Andreas H. Jucker

The discourse marker well: a relevance-theoretical account

Abstract In Sperber and Wilsons relevance theory, the discourse marker well can be seen as a signpost which constrains the interpretation process and the concomitant background selection. It signifies that the most immediately accessible context is not the most relevant one for the interpretation of the impending utterance. This analysis covers four more or less distinct uses of well : (1) as a marker of insufficiency; (2) as a face-threat mitigator; (3) as a frame; and (4) as a delay device. Relevance theory, which is a general theory of human communication based on cognitive principles, offers a unified explanation across a broad range of examples.

Interactive aspects of vagueness in conversation

Vagueness in reference is often seen as a deplorable deviation from precision and clarity. Using a relevance theoretical framework of analysis, we demonstrate instead that vague expressions may be more effective than precise ones in conveying the intended meaning of an utterance. That is, they may carry more relevant contextual implications than would a precise expression. In introducing entities into a conversation, we found that vague referring expressions often served as a focusing device, helping the addressee determine how much processing effort should be devoted to a given referent. In characterising events and experiences, they may indicate a closer or looser assignment of a characteristic to a conceptual category. For expressing quantities, they may convey the speaker’s attitude about the quantity itself, and they may convey assumptions about the speaker’s and/or the hearer’s beliefs. They may be used to directly express the degree of commitment a speaker makes to a proposition, or they may convey other propositional attitudes such as newsworthiness and personal evaluation more indirectly. Finally, they may serve social functions such as engendering camaraderie and softening implicit criticisms. They may thus be seen as managing conversational implicature. Our analysis is based on a corpus of semi-controlled spoken interactions between California students, who were asked to converse on specific topics, such as movies, sports or opera. Following the categories proposed by Channell (Channell, Joanna. 1994. Vague Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford), we analysed examples of vague additives, i.e., approximators, downtoners, vague category identifiers and shields, and examples of lexical vagueness, i.e., vague quantifying expressions, vague adverbs of frequency, vague adverbs of likelihood, and placeholder words. Such expressions are used regularly in everyday conversations and they rarely lead to detectable misunderstandings; we argue that their success depends on the exploitation of common ground. # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

News interviews : a pragmalinguistic analysis

Jucker endeavors to test pragmatic concepts (such as Grice’s principles of conversational inference) by applying them to concrete data. This application leads to suggestions for various modifications in the available pragmatic methodology. While pursuing this theoretical goal, he makes a significant contribution to descriptive pragmatics by offering a detailed picture of linguistically relevant aspects of news interviews, which show communicative behavior in ‘laboratory conditions’ where as many influencing factors as possible are kept stable while the influence of one specific factor at a time can be tested.

Social stylistics : syntactic variation in British newspapers

The social stylistics syntactic variations in british newspapers that we provide for you will be ultimate to give preference. This reading book is your chosen book to accompany you when in your free time, in your lonely. This kind of book can help you to heal the lonely and get or add the inspirations to be more inoperative. Yeah, book as the widow of the world can be very inspiring manners. As here, this book is also created by an inspiring author that can make influences of you to do more.

The discourse marker well in the history of English

The discourse marker well has four distinct uses in Modern English: as a frame it introduces a new topic or prefaces direct reported speech; as a qualifier it prefaces a reply which is only a partial answer to a question; as a face-threat mitigator it prefaces a disagreement; and as a pause filler it bridges interactional silence. In Old English well was used on an interpersonal level as an emphatic attention-getting device (similar to Old English hwaet ‘listen’, ‘behold’, or ‘what’). In Middle English, well always functioned as a frame on a textual level. In Early Modern English, and particularly in the plays by Shakespeare, the uses of well diversified considerably and adopted interpersonal uses again.

News actor labelling in British newspapers

Newspapers constantly refer to people, and they employ a large variety of linguistic means to do so, such as the first names, surnames, titles, or public roles of the people concerned, and various combinations of these elements. They also use descriptive labels and pronouns. Expressions which refer to news actors can be traced along two dimensions. The first dimension concerns the development from the headline through the introductory paragraphs to the later paragraphs of an article. At its first occurrence, such an expression must necessarily be exophoric, that is, it must refer to the intended real-world referent directly. When mentioned again, the expression has both exophoric and endophoric reference, a factor which influences the journalists choice of linguistic means. The journalists choice is also governed by stylistic considerations. This becomes clear if different newspapers are compared. Writers for downmarket papers such as The Sun employ strategies that are different to those found in mid-market papers such as The Daily Mail and even more different to those in up-market papers such as The Independent

Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse

This volume presents current state-of-the-art discussions in corpus-based linguistic research of the English language. The papers deal with Present-day English, worldwide varieties of English and the history of the English language. A special focus of the volume are studies in the broad field of corpus pragmatics and corpus-based discourse analysis. It includes corpus-based studies of speech acts, conversational routines, referential expressions and thought styles, as well as studies on the lexis, grammar and semantics of English. And it also includes several studies on technical aspects of corpus compilation, fieldwork and parsing.

Historical (im)politeness

Drawing on earlier approaches to politeness and impoliteness, this chapter shows their applicability to historical contexts. Early work tends to analyse historical data on the basis of Brown and Levinson’s approach to politeness as a face-threat mitigation strategy. Later work extends the scope to discursive approaches focussing on explicit negotiations of politeness values and the analysis of meta-communicative expressions relating to politeness and impoliteness. The chapter illustrates the most recent approaches with two case studies. The first one traces lexical items in the semantic field of (Im)politeness, such as civility, courtesy, rudeness or impoliteness, in the history of the English language. The second shows how impoliteness can be constructed discursively in a verbal duel between two Scottish Renaissance writers, William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy.

The relevance of cleft constructions

It-clefts, wh-clefts, reversed wh-clefts and their non-cleft equivalents are truth-conditionally identical. However, their discourse functions vary considerably. In terms of relevance theory it-clefts and both types of wh-clefts give specific processing instructions to the hearer, i.e., they convey procedural meaning. The highlighted element is presented as foreground information and the relative clause as background information, irrespective of whether either chunk of information is old or new. In non-cleft sentences, the distinction between foreground and background depends on the scope of the sentence focus and is gradual. In the cleft sentences, on the other hand, the syntactic structure distinguishes clearly between foreground and background and it determines the scope of the sentence focus. In this way, cleft constructions help to reduce processing effort and thus add to the relevance of the utterance. This account helps to explain the distribution of it-clefts, wh-clefts and reversed wh-clefts in different varieties of English, e.g., the fact that it-clefts are more frequent than wh-clefts in the written English of the LOB corpus, while wh-clefts are far more frequent than it-clefts in the spoken English of the London-Lund corpus.

Contrastive Analysis across Time: Issues in Historical Dialogue Analysis

Historical dialogue analysis can be seen as a special case of contrastive analysis, that is to say — as the title of this chapter suggests — as contrastive analysis across time. The objects of investigation are not two different languages, but two (or more) different stages in the development of the same language. In this chapter I want to discuss some of the similarities and differences of synchronic and diachronic contrastive analysis.