Doctor of Philology Mykhaylenko Valery V.
Tag As Afterthought In Discourse
The discourse analysis reveals
reveals the elements structuring the discourse itself Their structural,
semantic, functional, and pragmatic features have been under analysis for a long time [4]. However, their
attidudinal aspect has not been focused yet.
There is a tendency to add elements as the Speaker’s afterthought to the utterance expressed or the
discourse support stimulating the Recepient to agree, to disagree, to confirm,
to reject, or to comment the Speaker’s idea.
The grammarian sees discourse as having a definite structure
which is the projection of rules which the language user is constrained to
apply as a condition on his/her communicating at all. S/he does not see it, as
the ethnomethodologists appear to see it, as a process whereby the language
user resorts to certain strategies to apply his/her previous knowledge, or, to
put it another way, where the language user has a knowledge of rules of
application as well as a knowledge of rules relating to the language system. (Sacks 1974)
Attempts to
draw features of discourse within the scope of grammatical description, then,
involve removing the distinction between a knowledge of the language system and
the procedures which the language user follows in putting this knowledge to use
in actual acts of communication. In consequence, discourse
is represented
as consisting of a combination of pre-established meanings, as a set
of tokens of
types already set up within the code of the language.
Discourse consists of its
discoursive units which can be called “quants”
creating a discourse, They function as nodes of graphs reflecting
discoursive relationships between the parts of the discourse in terms of the
Theory of Rhetorical Structures suggested by W.C.Mann and S.A.Thompson [3, 243-281].
There are two criteria of defining a
discourse constituent – semantic syntactic and intonational. Accordingly, the first criterion considers
predication to be an integral part, while the other requires an intonational
pattern. The problem arises when there is a discrepancy between these two
criteria.
In semantics, discourses are linguistic units
composed of several sentences — in other words, conversations, arguments or speeches. The study of discourses, or of
language used by members of a speech community,
is known as discourse analysis.
It looks at both language form and function, and includes the study of both
spoken interaction and written texts. It is a cross-disciplinary field,
originally developing from sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology and social psychology.
dialogue between Speakers.
Our hypothesis is that discourse
markers can have one more function, that of a modus one. Modality in general –
as one subcategory of the system of ‘tense aspect modality marking’, or of
‘qualifications of states of affairs’ remains among the major problem domains
in linguistic semantics [5] .
But this characterization applies even more
stringently to deontic modality in particular, as one modal subcategory, which
in the literature is usually defined in terms of notions such as permission and
obligation, and which is much less understood than its more ‘popular’ sister
category of epistemic modality. Epistemic modality involves an assessment of
the likelihood of a state of affairs, as expressed e.g. by the adverb probably
in John is probably home now.
There is practically no
functional linguistic (including cognitive linguistic and typological)
literature specifically devoted to the semantic notion of deontic modality,
concern with it in linguistic semantics is nearly exclusively as a ‘byproduct’
in the context of analyses of the formal category of the modal auxiliaries
(even more so than this is the case for epistemic modality, which has received
at least some attention beyond the modals).
Not surprisingly, then,
there is no stable, well-founded and broadly accepted view regarding its status
among the modal or more generally the qualificational dimensions, and even the
few ‘default’ assumptions about it in the literature turn out to be problematic
if put in a wider perspective.
Thus, deontic
modality is not even generally acknowledged as a separate or independent
semantic notion: specifically, it is often not separated from (parts of)
‘dynamic modality’. The latter category most typically involves an indication
of abilities/possibilities or needs/necessities of the agent participant in the
state of affairs, inherent ones, as expressed by the modal auxiliary. Also
the ‘average’ definition of the category of deontic modality found in the
literature appears problematic, however.
The object of our investigation is
a tag as the Speaker’s afterthought element in discourse, e.g.:
You get right to the heart of the matter, don’t you? (D. Brin)
It is a pity we must go back to Shadizar empty handed, is it not?
(R.Jordan)
Which can be
analysed in the domain including also:
To
what conclusion? (D. Brin)
Well then? (D. Brin)
Quite a sight, eh? (D. Brin)
Glory? (D. Brin)
And why not? (D. Brin)
The what? (D. Brin)
Who better to choose as our guest’s bodyguard, eh? (D. Brin)
You won’t tell, will you? (D. Brin)
Studying segmentation markers should help
determine how Speakers and Writers signal the beginning and end of large and
small discourse units and how Listeners and Readers recognize these units. As
soon as the language sciences expanded their research area beyond the sentence,
researchers tried to demonstrate the existence of these units larger than the
sentence and shorter than the text; they started looking for linguistic and
paralinguistic marks that highlight the boundaries of these units.
The interest for a cognitive
model of language understanding directed the attention to devices that would
facilitate the integration of large amount of information. Markers highlighting
the organization of discourse in chunks are well designed to fulfill this
function. Finally, as the duty of introducing these markers in the discourse
rests on the author/speaker, the way they are used should inform about the
mechanisms of discourse generation, the contextual factors that control it, and
the resources devoted to it by the Speaker and Writer. Segmentation markers can
be seen as traces of the difficulties the Speaker encounters when they have to
introduce of topic change in their discourse. The content is
not recovered in the form of a coherent and cohesive text, but as chunks of
closely related events. The chunk boundaries are a locus of significant change in time, space and casting. Updating all these constituents
and retrieving the next chunk is costly in terms of cognitive effort and causes
the occurrence of traces of segmentation. In written production, one should
also expect to observe some traces of text segmentation provided that they are
not removed by the author's editing work. Interjections of"er... hm" type are not always the trace of difficulties in
generating a topic hift, but can be intentionally introduced to inform the
addressee about the presence of a topic
shift. Understanding a text is an incremental process in which new sentences
are integrated with the preceding ones to construct a coherent mental representation. According to the Given-New Contract Theory,
authors are expected to produce their discourse in such a way that Readers can
apply the nextness principle. However, each time a new topic is introduced in
the discourse they have to explicitly prevent the application of this
principle. According to
the Gricean maxims of communication, Speakers and Writers are expected to
inform the Addressees that continuity is not preserved, that there is a topic
shift, and that special action should be taken. This is definitely an important
pragmatic function of the segmentation marker. Yet, it is very difficult to
find segmentation markers that would function exclusively as a trace or as a
signal.
In the existing literature about
discourse markers it is possible to identify two approaches. On the one hand
there are investigations with a pragmatic and textual orientation, which try to
define theoretically the discourse mechanisms governing discourse markers use.
On the other hand there are more empirical studies, often with computational
purposes, which concentrate on the lexical aspects of discourse markers. It is
well known that within the pragmatic/textual orientation there are two distinct
approaches: the Discourse-Coherence approach (Schiffrin[8] Redeker [6], Fraser[2]) and the Relevance-Theory approach
(Blackemore[1] ) Discourse markers bear some symbolic information and
play the function of linking the context with the utterance making the
information accessable to the Reader/Listener.
The functions of discourse markers are in various contexts: converasation managing, role
change, topic shifts, separation, utterance coherence, developing a
macrostructure, pause fillers, discourse relationship, hesitating markers, modus
markers (speaker’s subjective modality markers),expressions of attitudes, hedgings
markers, supporting markers, etc.
We use the term discourse marker for
those lexical items that (in addition to non-lexical means such as punctuation,
aspectual and focus shifts, etc.) can signal the presence of such a relation at
the linguistic surface. Definitions of discourse markers have often been
couched in negative terms: markers are said to be non-propositional, to
contribute nothing to truth-conditional meaning, to have little or no semantic
value, to be outside the syntax of the sentence, to be optional elements, etc. The
discoursal use of such expressions is part of the wider phenomenon of Speakers'
attitudes towards the ideas they express. The study of discourse markers is
therefore a part of the study of modal and metatextual comment, and is best
approached under the rubric of discourse structure.
Discourse markers are a
polifunctional and polisemantic
phenomenon, therefore they can be investigated in various formats – the
thery of speech acts, the theory of speech relativity, discourse analysis, and
others. For a quarter of a century some six fundamental approaches have been
employed: the theory of discourse (Schiffrin), the theory of linguistics (Fraser), the theory of coherence (Sanders), the theory of relevence òåîðèÿ (Blakemore), the theory of argumentation (Ducrot and Anscombre), the cognitive theory (Sweetser).
The difference lies in understanding the
functions of discourse markers and methods of their analysis. Consequently we
have functional pragmatic linguistics of discourse markers, sociolinguistics of
discourse markers, and diachrony of discourse markers. The classification of
discourse markers is based on the following features: contents, propositional structure, speech act structure,
interchange structure, participants
structure, information structure, form, function, distribution.
Discourse structure is a
crucial component in both language interpretation and generation. In
interpretation, discourse structure provides clues about how people infer
content that's linguistically implicit. In generation, discourse structure is
needed for planning text which effectively communicates the intended content,
and which sounds natural in that it doesn't make every bit of that content
linguistically explicit. Most tags are loosely attached to the preceding
sentence. There are various kinds of tag are registered: tag-questions, retrospective
comment clauses, retrospective vagueness hedges, noun phrase tags, other
non-clausal units retrospectively added, self-supplied answers,vocatives.
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