Information Structural Perspectives On Discourse Particles

The articles collected in this volume offer new perspectives into the relevance of notions such as topic, antitopic, contrastive topic, focus, verum focus and theticity for the analysis of the syntax and semantics of modal particles, sentence-final particles and other medial, sentential and illocutive particles. This book addresses three great questions in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese to Mohawk, including Basque, French, German, Italian, Kazakh, Spanish and Turkish, with some insights from English and Russian. The first question is the role played by information-structural strategies such as left dislocations, clefts or the morphological marking of focus in the rise of discourse particles. In the second part, papers are concerned with the relevance of information structure for the study of polysemic and polyfunctional discourse particles. Finally, the contribution of particles to the determination of the information-structural profile of the clause is examined, as well as their role in the information-structural specification of illocutionary types. Language-specific papers alternate with comparative approaches in order to show how newer insights on information structure can help resolve some of the classical issues of the linguistic research on particles.

Read this book to get a deeper understanding of a wide range of semantics research on complex sentences and meaning in discourse. These in-depth articles from leading names in their fields cover the core concepts of sentential semantics such as tense, modality, conditionality, propositional attitudes, scope, negation, and coordination. The highly cited material, covers questions, imperatives, copular clauses, and existential sentences. It also includes essential research on sentence types, and explains central concepts in the theory of information structure and discourse structure, such as topics, cohesion and coherence, accessibility and discourse particles.

Discourse particles have often been treated as a phenomenon restricted to Germanic languages (Abraham 2020) and they still raise questions about their nature as an independent category. This book reveals that this phenomenon exists in other languages as well, and provides evidence for their nature as a separate category. The volume brings together a collection of nine papers that focus on three research topics: a) the diachronic development of discourse particles; b) their syntactic analysis; and c) the study of their semantic-pragmatics. Furthermore, it also discusses other issues less often dealt with in the literature but of great interest for linguistic theory, such as the acquisition of discourse particles by children or the analysis of elements not usually considered discourse particles but whose historical path or microvariation indicates otherwise. Additionally, the book offers a cross-linguistic perspective as it discusses various languages including Basque, Catalan, German, Italian, Laz, Mandarin Chinese, Old English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

This collection presents current work on discourse structuring from a theoretical as well as a processing perspective. The main objectives are the investigation of appropriate levels of analysis for discourse segmentation and criteria for the identification of basic discourse units.

"Researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields"--Del editor.

This monograph aims to contribute to linguistic knowledge about the distribution and function of discourse particles, particularly with respect to a small group of particles which are highly frequent in contemporary spoken standard French. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 (Theory) defines discourse particles as such, and gives a dynamic global approach to their description. Matters such as previous research on discourse particles, related categories of particles, instructional semantics, the difference between speech and writing, the delimitation of discourse units, competing approaches to discourse structure and to coherence, and methodology are discussed extensively. Part 2 (Description) offers in-depth corpus-based analyses of six French discourse particles, namely bon, ben, eh bien, puis, donc, and alors, as used in non-elicted native-speaker interaction. The book is of interest to linguists doing research in semantics, pragmatics and discourse studies.

The relation between pragmatic markers and the peripheries of clauses, utterances and/or turns has been a topic of linguistic interest for the last few decades. Many issues continue to be debated, however, such as “how should the notion of periphery be defined?”, “to what extent do pragmatic markers in the left versus the right periphery fulfill different functions?” and “which factors determine the order of multiple pragmatic markers in a periphery?”. This volume brings together a number of studies addressing these and other questions. It presents new data from a diverse range of languages – including less researched ones in this context like Ainu, Latvian and Lithuanian – and on a variety of types of pragmatic marker – including emoji. The volume as a whole offers new insights into, among other things, the subjectivity intersubjectivity peripheries hypothesis, the idea of left-to-right movement and the matrix clauses hypothesis.

This study investigates the properties of a set of Italian adverbs (among others: pure ‘also’, solo ‘only’, un po’ ‘a bit’) that, in specific contexts of use, modify the speech acts in which they appear. On the one hand, these elements specify the way in which a speech act should be interpreted with reference to the specific interactional context, modifying its illocutionary force. On the other hand, they index presupposed/inferred meanings active in the common ground of the interaction, integrating the speech act in the common ground. These functions closely resemble those of the elements that, especially in the German linguistic tradition, are called modal particles. Drawing on original data from Italian – both from the standard language and regional varieties – the goal of the study is to describe the synchronic features of these elements and to explain the emergence of the modal uses. For this purpose, it jointly employs theoretical notions of pragmatics (speech act theory, inferences in interaction), models of language change (reanalysis and conventionalization) and the descriptive tools of sociolinguistic approaches. Through the presentation of four case studies, integrating corpus and questionnaire data, the present work gives a thorough analysis of the modal functions and the contexts of use of the adverbs under investigation: it explores their role at the semantics/pragmatics interface, it discusses their place in a layered model of grammar and it examines their distribution across different language varieties.