Pragmatic Markers and Pragmaticalization

Pragmatic Markers and Pragmaticalization
Author: Peter Lauwers
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2012
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 902720263X

In this paper, we investigate the evolution from imperatives to discourse markers in Romance, with a corpus-based approach. We focus on the case of items coming from verbs meaning 'to look', in a semasiological perspective: Spanish and Catalan mira, Portuguese olha, Italian guarda, French regarde, Romanian uite. We show that they all share many uses, among which turn-taking, introduction of reported speech, hesitation phenomenon, topic-shifting and modalization, except for French regarde. We then establish (against Waltereit, 2002) that the development of these uses is the result of a process

Pragmatic Markers in Contrast

Pragmatic Markers in Contrast
Author: Karin Aijmer
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2022-05-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0080480292

Presents an examination of the methods and theories for studying pragmatic markers cross-linguistically. This work also explores the comparison of pragmatic markers across languages in order to offer important insights into the similarities and differences between languages.

Corpus Pragmatics

Corpus Pragmatics
Author: Karin Aijmer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2015
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1107015049

The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.

Discourse Functions at the Left and Right Periphery

Discourse Functions at the Left and Right Periphery
Author: Kate Beeching
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2014-08-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004274820

A basic property of human language is that it unfolds in time; the left and right margin of discourse units do not behave in a symmetrical fashion. The working hypothesis of this volume is that discourse elements at the left periphery have mainly subjective and discourse-structuring functions, whereas at the right periphery, such elements play an intersubjective or modalising role. However, the picture that emerges from the different contributions to this volume is far more complex. While it seems clear that the working hypothesis cannot be upheld in a “strong” way, most of the chapters – especially those based on corpus data – show that an asymmetry between left and right periphery does exist and that it is a matter of frequency.

Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude

Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude
Author: Gisle Andersen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2000-07-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027283745

In interactive discourse we not only express propositions, but we also express different attitudes to them. That is, we communicate how our mind entertains those propositions that we express. A speaker is able to express an attitude of belief, desire, hope, doubt, fear, regret or pretence that a given proposition represents a true state of affairs. This collection of papers explores the contribution of particles and other uninflected mood-indicating function words to the expression of propositional attitude in the broad sense. Some languages employ this type of attitude-marking device extensively, even for the expression of basic moods and basic speech act categories, other languages use such markers sparsely and always in interaction with syntactic form. Both types of language are examined in this volume, which includes studies of attitudinal markers in Amharic, English, Gascon, Occitan, German, Greek, Hausa, Hungarian, Japanese, Norwegian and Swahili. The theoretical emphasis is on issues such as interpretive vs. descriptive use of utterances or utterance parts, procedural semantics, linguistic underdetermination of the proposition expressed and the speaker’s communicated attitude to it, higher-level explicatures in the relevance-theoretic sense, the explicit — implicit distinction, as well as processes of grammaticalization and negotiation of propositional attitude in spoken interaction.

Contrastive Pragmatics

Contrastive Pragmatics
Author: Karin Aijmer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2011-06-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027286647

We have recently seen a broadening of pragmatics to new areas and to the study of more than one language. This is illustrated by the present volume on Contrastive Pragmatics which brings together a number of articles originally presented at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference in Göteborg in 2007. The contributions deal with pragmatic phenomena such as speech acts, discourse markers and modality in different language pairs using theoretical approaches such as politeness theory, Conversation Analysis, Appraisal Theory, grammaticalization and cultural textology. Also discourse practices and genres may differ across cultures as illustrated by the study of TV news shows in different countries. Contrastive pragmatics also includes the comparative study of pragmatic phenomena from a foreign language perspective, a new area with implications for language teaching and intercultural communication. The contributions to this volume were originally published in Languages in Contrast 9:1 (2009).

Pragmatics of Society

Pragmatics of Society
Author: Gisle Andersen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 720
Release: 2011-12-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110214423

Pragmatics of society takes a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics and gives a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a wide range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield of pragmatics encompasses sociolinguistic studies that focus on how pragmatic and discourse features vary according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies investigating variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also covers studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.

The Evolution of Pragmatic Markers in English

The Evolution of Pragmatic Markers in English
Author: Laurel J. Brinton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2017-08-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108326331

Based on a rich set of historical data, this book traces the development of pragmatic markers in English, from hwæt in Old English and whilom in Middle English to whatever and I'm just saying in present-day English. Laurel J. Brinton carefully maps the syntactic origins and development of these forms, and critically examines postulated unilineal pathways, such as from adverb to conjunction to discourse marker, or from main clause to parenthetical. The book sets case studies within a larger examination of the development of pragmatic markers as instances of grammaticalization or pragmaticalization. The characteristics of pragmatic markers - as primarily oral, syntactically optional, sentence-external, grammatically indeterminate elements - are revised in the context of scholarship on pragmatic markers over the last thirty or more years.

Pragmatic Approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek

Pragmatic Approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek
Author: Camille Denizot
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2017-10-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027264937

Pragmatics forms nowadays an integral part of the description not only of modern languages but also of ancient languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek. This book explores various pragmatic phenomena in these two languages, which are accessible through corpora consisting of a broad range of text types. It comprises empirical synchronic studies that deal with three main topics: (i) speech acts and pragmatic markers, (ii) word order, and (iii) discourse markers and particles. The specificity of this book consists in the discussion and application of various methodological approaches. It provides new insights into the pragmatic phenomena encountered, compares, where possible, the results of the investigation of the two languages, and draws conclusions of a more general nature. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on pragmatics in general and to scholars of Latin and Ancient Greek in particular.