Cover not available
Part of
New Trends in Grammaticalization and Language Change
Edited by Sylvie Hancil, Tine Breban and José Vicente Lozano
[Studies in Language Companion Series 202] 2018
► pp. 135–157

Grammaticalizing connectives in English and discourse information structure

| Aix Marseille University | Laboratoire Parole et Langage

The development of lexical expressions such as VP adverbs, matrix clauses and prepositional phrases into discourse markers and connectives expressing coherence relations has been well explored in the grammaticalization literature, under a broad view of grammaticalization, but there has been less emphasis on how the discourse information structuring functions of markers evolve during these developments. This paper investigates the relationship between discourse coherence marking and information structure by examining two developing discourse connectives: it suggests that the grammaticalization of a lexeme in its construction into a discourse marker may involve acquiring or strengthening discourse-level information structuring functions – indicating relative informational salience – and that (further) grammaticalization of markers may be at least partly directed by information structure.

Keywords: coherence relations, discourse connectives, English, grammaticalization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse connectives
    • 2.1Grammaticalization and discourse connectives
    • 2.2Positions of discourse connectives
    • 2.3Coherence relations and information structure
  • 3.Grammaticalizing discourse connectives and position
    • 3.1Two recent Engish connectives
    • 3.2In fact
      • 3.2.1Evolution of ‘in fact’
      • 3.1.2Position of in fact
    • 3.3After all
      • 3.3.1Evolution of after all
      • 3.3.2Position of ‘after all’
    • 3.4Findings for ‘in fact’ and ‘after all’
  • 4.Grammaticalization and information structure beyond the sentence
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Appendix
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.202.06lew
References
Aijmer, Karin
1997 ‘I think’ – An English modal particle. In Modality in Germanic Languages. Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Toril Swan & Olaf Jansen Westvik (eds), 1– 47. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 English Discourse Particles: Evidence from a Corpus [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 10]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 Pragmatic markers as constructions. The case of anyway . In Outside the Clause: Form and Function of Extra-Clausal Constituents [Studies in Language Companion Series 178], Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Kreizer & Arne Lohmann (eds), 29–58. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar & Couper-Kuhlen, Elisabeth
2002 On the development of final ‘though’: A case of grammaticalization? In New Reflections on Grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds), 345–361. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beeching, Kate & Detges, Ulrich
2014 Introduction. In Discourse Functions at the Left and Right Periphery, Kate Beeching & Ulrich Detges (eds), 1–23. Leiden: Brill.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward
1999 The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Blakemore, Diane
1996 Are apposition markers discourse markers? Journal of Linguistics 32(2): 325–347.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2005 Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: CUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan L.
1985 Morphology. A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form [Typological Studies in Language 9]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carlson, Lynn & Marcu, Daniel
2001 Discourse Tagging Reference Manual. ISI Tech Report ISI-TR-545 July 2001 [URL]Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger
2005 Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses. Linguistics 43(3): 449–470.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dowty, David
2003 The dual analysis of adjuncts/complements in Categorial Grammar. In Modifying Adjuncts, Ewald Lang, Claudia Maienborn & Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen (eds), 33–66. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erman, Britt & Kotsinas, Ulla-Britt
1993 Pragmaticalization: The case of ba’ and you know . Studier i Modern Språkvetenskap 10: 76–93.Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga
2007 Morphosytactic Change. Functional and Formal Perspectives. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Gentens, Caroline, Kimps, Ditte, Davidse, Kristin, Jacobs, Gilles, Van linden, An & Brems, Lieselotte
2016 Mirativity and rhetorical structure. The development and prosody of disjunct and anaphoric adverbials with no wonder . In Outside the Clause: Form and Function of Extra-Clausal Constituents [Studies in Language Companion Series 178], Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer & Arne Lohmann (eds), 125–156. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hancil, Sylvie
2014 The final particle ‘but’ in British English. In Grammaticalization – Theory and Data [Studies in Language Companion Series 162], Sylvie Hancil & Ekkehard König (eds), 235–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hancil, Sylvie, Haselow, Alexander & Post, Margje
(eds) 2015 Final Particles. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hankamer, Jorge
1977 Multiple analyses. In Mechanisms of Syntactic Change, Charles N. Li (ed.), 583–607. Austin TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Harris, Alice C. & Campbell, Lyle
1995 Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: CUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haselow, Alexander
2012 Discourse organization and the rise of final then in the history of English. In English Historical Linguistics 2010 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 325], Irén Hegedüs & Alexandra Fodor (eds), 153–175. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Arguing for a wide conception of grammar. The case of final particles in spoken discourse. Folia Linguistica 47(2): 375–424.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 Left vs. right periphery in grammaticalization. The case of anyway . In New Directions in Grammaticalization Research [Studies in Language Companion Series 166], Andrew D. M. Smith, Graeme Trousdale & Richard Waltereit (eds), 157–186. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd
2013 On discourse markers: Grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, or something else? Linguistics 51(6): 1205–1247.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd, Kaltenböck, Gunther & Kuteva, Tania
2015 Some observations on the evolution of final particles. In Final Particles, Sylvie Hancil, Alexander Haselow & Margje Post (eds), 111–140. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2003 Grammaticalization, 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.
2002 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Izutsu, Katsunobu & Izutsu, Mitsuko Narita
2013 From discourse markers to modal/final particles. What the position reveals about the continuum. In Discourse Markers and Modal Particles: Categorization and Description [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 234], Liesbeth Degand, Bert Cornillie & Paola Pietrandrea (eds), 217–235. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kim, Min-Jo & Jahnke, Nathan
2011 The meaning of utterance-final even . Journal of English Linguistics 39(1): 36–64.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lehmann, Christian
2002 New reflections on grammaticalization and lexicalization. In New Reflections on Grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds), 1–18. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Information structure and grammaticalization. In Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 77], Elena Seoane & Marie-José López Couso (eds), 207–229. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lenker, Ursula
2010 Argument and Rhetoric. Adverbial Connectors in the History of English. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Diana M.
1998 From modal adverbial to discourse connective: Some rhetorical effects in present-day English. In Pragmatics in 1998: Selected Papers from the 6th International Pragmatics Conference, Vol. 2, Jef Verschueren (ed.), 363–375. Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association.Google Scholar
2007 From temporal to contrastive and causal: The emergence of connective after all . In Connectives as Discourse Landmarks [Benjamins Current Topics 92], Agnès Celle & Ruth Huart (eds), 89–99. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 A discourse-constructional approach to the emergence of discourse connectives in English. Linguistics 49(2): 415–443.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mann, William C. & Thompson, Sandra A.
1987 Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organization [ISI Report RS-87–190]. Marina del Rey, CA: Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
Mithun, Marianne
2005 On the assumption of the sentence as the basic unit of syntactic structure. In Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories [Studies in Language Companion Series 72], Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Adam Hodges & David S. Rood (eds), 169–184. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 Discourse and grammar. In Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2nd edn, Heidi Hamilton, Deborah Schiffrin & Deborah Tannen (eds), 9–41. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Mulder, Jean & Thompson, Sandra A.
2008 The grammaticalization of but as a final particle in English conversation. In Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The Multifunctionality of Conjunctions [Typological Studies in Language 80], Ritva Laury (ed.), 179–204. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Polanyi, Livia, van den Berg, Martin & Ahn, David
2003 Discourse structure and sentential information structure: An initial proposal. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 12(3): 337–350.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schweinberger, Martin
2015 Comparing ‘like’ in Irish and British Englishes. In Pragmatic Markers in Irish English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 258], Carolina P. Amador Moreno, Kevin McCafferty & Elaine Vaughan (eds), 114–134. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwenter, Scott & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2000 Invoking scalarity. The development of in fact . Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1(1): 7–25.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stede, Manfred
2008 Disambiguating rhetorical structure. Research on Language and Computation 6: 311–332.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
1995 The role of the development of discourse markers in a theory of grammaticalization. Paper presented at the 12th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, University of Manchester, August 1995.Google Scholar
1997 The discourse connective after all: A historical pragmatic account. Paper presented at the Sixteenth International Congress of Linguists, Paris, July 1997.Google Scholar
2012 Intersubjectification and clause periphery. English Text Construction 5(1): 7–28.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 ‘I must wait on myself, must I?’ at right periphery of the clause in English. Talk given at Lund University 4 September 2013.Google Scholar
2014 On the function of the epistemic adverbs ‘surely’ and ‘no doubt’ at the left and right peripheries of the clause. In Discourse Functions at the Left and Right Periphery, Kate Beeching & Ulrich Detges (eds), 72–91. Leiden: Brill.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 Investigating ‘periphery’ from a functionalist perspective. Linguistics Vanguard 1(1): 119–130.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 On the rise of types of clause-final pragmatic markers in English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 17(1): 26–54.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Gast, Volker
2022. Chapter 5. The German modal particle ja and selected English lexical correlates in the Europarl corpus. In Particles in German, English, and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series, 224], ► pp. 117 ff. DOI logo
Ruskan, Anna & Marta Carretero
2021. Chapter 15. A cross-linguistic look at the right periphery. In Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 325], ► pp. 415 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 september 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.