Discourse Markers and Modal Particles

Discourse Markers and Modal Particles
Author: Liesbeth Degand
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2013-11-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027271224

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
Author: Chiara Fedriani
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2017-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027265496

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
Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2020-09-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108861083

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.

Approaches to Discourse Particles

Approaches to Discourse Particles
Author: Kerstin Fischer
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2021-11-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0080461581

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
Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 347
Release: 1991
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027250227

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.

Studies at the Grammar-Discourse Interface

Studies at the Grammar-Discourse Interface
Author: Alexander Haselow
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027259895

This book investigates phenomena at the grammar–discourse interface with a strong focus on discourse markers, whose development and concrete uses in a given language tend to be based on a close interplay of grammatical and discourse-related forces. The topics range from the transition of linguistic signs “out of” sentence grammar and “into” the domain of discourse to differences between more grammatical vs. more discourse-pragmatic expressions in terms of structural behavior and cognitive processing, and the different, intricate ways in which the usage conditions and meanings of grammatical constituents or structural units are affected by the discourse context in which they are used. The twelve studies in this book are based on fresh empirical data from languages such as English, Basque, Korean, Japanese and French and involve the study of linguistic expressions and structures such as pragmatic markers and particles, comment clauses, expletives, adverbial connectors, and expressives.

Pragmatics of Discourse

Pragmatics of Discourse
Author: Klaus P. Schneider
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2014-06-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110375028

Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

English Discourse Particles

English Discourse Particles
Author: Karin Aijmer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2002-09-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027297355

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.

Discourse Markers

Discourse Markers
Author: Graham Ranger
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2018-02-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3319709054

In our everyday speech we represent events and situations, but we also provide commentary on these representations, situating ourselves and others relative to what we have to say and situating what we say in larger contexts. The present volume examines this activity of discourse marking from an enunciative perspective, providing the first English-language study of the highly influential Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations. This semantic/pragmatic theory is popular among academics who specialize in linguistics, discourse analysis, translation studies and didactics in France, but has not yet been widely adopted elsewhere. The tools of this theory are applied to a variety of specific discourse markers in contemporary English and semantic hypotheses are tested using the data-based approach of corpus linguistics. This book therefore provides an English-speaking readership with the keys to understand the theory underlying the author’s analysis of a selection of markers (‘anyway’, ‘indeed’, ‘in fact’, ‘yet’, ‘still’, ‘like’ and 'I think'). This book will provide a valuable resource for students and researchers in linguistics with an interest in discourse markers, natural language argumentation, formal semantics, the interfaces between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, linguistic theorisation and French – or “poststructural” – models of discourse analysis.