Part of
Pragmatic Markers and PeripheriesEdited by Daniël Van Olmen and Jolanta Šinkūnienė
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 325] 2021
► pp. 303–326
Edited by Daniël Van Olmen and Jolanta Šinkūnienė
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 325] 2021
► pp. 303–326
Chapter 11Functional asymmetry and left-to-right movement
Speaking of peripheries
This corpus-based study of the discourse marker speaking of X addresses the issues of functional asymmetry and left-to-right movement. It shows that speaking of X has different pragmatic functions, which may express different degrees of (inter)subjectivity in different peripheral positions. But these functions are not strictly confined to certain peripheries and, diachronically, there is no statistically significant evidence of further (inter)subjectification or change in peripheral preferences. This study thus confirms that the functional asymmetry hypothesis is better understood as a strong tendency that holds better for certain functional domains than for others and it serves as a counterexample to the related left-to-right movement hypothesis therewith.
Keywords: discourse marker, periphery, functional asymmetry, (inter)subjectivity
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Corpus and dataset
- 3.Discourse marking functions of SPOX
- 3.1Topic introduction
- 3.2Speech act adverbial
- 3.3Emphasized commenting
- 4.Peripheral positions and functional asymmetry
- 5.Left to right movement
- 6.Summary
-
Note -
References
References
Aijmer, Karin
Andersen, Gisle
2015 “Discourse
Topic Markers from a Cross-Linguistic and Variational
Perspective.” Paper
presented at the 14th
International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA
14), Antwerp, July
28.
Beeching, Kate, and Ulrich Detges
2014 Discourse
Functions at the Left and Right Periphery: Crosslinguistic
Investigations of Language Use and Language
Change. Leiden: Brill. 
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan
1999 Longman
Grammar of Spoken and Written
English. Harlow: Longman.
Carter, Ronald, and Michael McCarthy
2006 Cambridge
Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide: Spoken and
Written English Grammar and
Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chen, Jiajun
2018 “(Inter)Subjectification
at the Left and Right Periphery: Deriving Chinese Pragmatic
Marker Bushi from the Negative
Copula.” Language
Sciences 66: 83–102.
Davies, Mark
Degand, Liesbeth
2014 “ ‘So
Very Fast Then’ Discourse Markers at Left and Right
Periphery in Spoken
French.” In Discourse
Functions at the Left and Right Periphery: Crosslinguistic
Investigations of Language Use and Language
Change, ed.
by Kate Beeching, and Ulrich Detges, 151–178. Leiden: Brill.
Degand, Liesbeth, and Benjamin Fagard
2011 “Alors
between Discourse and Grammar: The Role of Syntactic
Position.” Functions of
Language 18 (1): 29–56.
Diewald, Gabriele
2006 “Discourse
Particles and Modal Particles as Grammatical
Elements.” In Approaches
to Discourse Particles, ed.
by Kerstin Fischer, 403–425. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Diewald, Gabriele, and Kerstin Fischer
1998 “Zur diskursiven und modalen Funktion der
Partikeln aber, auch, doch und ja in
instruktionsdialogen [On the discursive and modal functions of the
particles aber, auch, doch and ja in instructional
dialogues].” Linguistica 38 (1): 75–99.
Ferrara, Kathleen W.
1997 “Form
and Function of the Discourse Marker
Anyway: Implications for Discourse
Analysis.” Linguistics 35: 343–378.
Fraser, Bruce
1988 “Types
of English Discourse
Markers.” Acta Linguistica
Hungarica 38 (1/4): 19–33.
1999 “What
Are Discourse
Markers?” Journal of
Pragmatics 31 (7): 931–952.
2001 “The
Case of the Empty S1.” Journal of
Pragmatics 3: 1625–1630.
2009 “Topic
Orientation Markers.” Journal
of
Pragmatics 41 (5): 892–898.
Gast, Volker
2010 “Contrastive
Topics and Distributed Foci as Instances of
Sub-Informativity: A Comparison of English and
German.” In Comparative
and Contrastive Studies of Information
Structure, ed.
by Carsten Breul, and Edward Göbbel, 15–50. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Greenbaum, Sidney
1969 Studies
in English Adverbial
Usage. London: Longman.
Grosz, Barbara J., and Candace L. Sidner
1985 “Discourse
Structure and the Proper Treatment of
Interruptions.” In IJCAI’85:
Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on
Artificial
Intelligence, 2: 832–839. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.
Haselow, Alexander
2011 “Discourse
Marker and Modal Particle: The Functions of Utterance-Final
Then in Spoken
English.” Journal of
Pragmatics 43 (14): 3603–3623.
Huddleston, Rodney D., and Geoffrey K. Pullum
2002 The
Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Izutsu, Katsunobu, and Mitsuko Narita Izutsu
2013 “From
Discourse Markers to Modal/Final Particles. What the
Position Reveals about the
Continuum.” In Discourse
Markers and Modal Particles: Categorization and
Description, ed.
by Liesbeth Degand, Bert Cornillie, and Paola Pietrandrea, 217–236. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Jucker, Andreas H.
1993 “The
Discourse Marker Well: A
Relevance-Theoretical
Account.” Journal of
Pragmatics 19: 435–452.
1997 “The
Discourse Marker Well in the History of
English.” English Language
&
Linguistics 1 (1): 91–110.
Kong, Lei, and Hongwu Qin
2017 “The
Development of Manner of Speaking Markers in English and
Chinese: Pragmaticalization, Grammaticalization and
Lexicalization.” Journal of
Pragmatics 107: 16–30.
Leech, Geoffrey N.
1974 Semantics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Onodera, Noriko O.
2014 “Setting
Up a Mental Space: A Function of Discourse Markers at the
Left Periphery (LP) and Some Observations about LP and RP in
Japanese.” In Discourse
Functions at the Left and Right Periphery: Crosslinguistic
Investigations of Language Use and Language
Change, ed.
by Kate Beeching, and Ulrich Detges, 92–116. Leiden: Brill.
Pons Bordería, Salvador
2018 “Paths
of Grammaticalization: Beyond the LP/RP
Debate.” In Beyond
Grammaticalization and Discourse Markers: New Issues in the
Study of Language Change, ed.
by Salvador Pons Bordería, and Óscar Loureda Lamas, 334–383. Leiden: Brill.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik
1985 A
Comprehensive Grammar of the English
Language. London: Longman.
R Core
Team
2020 R: A
Language and Environment for Statistical
Computing (version
3.2.1). R. R. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. URL [URL]
Sohn, Sung-Ock, and Stephanie Hyeri Kim
2014 “The
Interplay of Discourse and Prosody at the Left and Right
Periphery in Korean: An Analysis of Kuntey
‘But.’” In Discourse
Functions at the Left and Right Periphery: Crosslinguistic
Investigations of Language Use and Language
Change, ed.
by Kate Beeching, and Ulrich Detges, 221–250. Leiden: Brill.
Tanno, Koji
2017 “Expanding
to the Peripheries: A Corpus-Based Study of the Development
of the Japanese Discourse Marker
Toiuka
.” Ampersand 4: 58–72.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
1982 “From
Propositional to Textual and Expressive Meanings: Some
Semantic-Pragmatic Aspects of
Grammaticalization.” In Perspectives
on Historical Linguistics, ed.
by Winfred P. Lehmann, and Yakov Malkiel, 245–271. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
2003 “From
Subjectification to
Intersubjectification.” In Motives
for Language Change, ed.
by Raymond Hickey, 124–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2015 “Investigating
‘Periphery’ from a Functionalist
Perspective.” Linguistics
Vanguard 1 (1): 119–130.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Richard B. Dasher
2002 Regularity
in Semantic
Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Virtanen, Tuija
2004 “Point
of Departure: Cognitive Aspects of Sentence-Initial
Adverbials.” In Approaches
to Cognition through Text and
Discourse, ed.
by Tuija Virtanen, 79–98. Berlin: De Gruyter.