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"Pragmatics Variation."
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Pragmatic markers, discourse markers and modal particles : new perspectives
This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form, meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages, along with new methods for identifying their 'prototypical' instances in situated language contexts, often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collected in this volume also discuss different factors at play in processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, which include contact-induced change and pragmatic borrowing, socio-interactional functional pressures and sociopragmatic indexicalities, constraints of cognitive processing, together with regularities in semantic change. Putting the traditional issues concerning the status, delimitation and categorization of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles somewhat off the stage, the eighteen articles collected in this volume deal instead with general questions concerning the development and use of such procedural elements, explored from different approaches, both formal and functional, and from a variety of perspectives - including corpus-based, sociolinguistic, and contrastive perspectives - and offering language-specific synchronic and diachronic studies.
eBook
Socioeconomic pragmatic variation : speech acts and address forms in context
On a regular basis people encounter unfamiliar uses of pragmatic features, such as offers or requests with differing levels of directness or terms of address showing differing amounts of solidarity or deference. Variational pragmatics is the study of such uses, according to region, gender, age, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, among national and sub-national varieties of pluricentric languages. Despite the wide focus just outlined, this volume provides the first study of pragmatic variation across different social classes, using naturally occurring, interactional data. The discourse analyzed here was collected in over twenty restaurant service encounters spanning three price points. The aim of this study is two-fold: to provide a potential framework for how pragmatic variables and their context can be defined, using the concept of a communicative activity, and to investigate socioeconomic variation in pragmatics by taking offers, thanks responses and address forms as examples. This study contributes, both on a methodological and empirical level, to the growing body of research in variational pragmatics, as well as speech acts, terms of address, relational work and sociolinguistics.
eBook
Epistemic phrases and adolescent speech in West London
Adolescents, particularly those in multiethnic, multilingual communities, have become central to sociolinguistic research in the variationist tradition (Cheshire, Nortier & Adger 2015). In several studies of adolescent speech in European urban centres, the same set of Arabic-derived epistemic phrases, namely wallah , wallahi and related phrases meaning ‘swear’, appear to be in use (see, e.g., Quist 2005; Opsahl 2009; Lehtonen 2015). In this article, we document how these phrases are used in the speech of adolescents from a borough of West London and demonstrate the functional similarities between the current data and studies of adolescents in other West European contexts. Using a distributional analysis, we also draw several comparisons between our data and data collected in previous studies of adolescent speech in London. We find functional and distributional similarities and contrasts in both cases. We then discuss the consequences of these findings for the study of epistemic markers and their relevance in adolescent speech.
Journal Article
The Emergence of Tab in Najdi Arabic
This study empirically investigates functional and social variation in the use of TAYYIB (‘okay, well, right’) in light of grammaticalisation. Thirty naturally occurring conversations of 60 Najdi Arabic speakers were recorded in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The analysis demonstrates that TAYYIB has two realisations: full Tayyib [tˁajjib] and reduced Tab [tˁab]. Drawing on the conversation analytic approach within a variationist framework, TAYYIB was used to perform multiple discourse-pragmatic functions: interpersonal, textual and interpersonal–textual. The statistical analysis reveals that variant choice is significantly conditioned by the pragmatic functions. While Tayyib is employed to perform all three functions, Tab is only used for textual and interpersonal–textual meanings. As for social factors, Tab is significantly more likely to be used by younger speakers than adults and also more likely to be used by females than males. This can be interpreted as an indication of ongoing change driven by young people, primarily females, towards the greater use of the innovative Tab. Given the evidence of linguistic change in Tab including semantic bleaching, pragmatic strengthening and phonological reduction, the study suggests that Tab has undergone advanced grammaticalisation.
Journal Article
Teenagers' use of pragmatic markers in Madrid, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile
Pragmatic markers are typical of teenage talk, and they tend to spread from one region to another, often from large cities, such as the capital, to the countryside and sometimes even further. Since Spanish is spoken not only in Spain but also in the Americas, and further afield, the question is to what extent pragmatic markers used by Madrid teenagers are employed by teenagers from other cities in the Spanish-speaking world. This paper compares Madrid teenagers' use of vale, venga, que va, en plan and tipo with their use by teenagers in Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile as reflected in three corpora of teenage talk, Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm), Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Santiago de Chile (COLAs) and Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Buenos Aires (COLAba). That the long-established markers vale and venga should be used by all alike can perhaps be taken for granted. But what about the newcomers en plan and tip61 The results of the study are mixed due to the uneven sizes of the corpora, but some unexpected tendencies will be accounted for.
Journal Article
‘Ey, wait, wait, gully!’ Style, stance and the social meaning of attention signals in East London adolescent speech
Recent accounts of discourse-pragmatic (DP) variation have demonstrated that these features can acquire social indexical meaning. However, in comparison to other linguistic variables, DP features remain underexplored and third-wave perspectives on the topic are limited. In this article, I analyse the distribution, function and social meaning of the ‘attention signals’ – those features which fulfil the explicit function of eliciting the attention of an individual – in just over 35 hours of self-recordings of 25 adolescents collected during a year-long sociolinguistic ethnography of an East London youth group. This leads me to identify an innovative attention signal – ey. Distributional analyses of this feature show that ey is associated with a particular Community of Practice, the self-defined and exclusively male ‘gully’. By examining the discourse junctures at which ey occurs, I argue that this attention signal is most frequently used by speakers to deploy a ‘dominant’ stance. For gully members, this feature is particularly useful as an interpersonal device, where it is used to manage ingroup/outgroup boundaries. Concluding, I link the use of ey and the gully identity to language, ethnicity and masculinity in East London.
Journal Article
The Functions of the Spanish Approximators Como and Como Que in Institutional and Non-Institutional Discursive Contexts
The Spanish approximators
and
(“sort of,” “as if,” “kind of,” “seems,” “like”) serve multiple pragmatic functions. They can be employed in similar contexts to express vagueness when speakers experience uncertainty or to hedge and avoid being straightforward. Furthermore, these forms can alternate according to context since they represent two ways of saying the same thing. This study investigated the use of
and
in two speech events: narratives of personal experience (non-institutional) and therapeutic interviews (institutional), which were generated by Spanish speakers of several varieties, educational levels, and lengths of residence in the United States. The study was informed by the theoretical frameworks of sociolinguistic and pragmatic variation, and the data were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative approaches. The findings revealed that while
was the preferred form among the speakers of the study they employed como que more often in the therapeutic interviews. Thus, both discourse and the pragmatic functions conditioned the use of these approximators.
Journal Article
Variación sociolinguistica en el empleo de un nuevo marcador discursivo: ahora si que en el español de México
En este artículo se analiza la distribución del marcador discursivo ahora sí (que) en dos variedades del español de México, Ciudad de México y Monterrey, y en dos momentos diferentes. Empleando los corpora de PRESEEA de ambas ciudades y otros dos corpora de entrevistas sociolingüísticas más antiguos, el estudio constata diferencias diacrónicas y diatópicas claras: el marcador es más frecuente en Ciudad de México que en Monterrey y, en ambas variedades, es más frecuente en los datos más recientes. Además, el análisis de frecuencias del marcador apunta interesantes diferencias sociales en el empleo de ahora sí (que) en la Ciudad de México, donde su uso está favorecido por hablantes jóvenes, por hombres y por informantes de los niveles de instrucción bajo y medio.
Journal Article