29.3908, Review: Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics; Syntax: Fedriani, Sansó (2017)

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Subject: 29.3908, Review: Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics; Syntax: Fedriani, Sansó (2017)

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Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2018 15:46:58
From: Pierre-Yves Modicom [pymodicom.ling at yahoo.fr]
Subject: Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-5256.html

EDITOR: Chiara  Fedriani
EDITOR: Andrea  Sansó
TITLE: Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles
SUBTITLE: New perspectives
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Language Companion Series 186
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Pierre-Yves Modicom, Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3

SUMMARY

The book begins with a robust general introduction by the two editors
(“Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal particles : What do we know
and where do we go from there ?”, p.1 to 33). 

The authors take notice of the plethoric literature on pragmatic markers
(PMs), discourse markers (DMs) and modal particles (MPs). PMs are seen as
“markers of functions belonging to the domains of social and interpersonal
cohesion”, DMs are “strategies ensuring textual cohesion”, whereas the term MP
refers to “a closed class of items that participate in a paradigm as signals
of the speaker’s evaluation of the information status of his/her utterance
(e.g. German “ja”, “eben”, “doch” etc.)” (see p.3 for all three definitions).
The rest of this introductory chapter is a panorama of the topics that are
subsequently dealt with in the volume. The summaries of the different papers
of the book are included within a broader discussion about the state of the
art and the current research perspectives in the various subdomains at stake.

The first part of the volume is devoted to “general theoretical questions and
quantitative approaches” and regroups five papers, mostly written from the
perspective of corpus linguistics.

Chapter 1 (“The emergence of Hebrew “loydea”or “loydat” (‘I dunno’) from
interaction”, by Yael Maschler, p. 37-69) is a study of the grammaticalization
of Hebrew “lo yode’a” (masc) or “lo yoda’at” (fem), ‘I don’t know’, into a DM.
It is also a plea for interactional approaches to DMs. Studying a corpus of
conversational data in Hebrew, the author identifies two concurring
grammaticalization paths. In the first case, originating from the transitive
use of the verb, the emergent DM “loydea/loydat” mostly has an epistemic value
of uncertainty. When it is followed by the question word ma, it can also be
used as a metalinguistic chunk to repair unfortunate formulations (Maschler
resorts to her notion of ‘metalanguaging’, see Maschler 1994). In the second
case, originating from the intransitive use, the author detects other
contextual values on top of the first two: first, “loydea/loydat” seems to
have developed into a routinized topic shift strategy; second, it can be used
to let the speaker’s own response to a question “die out”. 

Chapter 2 (“Towards a model for discourse marker annotation : from potential
to feature-based discourse markers”, p. 71-98) is a joint work by Catherine
Bolly, Ludivine Crible, Liesbeth Degand and Deniz Uygur-Distexe. Their
starting point is the notorious fuzziness of the notion of DM, which raises
difficulties when it comes to establishing reliable criteria for corpus-based
studies. The authors propose to consider DMs as “clusters of features that, in
specific patterns of combination, allow to distinguish DM use from other
uses”. Three expert coders were asked to manually sort out potential DMs in a
corpus of oral French data. All tokens of the 152 identified types were then
automatically retrieved and annotated by the authors. The annotation scheme
included syntax (part of speech, position, mobility), semantic-pragmatic
features such as the opposition between conceptual and procedural meaning, and
cotextual indications (prosody and the position within the speech-turn).
Finally, each token was coded for the certainty of the coder as to whether it
is a case of DM use or not. This enabled the authors to use statistical
Multiple Correspondance Analysis to identify the features associated with a
high response low certainty score, before establishing conditional trees of
predictive factors. The result is that syntactic position is the most reliable
variable with which to determine whether an item is a DM or not. The authors
consider that their set of results confirms the validity of their cluster
hypothesis.

Ludivine Crible then goes on with a general plea for operational definitions
of DMs from a corpus linguistic point of view (Chap. 3 : “Towards an
operational category of discourse markers : a definition and its model”, p.
99-127). She first highlights the number of concurring and overlapping
concepts and definitions in the field of PM research (she uses the notion of
PM as an overarching category for DMs, MPs, interjections, response signals
and politeness expressions). Focusing on the notion of DM, she considers it to
be a functional category that should be made operational on a corpus
linguistic basis. She presents a multi-tier coding scheme she implemented on
the software Exmaralda, and then proposes a pilot study on bilingual corpus
data (French/English) showing how this multi-tier scheme can help identify and
describe DMs from a crosslinguistic perspective.

Syntactic features are the heart of Chapter 4, “A corpus-based approach to
functional markers in Greek : Exploring the role of position”, by Dionysis
Goutsos (p. 125-149). The author uses the notion of “functional marker” as a
cover term comparable to the use of “pragmatic marker” in Chapter 2. He
delivers a systematic study of the position of these “functional markers” in
the Corpus of Greek Texts, a corpus made up from four subcorpora (academic
papers, newspaper opinion articles, parliament speeches and transcribed radio
and TV interviews). His finding is that syntactic position is relatively
reliable when it comes to distinguishing various subkinds of functional
markers. The first position rather attracts text-linkers or stance markers ;
the third position is rather specialized for modality markers, focus particles
and intensifiers ; the results are not so clear for the second position. In
his conclusion, the author underlines the need to cross these findings with
multifactorial analyses of corpus data as in the previous chapters.

The fifth and last paper of this section (“Discourse markers and discourse
relations : The French DM quoi”) is a case study by Adriana Costăchescu.
Unlike the previous chapters, it is not properly speaking a corpus-based
study. It is rather the application of a theoretical framework, Segmented
Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT, Asher & Lascarides 1993), to a set of
authentic data collected from various corpora. The author presents of the most
relevant features of SDRT for her study, before turning to the meaning of the
French DM “quoi” (a pragmatic use of the interrogative pronoun “quoi”). She
shows that the tools of SDRT for the elucidation of non-sentential units are
also useful for the description of this DM. Rhetoric relations such as
explanation, contrast, elaboration etc. can be modeled within this framework
and account for the use conditions of “quoi”. From a cross-theoretical point
of view, the main finding of this study is the corroboration of the parallel
between DMs and non-sentential units. 

Part 2 (“The status of modal particles”) groups three studies on discourse
particles in German, Italian and Croatian.

In his paper (Chapter 6 : “Modal particles and Verum focus : new corollaries”,
 p.171-202), Werner Abraham first underlines the similarities between Verum
focus (defined here as the highlighting of a clausal element expressing the
truth of the whole proposition) and the licensing of modal particles. These
similarities are not only functional : they can also be traced back to
sentence mood sensitivity and to semantic parameters of syntactic dependence.
In the second half of the paper, the main point is the role of topicality in
these corollaries between MP licensing and Verum Focus. The author comments
upon the correlations between MP insertion, theticity and the Individual Level
/ Stage Level distinction. He argues that MP insertion is licit only if a
topic constituent is available in the clause. Finally, the comparison between
this set of parameters and the licensing conditions of epistemic adverbials
helps establishing a clear functional difference between modal particles and
modal adverbials.

Chapter 7 (“Italian non-canonical negations as modal particles : information
state, polarity and mirativity”, by Mario Squartini, p. 202-228) draws on
previous research on Romance non-canonical negations (see Espinal 1993 among
others). The use of non-canonical negation in Romance is related to the
informational status of the proposition denied. This leads the author to a
fine-grained discussion of the links between the given/new opposition and the
notion of hearer knowledge, leading to a double opposition between
discourse-old and discourse-new on the one hand, hearer-old and hearer-new on
the other hand. The standard use of Italian non-canonical negation “mica” is
restricted to discourse-old negated fact. But the analysis of regional uses of
“mica” in direct questions shows some regional variation. In some regions,
“mica” can be used in negative questions asked by the speaker when she learns
that what she held to be true might actually not be the case. Thus, we have to
distinguish between standard “mica” (“mica1”) and regional “mica” (“mica2”).
“Mica1” corresponds to cases where the speaker holds presupposed positive
information to be untrue (discourse-true, speaker-false). “Mica2” is used when
the speaker was convinced of the validity of a proposition that has just been
presented as false in the immediate context (discourse-false, speaker-true).
This leads Squartini to deconstruct the information status of questions and to
separate discourse-old/discourse-new from speaker-old/speaker-new. Finally, a
brief comparison with interrogative uses of “déjà” in French corroborates the
relevance of this last distinction for the analysis of particles in direct
questions. The author concludes his paper with a defense of the notion of
mirativity in the interpretation of particles.

The final paper in this section (Ch. 8, “A format for the description of
German modal particles and their functional equivalents in Croatian and
English”, p.229-254) is a contrastive study by Marijana Kresić, Mia Batinić
and Gabriele Diewald. Drawing on previous work either on German or on Croatian
MPs, the authors give a list of functional features common to MPs in both
languages. Their core thesis is that “the relational discourse grammatical
function of MPs is universal insofar as it answers a basic communicative need.
Thus, there must be functional equivalents to MPs in those languages that do
not have this grammatical category.” (p.239). Thanks to a corpus-based study
on German, Croatian and English, it was possible to isolate three formal types
of MP-equivalents : clusters of MPs ; modal phrasemes ; modal constructions.
Then, the authors adopt a two-field description pattern already presented in
Diewald &  Kresić (2010). On this base, they propose a description of German
MP “bloß” in wh-questions, before turning to Croatian and English. Finally,
they extend their description to other sentence types, especially imperative
sentences. In the conclusion, the authors summarize the advantages of that
kind of model to establish the grammatical status of MPs in various languages
and to guarantee the comparability of languages with and without MPs.

Part 3 (“Language-specific and diachronic studies”) encompasses six papers
dealing with the development of pragmatic markers in several languages. The
first chapter in this section (Ch. 9, by Friederike Kleinknecht and Miguel
Souza, p.257-287) is devoted to “Vocatives as a source category for pragmatic
markers”. More specifically, they study the development of the markers “güey”
in Mexican Spanish and “alter” in German, both of which are derived from
familiarizers, “a special class of vocatives denoting solidarity and intimacy”
(p.257). The paper begins with a general presentation of vocatives,
familiarizers, affectivity and expressivity. Familiarizers can be used both to
intensify the speaker’s intention, and to mitigate a possibly face-threatening
act. Then, the authors turn to the use of familiarizers as turn-taking
devices. This dimension is very prominent in the case of Mexican Spanish
“güey”, which has undergone semantic bleaching and is now also used inside of
an utterance with a function of discourse segmentation. The evolution of
“alter” (and its various phonetic realizations) is comparable, with a
preference for a position at the end of prosodic units, with a double function
of marking affectivity and segmenting discourse. In their conclusion, the
authors insist on the difference between PMs and DMs with PMs as the
overarching category (see introduction or Chapter 2) : routinized vocatives
are PMs, but “güey” and “alter” tend to be specifically identifiable as DMs.
They also underline the role of affectivity as a catalyst for functional
change.

Chapter 10 (“Paths of development of English DMs : (Inter)subjectification,
deontic reversal and other stories”, by Gabriella Mazzon, p.289-304) is a
discussion of the “textual > subjective > intersubjective” model of semantic
evolution for DMs (Traugott 1982). The authors want to show that the history
of English DMs is characterized by a tendency towards the development of
deontic meanings out of subjective epistemic contexts, and that
intersubjectification often follows a cline towards impoliteness of
face-threat. After a general discussion of these notions, the author proposes
two case studies : she first examines the diachronic development of “now”,
whose conflictual usages seem to be the most recent. She then turns to “I’m
afraid”, for which she can show that there was a development from the literal
meaning to a metalinguistic routine about unpleasant information, which gave
rise to a mitigating value. Finally, this mitigating value evolved into a
reinforcement of the validity of a contradictory statement. Data from the
history of  “well” seem to confirm this path leading to adversarial values. In
the conclusion, the author underlines the compatibility of these findings with
the (inter)subjectification path and suggests that the diachronic development
of DMs should further be investigated from the perspective of a “deontic
cycle”.

Chapter 11, by Rumiko Shinzato, deals with “Grammaticalization of
PMs/DMs/Modal Markers (MMs) in Japanese” (305-333). It discusses the
hypothesis of Beeching & Detges (2014) about the respective grammaticalization
paths attached to the left and the right peripheries in the development of
DMs. Another aspect is the link between the syntactic position of Japanese
PMs, DMs and MMs, their functional status and the layered structure of the
Japanese clause. In the case of Japanese, it also seems that the Sino-Japanese
origin of certain terms can play a decisive role in their development to DMs.
The author pays special attention to the functional evolution of originally
quotative markers. The general results seem to corroborate the hypothesis of
Beeching & Detges : “left periphery attracts DMs, while right periphery is
conducive to MMs” (p.329).

Chapter 12 (p. 335-367, by Anna Giacalone Ramat, Caterina Mauri and Andrea
Sansò) is devoted to “Dubitative-corrective constructions in Italian”. The
authors examine the evolution of four adverbial patterns in modern-day Italian
(“al massimo”, “al limite”, “tutt’al piu” and “caso mai”). All are first
roughly equivalent to Engl. “at most”. They are originally used after denying
a proposition A (e.g. “non A, caso mai B”), in order to correct A and to cast
doubt over a presupposition identifiable within the content of A, hence the
name “dubitative-corrective construction”. All four constructions are examined
separately, and the authors show that they have developed further pragmatic
uses, with “al massimo”, “al limite”, and “tutt’al piu” (all of which scalar
operators) on the one hand, and “casomai” (originally a condition
construction) on the other hand. As a consequence, the authors propose two
distinct development paths.

Magdalena Adamczyk’s paper (ch. 13, “On the pragmatic expansion of Polish
gdzieś tam, ‘somewhere there/about’”, p.369-397) is another language-specific
case study.  Originally, “gdzieś tam” is used to point approximately at a
contextually identifiable location. Today, it presents some unconventional
uses that can be described in terms of hedging, in the sense of Lakoff (1972).
The author then sketches a corpus-based analysis of the values of “gdzieś tam”
in context. One of the results is that the pragmatic expansion of “gdzieś tam”
is accompanied with substantial change in the formal environment of the
marker. The author concludes that “gdzieś tam” now behaves like a DM in Polish
and should be recognized as such.

The last chapter in this section is “A pragmatic approach to Joseph Wright’s
English dialect dictionary: Discourse markers in focus”, by Stephan Giuliani
(p.399-413). The author uses the notion of DM as overarching category in the
same ways as previous papers in the book did with the concept of PM. Working
on the newly digitalized English dialect dictionary by Joseph Wright
(1895-1905), Giuliani proposes three case studies on DMs in non-standard
English of the late 19th century: “Aweel”, which is primarily used as a
hedging device, “Lor-a-massy”, which can express surprise or pity, and
“arrah”, which is more characteristic for Irish English and whose values are
less clear. The article ends up with a methodological conclusion on the use of
historical dialect dictionaries as a tool for research on the development of
DMs.

The fourth and final part (“Language contact and variation”) comprises three
studies on the use of pragmatic markers in contexts of language contact. The
first paper in this section is a corpus-based study on “Italian discourse
markers and modal particles in contact” by Ilaria Florentini (chap.15,
p.417-437). The author examines the use of DMs in the Ladin speech of speakers
from the contact area between Ladin and Italian in Trentino-South Tyrol, with
a short development on the special case of the trilingual Italian/Ladin/German
area. It appears that speakers almost exclusively resort to Italian DMs for
interactional functions, tend to prefer Italian DMs also for metatextual
functions, but that cognitive meanings are rather expressed with Ladin DMs. In
the trilingual area, cognitive meanings are expressed only by Ladin DMs, and
Italian is not as prominent for the expression of metatextual functions as it
is in the bilingual region. Thus, when it comes to establishing a
borrowability hierarchy, the author is led to the following scale :
interactional > metatextual > cognitive.

Chapter 16 (“Functional markers in Llanito code-switching : Regular patterns
in Gibraltar’s bilingual speech”, by Eugenio Goria, p.439-457) is devoted to
Llanito, a mixed speech of Gibraltarian English and Gibraltarian Spanish,
characterized by frequent code-switching. The paper mostly investigates the
use of Spanish-based PMs inside of verb clauses where English is dominant.
There is a special focus on Spanish PMs “mira”, “bueno” and “dice”. The first
is used as an attention getter, the other two are rather text-linking devices.
Further, the author shows that Spanish cleft structures and metalinguistic
markers are often used either for the expression of textual relations, or of
modality and illocution. Here also, the conclusion discusses the possibility
of establishing a borrowability hierarchy, in this case PM > DM > MP.

The last paper is a comparison of the use of “just” in English and “juste” in
French, from which “just” was originally borrowed (Kate Beeching, “Just a
suggestion : just/e in French and English”, p.459-480). The author combines a
language contact perspective with a contrastive approach. She shows that
English “just” has undergone a broader pragmatic expansion than French
“juste”. This might be due to the fact that the original meaning of “juste”
(‘correct’) is still very salient in French. French has also developed an
adverb “justement”, which can play the role of a PM. Oral corpus data confirm
that “just” is much more frequent in oral English than “juste” in oral French,
where “justement” is actually more frequent than “juste”. “Just” has developed
both mitigating and intensifying values, which are more marginal in French,
though some signs suggest that “juste” might be on the verge of developing a
most robust intensifying usage. The conclusion insists upon the importance of
individual lexical factors in the pragmaticalization process of DMs.

EVALUATION

As is often the case with collective volumes on discourse markers and modal
particles, this book is characterized by a major diversity of approaches and
interests that makes it hard to deliver a general evaluation of the volume as
a whole. This impression of heterogeneity is reinforced by the arrangement of
the 17 papers in four sections. For the sake of coherence, a few papers could
have been placed in another part of the volume. For instance, Chapter 5 (by
Adriana Costăchescu) is the single study in the first part that is not
corpus-based, and also the single case of formal approach (in this case, SDRT)
in a part otherwise devoted to functional, usage-based analyses. It might have
been more appropriate to move it to Part 3 on “language-specific and
diachronic studies”. Even Chapter 4 (on Greek, by Dionysis Goutsos, p.125-149)
might have been transferred there: the study is corpus-based, but does not
rely on the same kind of methodology as the first three chapters, which form a
very coherent whole. Indeed, the third part is already very long and would
have be only longer if Chapters 4 and 5 were moved there. But here also, it
should have been possible to draw a line between diachronic studies (Ch. 9,
10, 11, 14) and synchronic approaches (12, 13, possibly also 4 and 5) and thus
organize the book into 5 more homogeneous parts, each of which would have
contained 3 to 5 papers. This would have provided the volume with a more
systematic outlook.

But this heterogeneity should not mask the two important merits of this edited
volume: its representativity of contemporary research and the very robust
introduction, which is also an excellent panorama of the state of the art.

First, the range of approaches represented here is so broad that this volume
can be used as a companion for linguists looking for an encompassing panorama
of contemporary research in the field. Though the focus unequivocally lies on
functional approaches, formal research is represented, as well (with Abraham
and Costăchescu). Within the spectrum of functional linguistics, different
methodologies are represented, especially as regards the status of corpora. In
this respect, the complementary papers by Crible (Ch.3, p. 99-127) and Bolly,
Crible, Degand and Uygur-Distexhe (Ch.2, p.71-98) should be granted special
attention. They represent a very solid contribution to the methodological
development of corpus-driven linguistics in the field of DM research. Other
papers are more traditional, such as Goutsos’s study on Greek, where the
corpus is used to provide percentages and proportions indicating placement
preferences for numerous markers. Finally, a third group of papers uses
corpora only as bases of authentic examples (Costăchescu and most of the
papers in Part 3). 

It is remarkable to see that en vogue notions such as grammaticalization and
pragmaticalization do not play a really important role in this volume. Not a
single paper is devoted to the discussion of these notions or to the question
of their delimitation (for discussion, see Diewald 2011 and Badiou-Monferran &
Buchi 2012, among many others). Some readers might regard this as a blind
spot, at least if what they expect is a complete state of the art. Yet, it
appears that even the chapters dealing with the historical development of
these markers do not obviously need to make use of these notions. In itself,
this is a confirmation of the fact that it is possible to disentangle research
on DMs from the debates surrounding grammaticalization and pragmaticalization
theories, and as such, an interesting contribution.

Further, it should be noted that the introduction written by the two book
editors is very ambitious and goes well beyond the standards of introductions
to volumes of collected papers or proceedings. After the general presentation,
each part of the volume is introduced by two small chapters: ‘What do we
know?’ And ‘Where do we go from there?’. Through this introduction, the
editors have visibly tried to give as much coherence as possible to the
volume. Each individual contribution is inserted into the broader framework of
contemporary research on DMs, MPs and PMs. Of course, this attempt is
sometimes undermined by the broad range of approaches represented. Even the
terminological conventions adopted for the volume concerning the use of
concepts as DM, PM and MP have not been followed by all authors, so that the
introduction sometimes has to include corrections or footnotes highlighting
this terminological and theoretical fuzziness, which inevitably weakens the
consistency of the text. But this does not prevent the introduction from
providing a very valuable summary of current tendencies, and to confirm the
status of this volume as a useful panorama of contemporary research on
discourse markers,  modal particles and pragmatic markers.

REFERENCES

Asher, Nicolas & Alex Lascarides. 1993. Temporal interpretation, discourse
relations and common sense entailment. Linguistics and Philosophy 16. 437-493.

Beeching, Kate & Ulrich Detges (eds.). 2014. Discourse functions at the left
and right periphery: Crosslinguistic investigations of language use and
language change. Leiden: Brill.

Badiou-Monferran, Claire & Eva Buchi. 2012. Plaidoyer pour la désolidarisation
des notions de pragmaticalisation et de grammaticalisation. Troisième Congrès
Mondial de Linguistique Française 1. 127-144.

Diewald, Gabriele. 2011. Pragmaticalization (defined) as grammaticalization of
discourse functions. Linguistics 49/2. 365-390.

Diewald, Gabriele &  Marijana Kresić. 2010. Ein übereinzelsprachliches
kontrastives Beschreibungsmodell für Partikelbedeutungen. Linguistik Online
44/4. 

Espinal, María Teresa. 1993. The interpretation of “no-pas” in Catalan.
Journal of Pragmatics 19. 353-369.

Lakoff, George. 1972. Hedges : a study of meaning criteria and the logic of
fuzzy concepts. Papers from the 8th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic
Society. 183-228.

Maschler, Yael. 1994. Metalanguaging and discourse markers in bilingual
conversation. Language in Society 23/3. 325-366.

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1982. From propositional to textual and expressive
meanings; some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization. Lehmann,
Winfred P. & Yakov Malkiel (eds), Perspectives on Historical Linguistics.
Papers from a conference held at the meeting of the Language Theory Division,
Modern Language Assn., San Francisco, 27–30 December 1979. Amsterdam : John
Benjamins. 245-272.

Wright, Joseph. 1895-1905. The English Dialect Dictionary,  vols. Oxford :
Henry Frowde.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Pierre-Yves Modicom teaches Germanic Linguistics at Université
Bordeaux-Montaigne (France). He holds a PhD in linguistics from U.
Paris-Sorbonne. His works is devoted to the syntax and semantics of
connectives and modal particles in German.





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