Functional Hybridization In Discourse: Turning Imperatives into Discourse Markers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/philologia.2023.21.21.2Keywords:
discourse markers, pragmatics, prosody, imperatives, intonation contoursAbstract
The author addresses discourse markers (DMs), suggesting that DMs represent functional, but not categorical, units. The paper shows that in reading aloud, under specific discourse conditions the readers convert imperatives into interjection-like units similar to DMs. This conversion is carried out through processing and adjusting prosodic features of imperative utterances, according to the function they perform in discourse, and can be defined as “functional hybridization”. The findings of the present paper support previous research in that: 1) according to our findings, prosodic structure of “functionally hybridized” imperatives places them close to interjections, and their function in discourse changes to attract attention to new information, or express “emphasis”; 2) “functionally hybridized” imperatives, like DMs, are characterized by specific formal features: initial position appears prerequisite for their autonomy, in other than initial position “functionally hybridized” imperatives tend to act as an enclitic to the previous word. Factors facilitating “functional hybridization” of imperatives are: 1) the formulaic/iconic structure of the imperative, 2) initial position, 3) emphatic nature of the utterance.
References
Aijmer, K. 2002. English Discourse Particles. Evidence from a Corpus. Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company.
Aikhenvald, A.Y. 2010. Imperatives and Commands. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2017. Imperatives and Commands: a Cross-Linguistic View. In A. Y.
Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon (eds.) Commands: A Cross-Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–45.
Boersma, P. and D. Weenik. 2022. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.2.06. https://www.praat.org [23.1.2022].
Boersma, P. 2014. The Use of Praat in Corpus Research. In J. Durand et al. (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 342–360.
Brinton, L.J. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English. Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cangemi, F., M. Krüger and M. Grice. 2015. Listener-specific Perception of Speaker-specific Productions in Intonation. In S. Fuchs et al. (eds.) Individual Differences in Speech Production and Perception. Bern: Peter Lang Peter Lang, 123–145.
Dehé, N. 2014. Parentheticals in Spoken English: the Syntax Prosody Relation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dehé, N. and A. Wichmann. 2010. Sentence-initial I think (that) and I believe (that): prosodic evidence for use as main clause, comment clause and discourse marker. Studies in Language 34(1), 36–74.
Falé, I. et al. 2016. Reading aloud: eye movements and prosody. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2016 1, 826–830.
Fedorova, O. V. 2014. Jeksperimental’nyj analiz diskursa. Moscow: JaSK.
Fraser, B. L. 2009. An Account of Discourse Markers. International Review of Pragmatics 1, 293–320.
Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hassan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman Group Limited.
Harris, Z. 1951. Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hudson, J. and M. Wiktorsson. 2009. Formulaic Language and the Relater Category – the Case of About. In R. Corrigan et al. (eds.) Formulaic Language: Volume 1. Distribution and historical change. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company, 77–96.
Isachenko, A. V. 2003. Grammaticheskij stroj russkogo jazyka v sopostavlenii s slovatskim. Morflogia. Moscow: JaSK.
Kaltenböck, G. 2008. Prosody and function of English comment clauses. Folia Linguistica 42, 83–134.
Kaltenböck, G. 2013. The Development of Comment Clauses. In B. Aarts et al. (eds.) The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 286–317.
Kilgarriff, A. et al. 2014. The Sketch Engine: Ten Years On. Lexicography 1(1), 7–36.
Kruchinina, I. N. 1980. Mezhdometie [Interjection]. In N. Yu. Shvedova et al. (eds.). Russkaya grammatika. Moscow: Nauka, 618–623.
Kubryakova, E. S. 2012. V poiskakh sushchnosti yazyka: Kognitivnye issledovaniya / In-t. Yazykoznaniya RAN. Moscow: Znak.
Lin, P. 2018. The Prosody of Formulaic Sequences. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Academic.
Maschler, Y. 2009. Metalanguage in Interaction: Hebrew Discourse Markers. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.
Maschler, Y. and D. Schiffrin. 2015. Discourse Markers: Language, Meaning, and Context. In D. Schiffrin et al. (eds.) The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Mertens, P. 2019. From Pitch Stylization to Automatic Tonal Annotation of Speech Corpora. In A. Lacheret-Dujour et al. (eds.) Rhapsodie. A prosodic and syntactic treebank for spoken French. Studies in Corpus Linguistics 89. Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company, 233–250.
Molinelli, P. 2018. Different Sensitivity to Variation and Change: Italian Pragmatic Marker ‘dai’ vs. Discourse Marker ‘allora’. In S. Pons Bordería and Ó. Loureda Lamas (eds.) Beyond Grammaticalization and Discourse Markers. New Issues in the Study of Language Change. Leiden: Brill, 271–303.
O`Connor, J. D. and G. F. Arnold. 1973. Intonation of Colloquial English. A Practical Handbook. 2nd edition. London: Longman Group Ltd.
Pons Bordería, S. 2018. Paths of Grammaticalization: Beyond the LP/RPDebate. In: S. Pons Bordería and Ó. L. Lamas (eds.) Beyond Grammaticalization and Discourse Markers. New Issues in the Study of Language Change. Leiden: Brill, 334–338.
Schiffrin, D. 2001. Discourse Markers: Language, Meaning, and Context. In D. Schiffrin et al. (eds.) The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Schiffrin, D. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: CUP.
Schmitt, N. and R. Carter. 2004. Formulaic Sequences in Action: An Introduction. In N. Schmitt (ed.) Formulaic sequences. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1–22.
Turnbull, R. et al. 2017. Prominence Perception is Dependent on Phonology, Semantics, and Awareness of Discourse. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 32(8), 1–17.
Van Dijk, T. 1979. Pragmatic Connectives. Journal of Pragmatics 3, 447–456.
Ward, N. G. 2019. Prosodic Patterns in English Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Webman-Shafran, R. 2018. Implicit Prosody and Parsing in Silent Reading. Journal of Research in Reading 41, 546–563.
Wells, J. C. 2006. English Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wichmann, A., A. Simon-Vandenbergen and K. Aijmer. 2010. How Prosody Reflects Semantic Change: A Synchronic Case Study of ‘Of Course’. In K. Davidse et al. (eds.) Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 103–154.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
