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Article published In:
Constructional Approach(es) to Discourse-Level Phenomena: Theoretical challenges and empirical advances
Edited by Renata Enghels and María Sol Sansiñena
[Constructions and Frames 13:1] 2021
► pp. 21–54

Discourse-referential patterns as a network of grammatical constructions

| Charles University

Grammatical organization of conversational language presents us with the challenge of incorporating recurrent contextual and discourse-relevant properties in grammatical descriptions, as part of speakers’ conventional knowledge. Using data from conversational Czech extracted from the Czech National Corpus, I address this issue by tracing the relationships among a set of dative-marked expressions of interpersonal relations (traditionally labeled ‘ethical datives’) and their connection to argument-expressing dative NPs. The discourse-referential expressions form a family of distinct patterns, the differences having to do with person (1st, 2nd) and number (sg. vs. pl.); functionally, they range from marking subjectively assessed newsworthiness to signaling evidentiality and solidarity to expressing the speaker’s emotional state. The attendant reorganization of formal, semantic, and discourse features that define these dative-marked items amounts to several patterns – ‘interactional datives’ – and I show that they have the status of grammatical constructions, which are conventionally tied to certain types of discourse settings and speaker-hearer expectations. In order to represent these constructions and their relationship to other, partially related, patterns, I propose a network representation in the form of contiguous functional spaces that overlap at the boundary between argument-expression and interactional markers.

Keywords: constructional network, construction grammar, interactional dative, ethical dative, discourse pattern, implicit anchoring
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and background
  • 2.Sematic and functional spectrum of Czech datives – a baseline
  • 3.A brief survey of Czech interactional datives
    • 3.1Explicit Addressee Reference – ‘contact’ ID
    • 3.2Implicit Addressee Reference – speaker-centered ‘emotional reaction’ ID
      • 3.2.1Ironic commentary context
      • 3.2.2Speaker’s emotional state
    • 3.3Collective Reference – speaker’s ‘witness’ commentary ID
  • 4.Interactional datives as constructions
    • 4.1Emergence of a new ‘interactional’ construction
    • 4.2Family of dative constructions in a constructional map
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Source of data
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00046.fri
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