Discourse Markers and Modal Particles

Discourse Markers and Modal Particles PDF

Author: Liesbeth Degand

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2013-11-14

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 9027271224

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Discourse markers and modal particles are fuzzy linguistic categories that are difficult to describe. The contributions in this volume go beyond this statement. They discuss the intersection between modal particles and discourse markers and examine whether or not it is possible to draw a line between these two types of linguistic expressions. On the basis of new synchronic and diachronic data, from speech and writing, from European and Asian languages or cross-linguistically, the authors answer the question whether discourse markers and modal particles are distinct categories, whether they form a cline, or whether modal particles are a subcategory of discourse markers. This common question shows up throughout all chapters, which makes the book to a coherent whole. By disentangling the complexity of categorizing multifunctional expressions, this book also sheds new light on the processes of meaning extension. The traditional discourse and modal functions are complemented by interactional and textual ones. A must read for functional linguists.

Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles

Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles PDF

Author: Chiara Fedriani

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 9027265496

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This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form, meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages, along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts, often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collected in this volume also discuss different factors at play in processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, which include contact-induced change and pragmatic borrowing, socio-interactional functional pressures and sociopragmatic indexicalities, constraints of cognitive processing, together with regularities in semantic change. Putting the traditional issues concerning the status, delimitation and categorization of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles somewhat off the stage, the eighteen articles collected in this volume deal instead with general questions concerning the development and use of such procedural elements, explored from different approaches, both formal and functional, and from a variety of perspectives – including corpus-based, sociolinguistic, and contrastive perspectives – and offering language-specific synchronic and diachronic studies.

Modality in Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics

Modality in Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics PDF

Author: Werner Abraham

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-09-17

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 1108861083

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What do we mean when we say things like 'If only we knew what he was up to!' Clearly this is more than just a message, or a question to our addressee. We are expressing simultaneously that we don't know, and also that we wish to know. Several modes of encoding contribute to such modalities of expression: word order, subordinating subjunctions, sentences that are subordinated but nevertheless occur autonomously, and attitudinal discourse adverbs which, far beyond lexical adverbials of modality, allow the speaker and the listener to presuppose full agreement, partial agreement under presupposed conditions, or negotiation of common ground. This state of the art survey proposes a new model of modality, drawing on data from a variety of Germanic and Slavic languages to find out what is cross-linguistically universal about modality, and to argue that it is a constitutive part of human cognition.

Discourse Particles

Discourse Particles PDF

Author: Josef Bayer

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2016-12-19

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 3110493489

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Particles have for the longest time been ignored by linguistic research. School-type grammars ignored them since they did not fit into pre-conceived notions of categories, and since they did not seem to enter into grammatical relations commonly discussed in the genre. Only in the last century did some publications discuss particles – and even then only from the perspective of their discourse and pragmatic functions, i.e. their dependance on certain previous contexts, and concluded that the function of particles for the grammar of sentences and their interpretation remains obscure. The current volume presents 11 new articles that take a fresh look at particles: As it turns out, particles inform many aspects of syntax and semantics, too – both diachronically and synchronically: Particles are shown to have fascinating syntactic properties with respect to projection, locality, movement and scope. Their interpretative contributions can be studied with the rigorous methods of formal semantics. Cross-linguistic and diachronic investigations shed new light on the genesis and development of these intriguing – and under-estimated – kinds of lexical elements.

Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles

Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles PDF

Author: Pierre-Yves Modicom

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2020-03-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9027261466

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The articles collected in this volume offer new perspectives into the relevance of notions such as topic, antitopic, contrastive topic, focus, verum focus and theticity for the analysis of the syntax and semantics of modal particles, sentence-final particles and other medial, sentential and illocutive particles. This book addresses three great questions in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese to Mohawk, including Basque, French, German, Italian, Kazakh, Spanish and Turkish, with some insights from English and Russian. The first question is the role played by information-structural strategies such as left dislocations, clefts or the morphological marking of focus in the rise of discourse particles. In the second part, papers are concerned with the relevance of information structure for the study of polysemic and polyfunctional discourse particles. Finally, the contribution of particles to the determination of the information-structural profile of the clause is examined, as well as their role in the information-structural specification of illocutionary types. Language-specific papers alternate with comparative approaches in order to show how newer insights on information structure can help resolve some of the classical issues of the linguistic research on particles.

Approaches to Discourse Particles

Approaches to Discourse Particles PDF

Author: Kerstin Fischer

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-11-22

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 0080461581

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Approaches to Discourse Particles serves as a unique reference by presenting the spectrum of approaches to discourse particles/markers in their richness and variability, whilst ensuring that the differences and similarities between the approaches are clear and comparable. With the hundreds of studies now published on discourse particles/markers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make such comparisons. Fischer addresses this problem by asking renowned researchers from different linguistic backgrounds to describe their particular ways of accounting for some of the most important problem areas by addressing issues such as: definition; the functional spectrum of the items considered; the model of polyfunctionality proposed; and the broader framework of the model.Discourse particles fulfil many different functions; they contribute to text structuring, dialogue management, turn-taking, politeness, and more. Their investigation is, thus, relevant from many different perspectives within pragmatics and linguistics as a whole. Approaches to Discourse Particles constitutes an important orientation for newcomers to the field, as well as providing the necessary guidance and reference for the many scholars now working in the growing research community. "Wide-ranging and useful... Places the assumptions underlying divergent approaches in sharp relief." – Lawrence Schourup, Osaka Prefecture University, Japan

Discourse Particles

Discourse Particles PDF

Author: Werner Abraham

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 9027250227

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This book is about particles in the narrower sense of the word as opposed to the broader meaning covering all uninflected words of a language. In the narrower meaning of the linguistic term particles can be distinguished between logical, or scalar particles and modal, or pragmatic particles. The semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties of modal particles differ vastly from those of the scalar particles, on the one hand, and their homonymic counterparts functioning in different syntactic categories, on the other hand. The contributions to this volume offer the latest research on the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties of particles in the English and German language.

English Discourse Particles

English Discourse Particles PDF

Author: Karin Aijmer

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9781588112842

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There are few aspects of language which are more problematic than its discourse particles. The present study of discourse particles draws upon data from the London-Lund Corpus to show how the methods and tools of corpora can sharpen their description. The first part of the book provides a picture of the state of the art in discourse particle studies and introduces the theory and methodology for the analysis in the second part of the book. Discourse particles are analysed as elements which have been grammaticalised and as a result have certain properties and uses. The importance of linguistic and contextual cues such as text type, position in the discourse, prosody and collocation for analysing discourse particles is illustrated. The following chapters deal with specific discourse particles ("now," "oh, just, sort of, and that sort of thing, actually") on the basis of their empirical analysis in the London-Lund Corpus. Examples and extended extracts from many different text types are provided to illustrate what discourse particles are doing in discourse.

Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries

Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries PDF

Author: Daniël Van Olmen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 9027259089

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The relation between pragmatic markers and the peripheries of clauses, utterances and/or turns has been a topic of linguistic interest for the last few decades. Many issues continue to be debated, however, such as “how should the notion of periphery be defined?”, “to what extent do pragmatic markers in the left versus the right periphery fulfill different functions?” and “which factors determine the order of multiple pragmatic markers in a periphery?”. This volume brings together a number of studies addressing these and other questions. It presents new data from a diverse range of languages – including less researched ones in this context like Ainu, Latvian and Lithuanian – and on a variety of types of pragmatic marker – including emoji. The volume as a whole offers new insights into, among other things, the subjectivity intersubjectivity peripheries hypothesis, the idea of left-to-right movement and the matrix clauses hypothesis.