Perspectival factors and pro-drop: A corpus study of speaker/addressee pronouns with creer ‘think/ believe’ and saber ‘know’ in spoken Spanish

This paper examines overt and covert speaker/addressee pronouns with the cognitive verbs creer ‘think/believe’ and saber ‘know’ in a corpus of spoken peninsular Spanish – the Madrid and Alcalá samples of PRESEEA (2014– ) – with a focus on 1st person singular (yo) creo que ‘(I) think that’. Departing from the observation made in the literature that overt pronouns are highly frequent with creer and that topic shift cannot account for all of them, it will be argued that perspectival factors related to evidentiality/epistemicity and subjectivity influence overt pronoun realization. A corpus study was conducted to investigate whether (i) [person] and [polarity] and (ii) the type of complement affect overt pronoun realization with the cognitive verbs creer and saber. The results indicate that the type of belief expressed in the embedded clause should be taken into account, as well as person and polarity. The ultimate trigger for phonetic realization of speaker/addressee pronouns will be argued to be the notion of contrast: cognitive verbs whose embedded complement encodes evaluations and non-visual, abstract information have high frequencies of overt pronoun realization because these contexts favor the evoking of alternative perspective holders. Overt pronouns will be analyzed as the result of a [+contrast] feature which is assigned to the specifier of a functional category encoding perspective in the split IP.

Linguistic Impoliteness and Interpersonal Positioning in Nigerian Online Political Forum

Interactional positioning has to do with how people express their attitudes and dispositions to others (stance) and signal how they wish to relate with other participants in the discourse (engagement). These are closely connected with the extent to which impoliteness is expressed in discourse and the resources and strategies employed. This study investigates interactional positioning and impoliteness in two Nigerian political discussion sites, Nairaland Forum and Gistmania. The findings show that bald-on-record and negative impoliteness were predominant in the discussions. The common linguistic expressions of impoliteness were name-calling, vulgarism, cursing, dismissal and sarcasm. Participants also used questions, directives and reader pronouns you and your for face attacks and heightening of the effect of impolite expressions. Self-mentions and attitude markers, especially cognitive verbs, were used to convey feelings and attitudes towards other participants within and outside the discussion. The study concludes that impoliteness thrives in political debates online because of the uninhibited context, which gives freedom to participants to deliberately inject invective language in order to set the emotional temperature in the discussion and cause disaffection among the participants and the group they represent.

Variable subject pronoun expression revisited: This is what the Paisas do

We explore subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Medellín, Colombia using 4,623 tokens to test eight predictors. The 28% overall pronominal rate found is significantly higher than those in other mainland communities. Grammatical person exerts the greatest conditioning effect, with uno ‘one’ strongly favoring overt subjects. Findings for verb class reveal that speech and cognitive verbs promote overt subjects. However, our in-depth analysis unveils opposing tendencies between different pronominal subject + verb collocations for the same verb. E.g., whereas (yo) soy ‘I am’ strongly favors overt subjects, (ellos) son ‘they are’ favors null subjects. These findings suggest that analyses focusing on infinitives do not constitute the most accurate way to explore verb effects on SPE. Moreover, the effect of age reveals a low pronominal rate among the youngest speakers, a finding that appears to have cognitive and acquisitional implications, as younger speakers would be expected to have higher pronominal rates. In general, this study contributes to expand our knowledge of SPE. Further, the findings regarding age and the lexical effect of the verb open promising research paths.

“I guess anyone would do that wouldn’t they?”

Hedging is a complex phenomenon with an indefinite number of potential realisations. The complexity and versatility of hedging strategies make them particularly interesting to study across languages. This contrastive study compares the realisations of the pragmatic function of hedging in everyday Norwegian and English conversations using data from four corpora of Norwegian and English informal spoken conversations (the Norwegian Speech Corpus, the Nordic Dialect Corpus, the BigBrother corpus, and the BNC2014). The results show that speakers of both languages mainly use pragmatic particles, adverbs, and first-/second-person pronouns + cognitive verbs [1/2 pers. + Cog. V] to express hedging. Furthermore, English speakers use significantly more [1/2 pers. + Cog. V] and modal verbs than Norwegian speakers, who use significantly more adjectives, prepositional phrases and clauses to hedge their utterances.

Licht en recht

Light and rightThe adjectives licht and recht can be used as adverbs of degree; they can also be used to express a negative-polar meaning in combination with a restricted number of verbs. In this squib, we will focus on the negative-polar and collocational properties of licht and recht by means of corpus data. licht is shown to be associated with futural clauses, often in combination with the verb vergeten ‘to forget’, while recht is associated with cognitive verbs, especially weten ‘to know’, begrijpen ‘to understand’ and verstaan ‘to understand’.

HYPONYMY OF ENGLISH COGNITIVE VERBS

The paper provides the analysis of the hyponymic relations in terms of the onomasiological approach to the lexico-semantic fields and endocentric series. Lexicometric properties of the hyponymic relations of English cognitive verbs are studied based on WordNet Vocabulary Helper heuristic resource. It enables conducting the analysis in the direction from a hyperonym to its hyponyms, which echoes with the reconstruction of the conceptual structure. In this respect, further application and elaboration of the suggested methodology appears topical. Hyponymy of verbs is scarcely studied in linguistics. It has been observed that the nature of verbal hyponymy proves to be different from the nominal one, as verbal hyponymy, or troponymy after C. Fellbaum and G. Miller, is based on the manner of action relation between the lexemes. Thus, it requires special attention and novel methods and sources apart from traditional dictionaries. WordNet as a conceptual thesaurus and a large lexical database has been designed to assist multiple applications involving vocabulary as a system and is well applicable to the study of paradigmatic lexical relations. Among the advantages of the methodology based on WordNet is taking into consideration vast polysemy of the lexical items. It enables tracing narrowing of the categorial cognitive verbal meaning without getting sidetracked. As a result of this study, the ways of endocentric series modelling are suggested, the peculiarities of the verbal hyponymy are defined, the quotient of the hyponymy of English cognitive verbs is calculated, the cases of autohyponymy are identified, as well as the future prospects are delineated.

INTERACTION OF GRAMMATICAL PERSON, NUMBER AND MODALITY IN NON-FACTUAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE MACEDONIAN LANGUAGE

The paper provides an in-depth analysis of functional features of the analytical first-person singular da-construction in the standard Macedonian language. When it is used in an independent clause, the daconstruction has a wide range of modal meanings, the most common of which are imperative and optative. The interaction of the grammatical categories of person, number and modality in the da-construction leads to changes in its meaning and shows its functional potential to indicate the speaker’s communicative intentions. The chosen semasiological approach to describing the da-construction is combined with the functional analysis and the communicative-pragmatic approach. The research material consists of about 200 examples gathered from contemporary Macedonian literary works and journalistic articles. 1. Da-construction has a full non-defective conjugation paradigm with an imperative meaning, where the first singular verb form has a special status. Directive speech acts, where imperative forms are usually used, are not supposed to combine a speaker and an addressee in one person, which causes semantic modification of the da-construction with a 1Sg verb: initially related to the imperative analytical paradigm, it describes the speaker’s intention to perform an action which he / she considers necessary. In addition, this type of construction marks a point in decision- making that is followed by the change of the speaker’s cognitive status; the only exception is the da-construction including verbs of perception, which points to an indirect causation of the addressee. 2. Independent 1Sg da-constructions with speech verbs and cognitive verbs tend to become idiomatic in meaning, which causes their use as discourse markers. Functioning as metacommentary, they help the speaker to direct the dialogue according to his/her communicative intentions. 3. The interaction of grammatical categories in the optative da-construction transforms curses to vows that have a function to confirm the truth of the speaker’s words and his / her commitment to face consequences in case of lying.

Thinking out loud: A discourse analysis of ‘thinking’ during talk radio interactions

Early work in discursive psychology highlighted the rhetorical strength of devices that serve to establish matters as objective facts. More recently, there has been increasing interest within this discipline concerning mental state invocations (e.g. imagining; knowing; intending), which typically convey speaker subjectivity. Elsewhere, linguists have examined the social business enabled by speakers’ deployment of cognitive verbs, a prime example of which deals with overt references to thinking. The current article sets out to extend the work on thinking by synthesizing research from discursive psychology, linguistics, and conversation analysis in order to undertake an integrated analysis of thinking. In our examination of a UK talk radio corpus, comprising data from 11 talk radio shows, we demonstrate three discursive functions of deploying a thinking device: setting an intersubjective agenda; doing opinion; and managing ‘facts’. An integrated approach allows us to examine the rhetorical strength of these subjectivizing maneuvers, and contribute to the existing body of work concerning the discursive deployment of thinking and mental state terms.