14, “The Norwegian tag da in comparison to English then” is
by Kaja Borthen and Elena Karagjosova. Tag and then are both traceable to the
demonstrative Indo-Germanic pronoun *to-, but the authors argue for the two
tag particles having different semantics. Previous studies have not accounted
adequately for the two distinct senses of tag da. Tags da₁ and then overlap in
function to indicate a retrospective conditional; within the two written
corpora, however, only 14% of the examples of tag da can be translated as
then, indicating that then is restricted to a more accessible antecedent. The
context the authors provide for citations of the particles is extremely
helpful in their interpretation. Using “notions from Relevance Theory and
‘questions under discussion’-based theories of discourse” (386), the authors
identify a second da₂ tag as a topic marker when the topic is not an
individual but a propositional entity that is a Question Under Discussion.
This frequently appears after a discourse pause or break. Referential da
develops through time into da₁, which becomes semantically bleached into da₂.
The final paper in the volume, Ch. 15, by Anna Ruskan and Marta Carretero and
entitled “A cross-linguistic look at the right periphery: Utterance-final
pragmatic markers in English, Spanish, and Lithuanian” uses multiple corpora.
The authors focus on the two sets of near-equivalent RP PMs: then, entonces,
tada (all temporal) and obviously, evidentemente, aisku (all evidential).
These six PMs are products of grammaticalization. Spoken corpora provided data
for the three languages. Although many of the same elements can appear at both
RP and LP, the RP has been less studied than the LP. RP offers an opportunity
for final moment or spontaneous modifications of discourse already completed.
The three temporals appear infrequently at RP; when they do, they often
co-occur with another marker to strengthen their linking function, marking the
clause as representing a consequence of something that occurred in previous
discourse. For all speech acts investigated the PMs play an interpersonal
function; for assertives, rogatives (speech acts of asking), and expressives,
an “ideational-logical meta-function” (432) is also engaged. Obviamente is an
outlier, being the only of the three evidentials to appear with any frequency
at all in RP; all three appear primarily in assertive speech acts, where they
play a role in persuasive, concessive, or agreement facework, and for turn
continuations (evidentemente).

EVALUATION

This volume will be of interest to all who want to learn more about PMs and
their behaviors at various locations in discourse. The chapters in this book
generally conform to a high standard of scholarship. Overall, PMs in eight
languages are covered, as are emojis (in German, Ch 10); especially welcome
are treatments of less well-known languages, such as Ainu (Ch. 3). There is
some repetitiveness across the literature reviews included in each chapter, as
many of the contributing authors rely on the same theories; however, this
enhances the cohesiveness of the volume, and the data from the various
languages and the different PMs speak to the theories in different ways. All
papers but one (Ch. 5) use corpus data, and the most informative papers are
those that describe the corpus/corpora and discuss how the data are used. 
While the final two chapters are explicitly comparative, the entire volume
could be considered as being comparative, in that so many languages are
investigated. Additionally, all non-English data are implicitly or explicitly
compared to English in translation; Ch. 14 uses translation from Norwegian to
English in a unique way. Not every chapter is equally invested in examining
the Subjectivity Intersubjectivity Peripheries Hypothesis mentioned in the
editors’ introduction; while the contributions in the book taken together
contribute to this investigation, no definitive answers are forthcoming.
There is some inconsistency across chapters in the use of the terms PM, DM,
and particle, which the authors invariably account for; I have deferred to the
author’s preference in the descriptions of each article above. Some authors
also differ in their definitions of periphery (sentence, clause, intonation
unit, turn, etc.) which depends, in part, on the spoken or written nature of
the data. There are a few minor distracting typos, missing references, and
inconsistencies across chapters in presentation of glosses in the examples.
The volume is a model for how to use corpus data to investigate PMs.

REFERENCES

Cresti, Emanuela. 2020. The Pragmatic Analysis of Speech and its Illocutionary
Classification according to Language into Act Theory. Search of Basic Units of
Spoken Language: A Corpus-driven Approach, ed. by Shlomo Izre’el, Heliana
Mello, Alessandro Pnunzi, and Tommaso Raso, 181-219. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Du Bois, John W. 2007. The Stance Triangle.  Stancetaking in Discourse:
Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, ed. By Robert Englebretson, 139-182.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Fraser, Bruce. 2009. An Account of Discourse Markers. International Review of
Pragmatics 1(2):1-28.
Haselow, Alexander. 2017. Spontaneous Spoken English: An Integrated Approach
to the Emergent Grammar of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haselow. Alexander. 2019. Discourse Marker Sequences: Insights into the Serial
Order of Communicative Tasks in Real-time Production. Journal of Pragmatics
194:1-18.
Salameh, Shima, Maria Estélles, and Salvador Pons Bordería. 2018. Beyond the
Notion of Periphery: An Account of Polyfunctional Discourse Markers within the
Val.Es.Co. Model of Discourse Segmentation. Positioning the Self and Others;
Linguistic Perspectives, ed. by Kate Beeching, Chiara Ghezzi, and Piera
Molinelli, 105-125. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
van der Wouden and Ad Foolen. 2015. Dutch Particles in the Right Periphery.
Final Particles, ed. By Sylvie Hancil, Alexander Haselow, and Margje Post,
221-247. Berlin:De Gruyter.
Weigand, Edda. 2010. Dialogue: The Mixed Game. Amsterdam: Benjamins.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mary Jill Brody is Professor Emerita of the Department of Geography and
Anthropology and the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics at Louisiana
State University. She investigates Mayan languages, especially Tojol-ab'al,
with particular interest in discourse, conversation, discourse markers, and
language contact.





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