Discourse Markers in Romance Languages. Crosslinguistic Approaches in Romance and Beyond
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- List of Contributors
- I Discourse Markers: Theories and Methods
- How the Study of Discourse Markers Changes Pragmatic Theories of Discourse
- Adunque and Dunque in Old Italian between Free and Patterned Variation: The Role of English Translation in Pragmatic Analysis
- II Discourse Markers and Their Relation to Other Semantic and Pragmatic Categories
- A Study on the French Functional Equivalents of some Modal and Metadiscursive Uses of the European Portuguese Marker lá
- The Semantic and Pragmatic Meanings of Italian davvero through Text Types
- The Evidentiality Dimension of the Italian Discourse Marker sai between Subjectification and Intersubjectification Processes
- The Use of știi, știți, vezi, vedeți and înțelegi, înțelegeți as Discourse Markers in Spoken Romanian. A Quantitative Analysis
- Discourse Markers in Complaints and Apologies: A Comparison between Native and Non-Native Speakers of Italian
- III Corpus-Based Approaches to Discourse Markers
- Dismark and Text·a·Gram: Automatic Identification and Categorization of Discourse Markers in Texts
- Digital Discourse Markers in Romanian Forum Communication: The Case of welp, TBH (to be honest) and TBF (to be fair)
- Reformulation Markers, Linguistic Typology and Rhetorical Conventions: The Case of Spanish and Korean
- On Discourse Reformulation Markers with the Structure More + Adverb in European Portuguese: A Corpus-Based Study
- Interactional Discourse Markers in a Corpus of Italian Migrants in Munich
- Discourse Markers si vous voulez in French and dacă vreți in Romanian: A Comparative Analysis
- Même Discourse Marker? A Study of Its Argumentative Uses
Foreword
This volume reunites a selection of the papers presented in the international conference Discourse Markers in Romance Languages: Crosslinguistic approaches in Romance and beyond (DISROM7), organized at the University of Craiova, Romania, during 16–18 June 2023. This conference continued the series of prestigious scientific events devoted to discourse markers in Romance languages (Madrid, 2010; Buenos Aires, 2011; Campinas, 2012; Heidelberg, 2015; Louvain-la- Neuve, 2017; Bergamo, 2019), and served as a platform for internationally renowned linguists and young researchers alike to exchange views and ideas and to broaden their research perspectives.
Roughly defined as words and phrases that are used to manage and organise the structure of discourse, discourse markers form a heterogeneous functional class that can be analysed and reviewed from a wide array of points of view (syntactically, semantically, pragmatically, etc.), on both a monolingual and cross-linguistic level, in synchrony and diachrony, and so on. Starting from these considerations, the authors of the 15 papers – organised in three thematic sections – propose a substantial and enriching range of reflections and interpretations of discourse markers.
The first section of the volume is devoted to the discussion of theories and methods in the analysis of discourse markers. Adriana Costăchescu’s contribution, How the Study of Discourse Markers Changes Pragmatic Theories of Discourse, focuses on three categories of discourse markers (of disagreement, of topic shift and of reformulation), in order to see whether any adjustments should be done to two of the main pragmatic theories of dialogue, Grice’s conversation theory (1975) and the relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). The second contribution in this section, Chiara Ghezzi’s Adunque and dunque in Old Italian between free and patterned variation: the role of English translation in pragmatic analysis, considers patterns of use of the Italian discourse markers adunque and dunque in texts dating from the 14th century and confronts them with their English translation in order to map the functional spectra of forms and establish their semantic-pragmatic fields.
The second section deals with the relationship between discourse markers and other semantic and pragmatic categories. In their Study on the French Functional Equivalents of some Modal and Metadiscursive Uses of the European Portuguese Marker lá, Pierre Lejeune and Amália Mendes explore some typical uses of the marker lá, such as locative, temporal, modal, etc., by using a monolingual corpus of Portuguese and two bilingual corpora. Federica Cominetti and Doriana Cimmino’s contribution, The Semantic and Pragmatic Meanings of Italian davvero through Text Types, discusses the various values of the adverb davvero, such as the dialogic feature of reacting to an interlocutor’s statement, reinforcing or questioning it, as well as the expression of agreement, surprise and courtesy, mostly in spontaneous spoken Italian. In The Evidentiality Dimension of the Italian Discourse Marker sai between Subjectification and Intersubjectification Processes, Viviana Masia argues that the Italian discourse marker sai has acquired a new evidential meaning – expressing mutually shared knowledge – through a pragmaticalization process. Other discourse markers with an intrinsic evidential nature are analysed and classified in Claudia Timoci’s contribution, The Use of știi, știți, vezi, vedeți and înțelegi, înțelegeți as Discourse Markers in Spoken Romanian. A Quantitative Analysis. In Discourse Markers in Complaints and Apologies: a Comparison between Native and Non-native Speakers of Italian, Anna de Marco and Emanuela Paone analyse the uses and functions of discursive markers (DMs) in complaints and apologies performed by learners of Italian as L2 and native speakers of Italian engaged in dyadic interactions, providing useful information on the language teaching level.
The third section includes papers discussing corpus-based approaches to discourse markers. Rogelio Nazar, Irene Renau and Hernán Robledo present a methodology for the compilation of a taxonomy of discourse markers using a parallel corpus in Dismark and Text·a·Gram: Automatic identification and categorization of discourse markers in texts. Bianca Maria Alecu deals with Digital Discourse Markers in Romanian Forum Communication: the Case of welp, TBH (to be honest) and TBF (to be fair) and proposes an investigation of the forms and functions of discourse markers occurring in forum interactions, as well as of the interaction between English borrowings and code-switching sequences in the case of discourse markers. In Reformulation Markers, Linguistic Typology and Rhetorical Conventions: the Case of Spanish and Korean, Heejung Kim conducts a contrastive study of reformulation markers between Spanish and Korean taking into account linguistic typology and the contrastive rhetorical features of these two languages. The contribution by Fátima Silva, Fátima Oliveira and Ana Sofia Pinto, On Discourse Reformulation Markers with the Structure More + Adverb in European Portuguese: a Corpus-Based Study, discusses the role of more + adverb markers in a typology of European Portuguese reformulation markers, based on three written and two oral corpora. Anna de Marco and Mariagrazia Palumbo propose an analysis of Interactional Discourse Markers in a Corpus of Italian Migrants in Munich, exploring the variation in the use of interactional discourse markers in terms of functional space across two generations of Italian migrants. Discourse Markers si vous voulez in French and dacă vreți in Romanian: a Comparative Analysis, by Alice Ionescu, undertakes a comparative review of two equivalent discourse markers which introduce sequences of speech presented as virtual, by means of a corpus of literary and journalistic texts. Finally, in Même Discourse Marker? A Study of Its Argumentative Uses, Louise Behe aims at showing that the French adverb même can be classified as a discourse marker, based on its argumentative uses that introduce a feature of unexpectedness.
Due to their dynamic pragmatic properties, discourse markers are a perpetually-evolving subfield of linguistics, inciting new research approaches and points of view. This volume aims at furthering scientific research on discourse markers, proposing up-to-date frames of quantitative and qualitative analysis, detailed reviews of their semantic and pragmatic features and thorough corpus surveys.
Cecilia-Mihaela Popescu and Oana-Adriana Duță
Adriana Costăchescu
1 How the Study of Discourse Markers Changes Pragmatic Theories of Discourse
Keywords: discourse markers, disagreement, topic shift, reformulation, pragmatic theoriesAbstract: Discourse markers have been studied lately from a wide range of theoretical perspectives (politeness theory, argumentation, conversation, etc.) and within distinct fields of linguistics (semantics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics). This study focuses on three categories of discourse markers that we have studied before (of disagreement, of topic shift and of reformulation), in order to see whether any adjustments should be done to two of the main pragmatic theories of dialogue, Grice’s conversation theory (1975) and the relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986). Markers of disagreement (assez ‘enough’, tais-toi/ taisez-vous ‘shut up’, ça suffit ‘that’s enough’, arrête! ‘stop!’) cast doubts on the first part of the wording of the cooperative principle. Topic shift markers (à propos ‘by the way’, d’ailleurs ‘besides’, quant à ‘as for’, concernant ‘regarding’, au sujet de ‘with respect to’) show that dialogue frequently exceeds the framework traced by the second part of the cooperative principle and by the Maxim of Relation. As for markers of reformulation (c’est-à-dire ‘that is’, à savoir ‘namely’, disons ‘let’s say’, je veux dire ‘I mean’), they show that some postulates regarding communication, concepts expressed by Martinet (1960), by Grice (1975) or by Sperber and Wilson (1986), are not always applicable.
1. Introduction
A considerable amount of research has been devoted to discourse markers, which have been described, in the last quarter of century, as one of the ‘great encounters of linguistics’ (Dostie & Pusch, 2007). Such research is based on a wide range of approaches, such as politeness theory, argumentation, dialogue frameworks, etc. It is not only the theories that differ, but also the field of reference: pragmatics, semantics, sociolinguistics, psychology. These studies have analysed discourse markers (DMs) from a wide range of languages, but they show some common traits: they are generally based on corpus extraction and, due to the nature of the topic, they focus on the interpersonal and textual meaning of the DMs.
When examining certain categories of DMs in terms of the postulates proposed by the pragmatic theories of communication, in general, and of conversation, in particular, we see the need to supplement, amend and adjust several of these principles. We focus on three categories of DMs (of disagreement, of topic shift and of reformulation), in order to see whether any adjustments should be done to two of the main pragmatic theories of dialogue, Grice’s conversation theory (1975) and the relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986).
DMs are generally characterised by at least one of the following particular traits: they do not contribute to the semantic propositional content of the sentences (to their truth value), they tend to be independent from the syntactic structure of the phrase, their use is optional, their function is manifested beyond the phrase, at the level of discourse relations between sentences (Dostie & Pusch, 2007: 4). DMs are the outcome of a de-categorization and re-categorization of target elements which, before, had no discourse meaning (Dostie, 2004; Pusch, 2007: 33), but which seem to bear pragmatic potential, especially in their metaphorical or connotative meanings. This process is quite vaguely termed as ‘pragmaticalization’, following the term for ‘grammaticalization’, as both developments are based on category change.
For some linguistic units (adverbs, prepositions, interjections, nouns, verbs, phrases and even sentences), the conversion to DMs may be under way, as re-categorization takes place gradually, which sometimes makes it difficult to establish whether a certain linguistic form is a full or partial DM.
The three classes of DMs that have inspired our reflections have the following discourse characteristics: (i) markers of disagreement (assez ‘enough’, arrêtez ‘stop’, silence ‘silence’, etc.) show that one of the speakers does not accept the topic or the direction of the conversation; (ii) topic shift markers (au sujet de ‘with respect to’, quant à ‘as for’, d’ailleurs ‘besides’, etc.)1 show that one of the participants in the conversation changes the topic or the direction of the discussion; (iii) markers of reformulation (c’est-à-dire ‘that is’, autrement dit ‘in other words’, soit ‘namely’, etc.) show that the speaker is not happy with the message s/he has just uttered and ‘corrects’ it.
Details
- Pages
- 304
- Publication Year
- 2024
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631898529
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631898536
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631898512
- DOI
- 10.3726/b20640
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2025 (January)
- Keywords
- pragmatics discourse analysis discourse markers corpus linguistics Romance languages comparative linguistics
- Published
- Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, 2024. 304 pp., 26 fig. b/w, 27 tables.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG