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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2022
Edited by Jorrig Vogels and Sterre Leufkens
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 39] 2022
► pp. 88–102

Claiming common ground with utterance-final particle hoor in Dutch

| Radboud University Nijmegen
| Radboud University Nijmegen
In this article we conduct a pragmatic analysis of the Dutch utterance-final particle hoor (lit. ‘hear’). Apparently, hoor has contradictory uses. It ex-presses politeness (involvement, togetherness), but it can also contribute to the face-threatening force of an utterance. We argue that there is a core meaning that all uses share, which is that by adding hoor, speakers claim a proposition at issue to be part of the common ground. This core meaning will be shown to account for hoor’s key characteristics. Hoor expresses involvement and is often attached to speech acts that are intrinsically polite, such as apologizing and giving compliments. Also, while hoor never occurs in interrogative sentences, it can be used with a certain type of directive speech acts, namely those that are in the interest of the hearer or are presented as having shared interests.
Keywords: discourse particles, speech acts, politeness, corpus, subtitles
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Kirsner on hoor
  • 3.Towards a unified analysis of the uses of hoor
    • 3.1 Hoor in second parts
    • 3.2 Hoor in autonomous speech acts
  • 4. Hoor with directive speech acts
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 4 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00063.hoo
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