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Building Categories in Interaction: Linguistic resources at work
Edited by Caterina Mauri, Ilaria Fiorentini and Eugenio Goria
[Studies in Language Companion Series 220] 2021
► pp. 415–438

Chapter 15
In a manner of speaking

The co-construction of manner in spoken Italian dialogues

| University of L’Aquila
| University of Lille & CNRS UMR 8163 STL

We provide a functional, corpus-driven definition of the category of Manner and we observe its (co)-construction in interactional discourse. In the linguistic literature, Manner has been traditionally approached as a basic cognitive prime, expressing the way in which an action is performed. It has been traditionally considered as a category fulfilling a basically descriptive function, necessarily realized by a limited inventory of means essentially encoded either at the lexical level, on verbal roots, or at the syntactic level, on verbal adjuncts. In this paper, we propose a functional definition of Manner that allows identifying Manner constructions without prejudging their morphosyntactic realization. We present an annotation scheme of Manner constructions that allows for an exploration of the realizations of this category in a corpus of spoken interactional data. The analysis of 514 occurrences of Manner constructions shows that, far from being a static descriptive monological category, Manner can be regarded as an interactional, gradable category co-constructed by participants in discourse. Manner is used by speakers not only to describe reality but also to reach, in discourse and through discourse, a shared perception of reality.

Keywords: manner, co-costruction of meaning, spoken interaction, corpus-driven
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.An ill-defined category
    • 2.1The traditional definition
    • 2.2More recent approaches
    • 2.3Towards a functional definition of manner
  • 3.The corpus
  • 4.Annotation
    • 4.1The annotation of the marker
    • 4.2Annotation of the scope
    • 4.3Annotation of the relation
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1An extensive inventory of structures
    • 5.2A complex semantics
  • 6.Co-constructing manner in and through discourse
    • 6.1Progressive construction of manner meanings
    • 6.2Negotiation of manner meanings
    • 6.3Indexical construction of manner meanings
    • 6.4Pragmaticalized use of (graduated) manner meanings
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.220.15cor
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Combe, Christophe & Dejan Stosic
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