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Discourse Markers and Beyond: Descriptive and Critical Perspectives On Discourse-Pragmatic Devices Across Genres and Languages Péter B. Furkó
Discourse Markers and Beyond: Descriptive and Critical Perspectives On Discourse-Pragmatic Devices Across Genres and Languages Péter B. Furkó
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POSTDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN DISCOURSE
SERIES EDITOR: JOHANNES ANGERMULLER
Discourse Markers
and Beyond
Descriptive and Critical Perspectives
on Discourse-Pragmatic Devices across
Genres and Languages
Péter B. Furkó
Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse
Series Editor
Johannes Angermuller
Centre for Applied Linguistics
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse engages in the exchange between
discourse theory and analysis while putting emphasis on the intellectual
challenges in discourse research. Moving beyond disciplinary divisions
in today’s social sciences, the contributions deal with critical issues at
the intersections between language and society.
Edited by Johannes Angermuller together with members of
DiscourseNet, the series welcomes high-quality manuscripts in dis-
course research from all disciplinary and geographical backgrounds.
DiscourseNet is an international and interdisciplinary network of
researchers which is open to discourse analysts and theorists from all
backgrounds.
Editorial Board
Cristina Arancibia
Aurora Fragonara
Péter Furkó
Tian Hailong
Jens Maesse
Eduardo Chávez Herrera
Michael Kranert
Jan Krasni
María Laura Pardo
Yannik Porsché
Kaushalya Perera
Luciana Radut-Gaghi
Marco Antonio Ruiz
Jan Zienkowski
Discourse Markers
and Beyond
Descriptive and Critical Perspectives
on Discourse-Pragmatic Devices across
Genres and Languages
Péter B. Furkó
Department of English Linguistics
Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed
Church in Hungary
Budapest, Hungary
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
v
vi Contents
References 257
Index 283
List of Figures
Chapter 2
Fig. 1 Concordance plots of Q2.1 and Q2.2 tags across
the four sub-corpora (Source Adopted from Furkó et al.
[2019: 253]) 48
Fig. 2 Presence and absence of discourse markers in reporting
across the four corpora (Source Adopted from Furkó et al.
[2019: 253]) 51
Chapter 3
Fig. 1 Types of reporting across four genres: scripted discourse
(SD), mediatized political interviews (MPI), celebrity
interviews (CI) and natural conversation (NC)
(Source Adopted from Furkó et al. [2019: 263]) 81
Chapter 8
Fig. 1 Translations of well in two Hungarian editions of The Hobbit 210
Fig. 2 Translations of of course in two Hungarian editions
of The Hobbit 210
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Chapter 9
Fig. 1 Specification and underspecification in 150 verses of Galatians 237
Fig. 2 Specification and underspecification in 150 verses of John 237
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1 Alternative terms for English discourse-pragmatic devices 3
Table 2 Individual authors’ focus on categorial properties discourse
markers display 5
Table 3 Summary of discourse marker and non-discourse
marker-related semantic tags assigned to the most frequent
discourse marker types in the MPI and CI sub-corpora 19
Table 4 Inter-annotator agreement between automated and manual
tagging of discourse marker/non-discourse marker tokens 21
Chapter 2
Table 1 Semantic fields in USAS 46
Table 2 Normalized frequencies of the USAS categories
relevant to reporting 47
xv
xvi List of Tables
Chapter 4
Table 1 Frequency and keyness of potentially populist uses
of lexical items and suffixes in speeches given by governing
and opposition parties in the period between 8 May 2018
and 18 September 2019 99
Table 2 Frequency and keyness of potentially populist uses
of lexical items and suffixes in speeches given
by governing and opposition parties surrounding
the immigration quota referendum of 2016 100
Table 3 Frequency and keyness of potentially manipulative
discourse markers in speeches given by members
of governing and opposition parties in the period
of 8 May 2018 and 18 September 2019 104
Table 4 Frequency and keyness of potentially manipulative
discourse markers in speeches given by members
of governing and opposition parties 105
Chapter 5
Table 1 The use and functional spectrum of well and of course
in BE textbooks adopted from Furkó and Mónos
(2013: 142–143) 132
Table 2 The use and functional spectrum of well and of course
in BE textbooks analysed in this chapter 134
Chapter 6
Table 1 RMs listed by author and year of publication 150
Chapter 7
Table 1 Keyness analysis of lexical items in the IEC and SD
sorted by test corpus and keyness 180
Table 2 Keyness analysis of lexical items in the IEC and BSD
sorted by test corpus and keyness 182
List of Tables xvii
Chapter 8
Table 1 Lexical items associated with authentication and
the pragmatic mode, sorted by test corpus and keyness 204
Table 2 Formal indicators of the use of the pragmatic mode
in the THC and the CSLC 205
Table 3 Frequency of USAS tags associated with textual,
interactional and subjectivity markers in the THC
and the CSLC sorted by log-likelihood 207
Table 4 Hungarian discourse markers associated with
spontaneous conversations in two Hungarian editions
of The Hobbit 211
Table 5 Pragmatic routines and their translation based
on Bayona (2003: 81) 213
Chapter 9
Table 1 Translation Equivalents of kαί (TEs in each row
are listed in order of frequency) 227
Table 2 Translation equivalents of δε (TT discourse markers
in each row are listed in order of frequency) 232
Table 3 Frequency of specification and underspecification
underspecification strategies in the various Bible
translations 236
Table 4 The frequency of and, but and for in the KJV and the ASV 238
Table 5 Frequency of USAS tags associated with textual,
interactional and subjectivity markers across the KJV
and the ASV of the New Testament sorted by log-likelihood 239
1
Preliminary Issues: Category Membership,
Methodology, Alternative Perspectives
on Discourse Markers
IS—interactional signal
PP—pragmatic particle
PFM—pragmatic force modifier
*—categorized according to the position/slot they take in the utterance
3
4 P. B. Furkó
markers as a functional class (cf. e.g. Schourup 1999; Fraser 1999; Beech-
ing 2016; Brinton 2017), but empirical studies rely on different subsets
of such criterial features when identifying particular instances of dis-
course markers in a given corpus (for a detailed discussion, cf. Crible
2017). Naturally, this makes it difficult to compare the results of empir-
ical research even if similar datasets are involved. Table 2 illustrates this
problem.
An even more challenging task is to develop annotation software that
can automatically identify discourse markers in oral discourse and fil-
ter out non-discourse marker tokens of lexical items that are frequently
used as discourse marker types (e.g. adverbial uses of well or now, prepo-
sitional uses of like, etc.). Moreover, to date, few attempts have been
made to use automated means of identification involving semantic crite-
ria and semantic fields, since one of the very criterial features of discourse
markers is their semantic underspecification (cf. Crible et al. 2019), which
is a result of the diachronic process of semantic bleaching (cf. Brinton
2017: 31).
Accordingly, the present introduction will explore the utility of
using an automated semantic tagging software, USAS as a pre-
annotation tool for the identification of oral discourse markers, includ-
ing (inter)subjective as well as textual markers. After an overview of the
formal and functional features that can be used for manual annotation,
and after comparing the results of manual and automatic annotation of
selected discourse markers, I will argue that despite the semantic under-
specification of most discourse markers, automatic semantic annotation
(ASA) can be an effective tool for the disambiguation between discourse
marker and non-discourse marker uses with regard to certain items, but
needs to be complemented by extensive manual error correction and
filtering.
Table 2 Individual authors’ focus on categorial properties discourse markers display
seq. context oral synt. proced poly-func. attitude scope non-prop. inv.
Schiffrin (1987) x x x x (x)
Fraser (1990, 1999) x x x x x
Redeker (1990, x x (x)
1991)
Stenström (1994) x (x)
Kroon (1995) x x x
Knott and Sanders x
(1998)
Andersen (1998) x x x
Hansen (1998) x (x) (x) x x
Risselada and x x
Spooren (1998)
Romaine and Lange x (x) (x)
(1998)
Blakemore (1987, x
2002)
González (2004) x x x
Crible (2017) x x x
Legend
seq.—sequentiality-coherence-connectivity
context—context-dependence—context-coordination
oral.—orality
synt.—syntactic criteria (diversity, non-integration)
proced.—procedural meaning
poly-funct.—poly-functionality
1 Preliminary Issues: Category Membership, Methodology …
attitude—marking attitudes
scope—variable scope, functional scope
non-prop.—non-propositional content
inv.—invariable form
5
6 P. B. Furkó
(1a) Owens is a respected drama critic. I tell you in addition that she
has written …
(1b) Owens is a respected drama critic. In addition, she has written …
(2a) Allegedly / Obviously / Frankly, the cook has poisoned the soup.
(2b) If the cook has allegedly / ?obviously / *frankly poisoned the soup,
we can eat the meal without worrying.
(2c) We shouldn’t eat the soup, because the cook has
allegedly/?obviously/*frankly poisoned it.
The uncertainty with regard to whether or not obviously retains its orig-
inal meaning in (2c) suggests to many that the truth-functionality–non-
truth-functionality distinction should be viewed as a continuum, rather
than a dichotomy, which is consistent with the finding in grammatical-
ization theory that due to the diachronic grammaticalization processes
that are synchronically manifested in the use of discourse markers, there
is a fuzzy boundary between uses that are non-truth-conditional and
(omissible) and those that are not (for a detailed discussion, cf. Andersen
2001; Blakemore 2002; Dér 2017).
Optionality as a distinguishing feature is in many respects derivative of
the previously discussed criterion of non-propositionality, and discourse
markers are considered optional from the perspective of sentence mean-
ing because their absence does not change the conditions under which
the sentence is true.
There are, however, two further senses in which discourse markers are
claimed to be optional. Firstly, they may be seen as syntactically optional
in the sense that removal of a discourse marker does not alter the gram-
maticality of its host sentence. Secondly, they are optional in the sense
that if a discourse marker is omitted, the relationship it signals is still
available to the hearer, though no longer explicitly cued (cf. Schourup
1999: 231).
The above statement does not entail that discourse markers are useless;
rather, it reflects the view according to which discourse markers guide
the hearer towards a particular interpretation of the connection between
a sequence of utterances and at the same time rule out unintended inter-
pretations.
8 P. B. Furkó
2.2 Context-Dependence
2.3 Multifunctionality
(3a) Interviewer: I know how close you are to your mom. How old is
she?
Interviewee: Well, she probably doesn’t want me to say…
(3b) You’re not going to have quality if you can’t sleep and you itch
and you bitch and you weep and you cry and you bloat and you can’t
remember anything and you don’t have a, well, sex drive. (examples
taken from Furkó 2014)
As the examples above show, the size of the linguistic unit well can take
in its scope ranges from a whole sentence to a single word. Waltereit
(2006) observes that this variability is a remarkable property, but it is
not an exclusive feature of discourse markers, since conjunctions as a
word-class (and even some individual conjunctions as a lexical item) can
also have variable scope, giving the following sentences as examples:
In (4a), and has scope over two NPs, and in (4b), it has scope over two
clauses. However, the difference between and used as a conjunction and
its discourse marker use lies in the fact that the scope of the conjunction
and can always be determined in grammatical terms. It could be defined
as ranging over two constituents of the same type adjacent to and, which,
in turn, make up a constituent of again the same type. The scope of dis-
course markers, in contrast, cannot be determined in grammatical terms,
as is clear from (5) below:
interactional unit that is being continued than we can use and to identify
the idea that is being coordinated” (Schiffrin 1987:150).
Traugott (1995) relates the feature of variable scope to grammaticaliza-
tion and argues that in addition to nominal clines (nominal adposition >
case) and verbal clines (main verb > tense, aspect, mood marker), which
are “staples of grammaticalization theory”, a further cline: Clause inter-
nal Adverbial > Sentence Adverbial > Discourse Particle should be added
to the inventory (Traugott 1995: 1). According to Traugott, this cline
involves increased syntactic freedom and scope.
Brinton (2017: 24) further refines Traugott’s (1995) clines and adds
scope within the proposition > scope over the proposition > scope over dis-
course as a separate cline in the evolution from propositional to textual
and interpersonal meaning.
Language: German
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