A quantitative approach to the grammaticalization of discourse markers

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Koops ◽  
Arne Lohmann
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Quantitative Approach ◽  
Syntactic Category ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Corpus Data

This article takes a quantitative approach to the grammar of English two-part discourse marker sequences like oh well, you know I mean, etc. We investigate the internal ordering preferences of such sequences in spoken American English corpus data from the perspective of grammaticalization. From this perspective, the development of many discourse markers can be understood as involving a process of increasing syntactic de-categorialization (Hopper 1991) as the grammaticalizing element loses its original grammatical constraints and comes to function as a marker at the level of discourse. We test the hypothesis that discourse marker grammaticalization results in largely unconstrained ordering possibilities. Our analysis shows that, on the contrary, discourse marker sequencing is highly constrained. We interpret these constraints in terms of Auer’s (1996) model of discourse marker grammaticalization. Discourse marker sequencing is characterized by strong persistence of a marker’s original syntactic category and reflects its specific grammaticalization trajectory.

Discourse markers as stance markers

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomoko I. Sakita
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Conversational Interaction ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Topic Shift

Stance is inherent in conversational interaction and is interactional in nature. When speakers take a stance, they pay attention to both prior stances and stance relations, as well as to the anticipated consequences of their stancetaking. They manage stance relations as a way of dealing with the “sociocognitive relations” of intersubjectivity (Du Bois 2007). Using the dialogic framework proposed by Du Bois, this paper shows that the discourse marker well in American English works as a resource for the management of relationships among stances. With its referential and grammatical flexibility, it is uniquely characterized as a meta-stance marker because, rather than indexing a specific stance, it negotiates and regulates stance relations. Well is analyzed in two contextual categories: first, at stance divergence among utterances, and second, at stance shifts embedded in topic shift.

Pseudoquotation in current English communication: “Hey, she didn't really say it”

1989 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty Lou Dubois
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Conversational Interaction ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Rhetorical Question ◽  
English Only ◽  
Expository Discourse

ABSTRACTTo investigate discourse and interactive functions ofquote formula+hey+pseudoquotation, that is, invented quotation, in current English communication, tokens were collected from public and commercial broadcasts and miscellaneous readings during a four-month period. In addition, all instances ofheywith context were extracted from the Brown Corpus of American English. Only 26 possible tokens, the majority from radio and television, were located; one instance inBrownindicates existence as early as 1961. A speaker uses quote formula +hey+ pseudoquotation to dramatize and thereby give emphasis to an important point (in these examples, generally in an expository discourse), a practice reported for both sophisticated and folk discourse. Instead of a rhetorical question, the device makes arhetorical answerto an unasked question. Although pseudoquotation can be found either without discourse marker or with other discourse marker,heyis an appropriate marker for pseudoquotation, simultaneously to mark an important point in a discourse and to bind listeners to the ongoing interaction by (re)capturing their attention. (Discourse markers, conversational interaction, pragmatics, dramatization,hey, quotation)

Colloquialization in journalistic writing

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Rühlemann ◽  
Martin Hilpert
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
American English ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Written Text ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Diachronic Development ◽  
New Evidence

Abstract Recent analyses of written text types have discovered significant frequency increases of colloquial or conversational elements, such as contractions, personal pronouns, questions or the progressive. This trend is often referred to as colloquialization. This paper presents a new perspective on colloquialization, with a special focus on the discourse marker well. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, we present new evidence of colloquialization on the basis of the TIME Magazine Corpus (Davies 2007), which allows analyses of diachronic change in recent written American English. The focus of our analysis is on highly frequent “inserts” (Biber et al. 1999: 56), which are elements such as discourse markers (e.g., well and oh), backchannels (yeah, uh-huh, etc.), and hesitators (uh and um, etc.). We conclude that inserts significantly increase diachronically in TIME. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the element well in its function as a discourse marker. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analytical steps, we analyze its diachronic development in terms of its structural contexts and its pragmatic functions, fleshing out how the process of colloquialization has affected its usage in recent written American English. We argue that the integration of corpus linguistic and pragmatic methods in this case study represents a new step towards the field of corpus pragmatics, that is, “the rapprochement between corpus linguistics and pragmatics and an integration of their key methodologies” (Rühlemann and Aijmer 2014: 23).

Outlining a grammaticalization path for the Spanish formula en plan (de): A contribution to crosslinguistic pragmatics

Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (6) ◽  
pp. 1543-1579
Author(s):  
Paula Rodríguez-Abruñeiras
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Diachronic Study ◽  
Diachronic Development ◽  
The Early 21St Century

AbstractThis article discusses the diachronic development of the Spanish multifunctional formula en plan (with its variant en plan de, literally ‘in plan (of)’ but usually equivalent to English like). The article has two main aims: firstly, to describe the changes that the formula has undergone since its earliest occurrences as a marker in the nineteenth century up to the early 21st century. The diachronic study evinces a process of grammaticalization in three steps: from noun to clause adverbial and then to discourse marker. Secondly, to conduct a contrastive analysis between en plan (de) and the English markers like and kind of/kinda so as to shed new light on the potential existence of a universal pathway of grammaticalization in the emergence of discourse markers.

scholarly journals Comparative modals

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
An Van linden
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Temporal Reference ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Phonetic Reduction ◽  
The One

This article examines modal expressions with the comparative adverbs better, rather and sooner in American English, and assesses to what extent they have grammaticalized. The corpus data offer evidence that the three comparative modal groups exhibit considerable phonetic reduction in the 1810–2009 period studied. Analysis of several aspects of the constructions, such as subject types, temporal reference and comparative meaning, reveals which conditions promoted this erosion. However, the data also indicate that the three groups are semantically and constructionally quite heterogeneous. In fact, this article proposes a grammaticalization scenario for the rather and sooner structures that is different from the one posited for the better structures.

scholarly journals Grammatical Positions of Focuser Like Among Native English-Speaking Undergraduate Students

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 116
Author(s):  
Basim Alamri
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Final Exam ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Midwestern University ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Native English Speaking

Discourse markers (DMs) are used in everyday conversations to serve different meanings and functions. The present exploratory study investigated grammatical positions of focuser like among 60 undergraduate native-English-speaking students at a midwestern university in the United States. Students were asked to read and place focuser like in this sentence: “We have to read five chapters for the final exam”. Then students were required to indicate a degree of acceptability of the placement of like at every possible position in sentences that contained the discourse marker like in 10 different grammatical positions. The results showed that students preferred inserting the DM like before a noun phrase, at the beginning of a sentence, and before a verb phrase, respectively. In terms of gender, females frequently posited focuser like before a sentence, whereas males placed it before a noun phrase. Also, the discourse marker like does not occur within auxiliary. Finally, this study draws conclusions about different grammatical positions and broader usages of discourse marker focuser like among younger students. 

scholarly journals Le marche di lista in russo. Segnali riformulativi, estensivi, generalizzanti… i vse takoe

2016 ◽  
pp. 17-43
Author(s):  
Valentina Benigni
Keyword(s):  
Functional Properties ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Structural And Functional Properties

This paper offers a survey of list markers in contemporary Russian, i.e. discourse markers that signal the presence of a list and fulfil specific semantic and pragmatic functions, such as generalization (и все такое ‘and things like that’), exemplification (типа ‘such as/kind of’) or reformulation of the list content (так сказать ‘so to speak’). It also explores the structural and functional properties of general extenders within the framework of CxG, focusing particularly on the process of lexicalization and grammaticalization of the discourse marker и все такое ‘and things like that’.

scholarly journals Discourse Marker Sequencing and Grammaticalization

2013 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Koops ◽  
Arne Lohmann
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Final Outcome ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Grammatical Functions

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This paper deals with the grammatical properties of discourse markers (DMs), specifically their ordering preferences relative to one another. While the data presented here are synchronic, we approach the topic of DM sequencing from the perspective of grammaticalization. From this perspective, DMs can be understood as the result of a process in which elements serving other functions, for example grammatical functions at the level of sentential syntax, come to be conventionally used as markers of discourse-level relations, or what Schiffrin (1987: 31) operationally defined as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk.” Here we are concerned with the final outcome of this process. We ask: to what degree do fully formed DMs retain or lose the grammatical properties associated with their previous role, specifically their syntactic co-occurrence constraints? In other words, what degree of syntactic decategorialization (in the sense of Hopper 1991) do DMs display?

A relevance-theoretic account of the use of the discourse marker well in translation from Chinese into English

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 162-179
Author(s):  
Wu Guangjun
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Pragmatic Enrichment ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Special Category

Abstract Discourse markers are a special category of words or expressions which have been shown to pose challenges during the translation process. This article adopts a relevance-theoretic perspective and, based on the two English translations of the Chinese play Leiyu (Thunderstorm), explores the use of the discourse marker well in translation from Chinese into English. The findings show that the discourse marker well in translation from Chinese into English is added in two scenarios: to intensify weaker forms of a similar Chinese discourse marker or as an addition when omitted in Chinese. Moreover, interlingual pragmatic enrichment will ensue and the English translations, in comparison with their Chinese originals, become more determinate. Based on this study, we can conclude that discourse markers are important pragmatic elements in translation from Chinese into English. Likewise, contrastive pragmatics is shown to be of potential in the process of translation.

‘I Assume You Know’

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-102
Author(s):  
Maher Bahloul
Keyword(s):  
Pilot Study ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
Pragmatic Function ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
And Function ◽  
Discourse Connectives ◽  
Formal Features

This paper is a pilot study on the form and function of the Arabic discourse marker ‘ṭabʕan’. Discourse markers in language have been the focus of myriad studies under a number of denotations such as discourse operators, discourse connectives, modal markers, cue phrases, amongst several others. While such markers occur in written and spoken forms of language, they are much more abundant in formal and informal conversations. ṭabʕan, for instance, is observed in media Arabic in formal and semi-formal contexts. The paper highlights its formal features, its syntactic distribution, and identifies its core pragmatic function. Although the marker does not change the truth value of utterances or alter them in any significant way, it tends to cluster around the speaker. Thus, it injects some modal features oscillating between assertiveness and evidentiality.

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