Discourse-referential patterns as a network of grammatical constructions
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.
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
References (61)
Source of data
Czech National Corpus, [URL]
PMK (2001); ORAL v. 11 (2017); SYN v. 71 (2018)
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