Inferences in Interaction and Language Change
International Colloquium
November 10–13, 2016, University of Freiburg
http://frequenz.uni-freiburg.de/812
Graduate School GRK 1624
“Frequency effects”
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
(FRIAS)
Contents
Contact information ................................................................................................................. 2 Travel and practical information............................................................................................ 2 Hotel ....................................................................................................................................... 2 Restaurant Warming Up (Thursday) & Conference Dinner (Friday) ................................... 2 Restaurant dinner (Saturday) ................................................................................................. 2 Venue ...................................................................................................................................... 2 Freiburg city map ................................................................................................................... 0 Program..................................................................................................................................... 0 Commentators (in order of appearance) ................................................................................... 2 Abstracts (in order of appearance) ............................................................................................ 3 Information ............................................................................................................................. 18 Research training group GRK DFG 1624/1 "Frequency effects in language".................... 18 Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies – FRIAS ................................................................ 19 1
Contact information
Oliver Ehmer
[email protected]
+49 179 9151298
Malte Rosemeyer
[email protected]
+49 178 6343149
Travel and practical information
Hotel
Stadthotel Freiburg, Karlstraße 7, 79104 Freiburg
Tel +49 761 3193-0
[email protected]
http://www.hotel-freiburg.de/en/
https://www.google.de/maps/dir//47.998657,7.855211/@47.998657,7.855211,15.75z
Walking distance from train station approximately 20 min.
Restaurant Warming Up (Thursday) & Conference Dinner (Friday)
Paradies, Mathildenstrasse 26 / 28, 79106 Freiburg
Tel +49 761-273700
http://www.paradies-freiburg.de/en
Restaurant dinner (Saturday)
Der Kaiser, Günterstalstr. 38, 79100 Freiburg
Tel + 49 761-74910
http://www.freiburgerkaiser.de/
Venue
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Albertstraße 19, D-79104 Freiburg
https://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/en/home?set_language=en
2
Freiburg city map
Program
Thursday, November 10th, 2016
19:30
Warm-up dinner
Paradies, Mathildenstrasse 26 / 28
Friday, November 11th, 2016
8:30
Registration opens
9:00
Opening
09:40 – 10:30
The relevance of inferences in interaction and language change
Arnulf Deppermann
(Why) do we need inferences in conversation analysis?
10:30 – 11:20
11:40 – 12:30
12:30 – 13:00
14:30 – 15:20
15:20 – 16:10
16:30 – 17:00
19:30
Elizabeth Traugott
The role of invited inferencing in constructional change: An assessment
from the perspective of interactional texts
Coffee break
Paul Drew
Inferences and Indirectness in Interaction
Esme Winter-Froemel
Commentary – Followed by a general discussion
Lunch
Adverbials
Kerstin Fischer & Elizabeth Traugott
Inferential processes in a clause-final use of already
Regine Eckardt
Texts of Law as model case of conditional reasoning: Why German lost
conditional "ob" and found "wenn" instead.
Coffee break
Stefan Pfänder
Commentary – Followed by a general discussion
Dinner
Paradies, Mathildenstrasse 26 / 28
Saturday, November 12th, 2016
Interlude
09:30 – 10:20 Susanne Michaelis & Martin Haspelmath
Why independent possessive person-forms are longer: Diverse sources
conspiring toward a uniform result
10:20 – 11:10
11:30– 12:20
12:20 – 12:50
14:30 – 15:20
15:20 – 16:10
16:30 – 17:00
Morphology
Peter Auer & Anja Stukenbrock
Personal and personalized "generic" uses of German du/you: inference and
change
Coffee break
Ulrich Detges
Te lo tengo dicho muchas veces. Resultative constructions between
implicature and coercion
Daniel Jacob
Commentary – Followed by a general discussion
Lunch
Interrogatives
Oliver Ehmer & Malte Rosemeyer
Contrast and inferences in but-prefaced questions: a synchronic and
diachronic analysis of Spanish
Richard Waltereit
Reanalysis at discourse level and at speech community level: the French
est-ce que question
Coffee break
Bert Cornillie
Commentary – Followed by a general discussion
19:30
Dinner
Sunday, November 13st, 2016
Pragmatic markers
9:00 – 09:50
John Heritage
Reading history backwards: Clues in contemporary conversational usage to
past processes of subjectivization
09:50 – 10:40
Uwe Küttner
The joint production of an inference: Sequential and linguistic aspects of
Oh that’s right as a practice for claiming ‘just-now recollection’
10:40 – 11:00
11:00 – 11:50
Coffee break
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen
Cyclic phenomena in the evolution of pragmatic markers
11:50– 12:20
Ekkehard König
Commentary – Followed by a general discussion
12:20 – 13:00
Final Discussion
Lunch
Social program
Guided visit in the “Augustinermuseum”
Farewell dinner
15:30
19:00
1
Commentators (in order of appearance)
Esme Winter-Froemel, [email protected], Universität Trier
Stefan Pfänder, [email protected], Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
Freiburg
Bert Cornillie, [email protected], KU Leuven
Daniel Jacob, [email protected], Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
Freiburg
Ekkehard König, [email protected], Freie Universität Berlin
2
Abstracts (in order of appearance)
(Why) do we need inferences in conversation analysis?
Arnulf Deppermann, [email protected], Institut für Deutsche Sprache
Mannheim
Conversation Analysis (CA) studies observable, public practices of sense-making in social
interaction. Conversation analysts reject the explanation of actions in interaction both by
normative-deductive appeals to social structure and by recourse to participants’ cognitive
structures and processes (te Molder/Potter 2006). Most of them favor cognitive agnosticism
(Hopper 2006) and look for indigenous explanations of interactional structures; in particular,
more ethnomethodologically minded researchers are even straightforward anti-cognitivist
(Coulter 2006). However, over the last decade, the role of epistemics in interaction has
become a major topic of CA (e.g. Heritage 2012, but see Lynch/Wong 2016), and it has been
argued that even researchers holding an agnostic position implicitly rely on cognitive
ascriptions to participants in their conversation analytic accounts (Deppermann 2012). In the
light of this debate, it is far from evident that, how and why inferences should be a research
topic for CA.
This paper will argue that conversation analysts necessarily treat participants as
discursive agents whose production and understanding of meaning in interaction largely relies
on inferences. Still, inferences may matter to interactional practice in very different ways.
Building on research by the author and his co-workers at the Institute for German Language,
three varieties of how inferences feature in interactional practice will be discussed:
a) Inferences may be explicitly formulated (see already Heritage/Watson 1979).
Connectives (like engl. so) are specialized linguistic means to display that a formulation is to
be understood as an inference from a prior turn. In German, the connective dann displays that
an upcoming formulation expresses a unilateral inference from a co-participant’s prior turn
which is not claimed to be intersubjectively shared. In contrast, also, sprich and das heißt
project intersubjective inferences which are expected to be confirmed by the co-participant as
having been meant (Deppermann/Helmer 2013).
b) Inferences may be indexed, but not formulated. The German response particle eben
is used to confirm a preceding turn, indexing at the same time that this turn follows from what
the eben-speaker had already said before. Eben thus claims epistemic priority by indexing an
inferential relationship between the confirmed turn and an anchor in the preceding talk of the
eben-speaker. However, neither the anchor and nor the precise ways in which the confirmed
turn follows from it are formulated by eben (Betz/Deppermann i.prep.).
c) Inferences may neither be indexed nor formulated, but needed for correct
understanding of a turn. Analeptic turns without object (denk ich auch, ‘think I also’) or even
without any argument (weiß nicht, ‘don’t know’) are quite pervasive in German. In analeptic
turns, an argument is omitted which is obligatory from a normative-grammatical point of
view and whose meaning is a necessary part of the meaning of the turn. In order to resolve
analepsis the hearer has to identify its antecedent in prior discourse. Mostly, this is not simply
a matter of “copying” an antecedent which has been mentioned overtly. Prior discourse may
offer several candidates for analepsis resolution between which the hearer has to choose on
inferential grounds; sometimes, there is no co-referential antecedent, but only an anchor
available which is inferentially related to the meaning of the analepsis (cf. Helmer 2016). In
order to account for how participants are able to use analeptic structures in interaction, the
analyst must invoke inferential processes on the part of the participants.
Having shown that inferences are inextricably involved in interactional practice, I will
discuss how CA-research may deal with inferences as constituents of participants’ practices in
a way which satisfies CA’s methodological tenets.
3
The role of invited inferencing in constructional change: An assessment from the
perspective of interactional texts
Elizabeth Closs Traugott, [email protected], Stanford University
In the late 1980’s I became interested in the role of implicatures in morphosyntactic change
(e.g. Traugott & König 1991, drawing on Grice 1989[1975] and Horn 1984). I conceived of
them as potential syntax-based pragmatic contexts for semasiological change. This was in
contrast to the then dominant hypothesis that semantic change was metaphor-based (e.g.
Sweetser 1990). Seeking to acknowledge the dyadic, interactive as well as cognitive nature of
change, I developed the Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC) (Traugott
1999, Traugott & Dasher 2002), hypothesizing that speakers (usually unconsciously, Keller
1994) invite addressees to infer certain meanings. These inferences may over time become
conventionalized and coded/semanticized, a process of reanalysis formalized by Eckardt
(2006) and Deo (2015). Some researchers have regarded pragmatic implicatures as necessary
for onset of grammaticalization (e.g. Diewald 2002, Bybee 2010); such implicatures are
sometimes referred to as “bridging” contexts (Evans & Wilkins 2002, Heine 2002). Others
(e.g. Hilpert 2013, Petré 2015) have argued that frequency and metatextual pattern activation
may be more important than inferences as prerequisites to morphosyntactic change; so may
interactional turn-taking (Waltereit 2006, Detges and Waltereit 2011, Haselow 2014).
In this programmatic paper I revisit invited inferences from the perspective of: i)
constructionalization, the development of formnew-meaningnew combinations that are
contentful/lexical as well as procedural/ grammatical (Traugott & Trousdale 2013), and are
subject to analogical and onomasiological as well as semasiological analysis, ii) interactive
discourse (e.g. Fitzmaurice 2004, Hansen 2008, Fried 2009, Detges & Waltereit 2011,
Beeching & Detges 2014, Haselow 2016). Since utterance-initial and utterance-final position
are key in interaction, the question arises whether constructions used in them originate there,
specifically pragmatic markers (look, surely), and various kinds of “chunked” projectors
(Auer 2005), e.g. pseudo-clefts and shell noun projectors such as What happened was, and
(The) X is that. As is fairly well known, they do not. So, assuming that there are various types
of inferential meaning (e.g. Hansen 2008, Ariel 2010), the question is which, if any,
inferences might have enabled use in initial or final position historically. Focus is on three
types of inference: a) local linguistic inferences associated with particular constructions, b)
discourse inferences that pertain to text structuring, c) inferences associated with interactional
exchanges. The failure to distinguish these three types has in some cases led to
misconceptions about what enables change.
Data are drawn from historical dialogues, plays and interactional parts of fiction and
trials, especially those in electronic data bases such as CED, COHA, and OBC.
4
Inference and indirectness in interaction
Paul Drew, [email protected], Loughborough University
I’ll begin with some observations about inferences (and implicature) in the context of a
criminal court trial, to address in a preliminary way some points in the Call for papers for this
meeting. After which my principal focus will be one small but significant aspect of
inference/implicature, associated with speakers’ indirectness in interaction, both in making
and responding to enquiries. 1) Enquiries may be made that are indirect, and that do not make
explicit the speaker’s purpose or agenda – leaving it to the recipient to infer what the enquiry
is ‘really’ about, which they do in responding not to what the prior speaker asked ‘literally,’
but to the inferred agenda. 2) Recipients may respond to enquiries indirectly, thereby ‘sidestepping’ the speaker’s purpose or agenda in asking; by not responding directly, the speaker
can leave it to the other to infer information that the speaker thereby avoids giving explicitly.
So that indirectness can be a means, a practice, for avoiding disclosing something about
oneself to which one would rather not admit, explicitly. My account of indirectness in making
and responding to enquiries (drawing on work with Traci Walker and John Local, University
of York) will explore the interconnections between inference, implicature and indirectness, in
the context of avoidance practices in interaction. I study interaction sequentially, from the
perspective and using the methods of Conversation Analysis (the three pillars of CA being
action-turn (design)-sequence).
5
Inferential processes in a clause-final use of already
Kerstin Fischer, [email protected], University of Southern Denmark
Elizabeth Closs Traugott, [email protected], Stanford University
Corpus data from COCA, COHA and SOAP show that from the 1950s on, the English adverb
already has been used in clause-final position in ways that deviate from its previous temporal
use, as illustrated in (1):
(1)
… Carabinieri officers honked impatiently, with one shouting, ‘Move those
sheep already!'(New York Times [COCA])
Here already conveys a certain amount of impatience. While this use of already is most
common in the imperative, it is not restricted to it:
(2)
a. My husband - well, he says I just need to relax already. (COCA:MAG)
b. With a speaker this cool, maybe your teen will remove the earbuds
already. (COCA:MAG)
c. I just want him to leave it alone already. (SOAP:GL)
Irrespective of sentence type, this use of already is generally tied to some kind of directive
speech act and is thus connected to inherently dialogical communicative situations, i.e.
situations that are anchored in situations with ‘communicative immediacy’ (Diewald 2015).
As a temporal adverb, already denotes a relation between a certain pragmatically
given, i.e. expected, transition point (ETP) and a real transition point (TP). Together with the
tense, already indicates that the TP has occurred prior to the time of utterance Tu, as in (3)
(note original already often occurs with perfect):
(3) _________________TP_____Tu____ETP____
By contrast, in (1), the expected time of moving the sheep lies before the time of utterance,
and the resulting implicature is that the actual time of moving the sheep should be as close to
the time of utterance as possible, giving rise to the implicature of impatience.
We propose two different analyses of the use in (1), (2): i) a new modal particle (MP)
use based in common ground, ii) use of the original temporal adverb in new irrealis contexts
without the constraint that TP precedes Tu.
In the MP analysis, the novel use of already is in line with other items that anchor
utterances in the argumentative background (e.g. indeed, just, then, but also negation). MPs
relate their host utterance to an inferable pragmatic context, namely to a logical variant
(Foolen 1989) of the host utterance (see Diewald & Fischer 1998; Diewald 2006, 2008). An
analysis of already as a MP assumes that there are items that evoke an inference as to the
existence of a pragmatically given proposition (one may move the sheep later). The basis for
this inference could be the perceptually available situation (Clark 1996) that may be taken to
indicate that, for instance, the addressee is behaving as if he was thinking that he could move
those sheep later. Already serves here to evoke this contextual background and to relate the
current utterance to that background, thus indicating ‘why that utterance here now’.
The other possible analysis is that already was managing expectations all along. The
new use results from relaxing of the constraint that already cues a TP prior to Tu. This has
allowed expansion to irrealis contexts (imperatives, modals like need, maybe, want). Such
context expansion has been found to constitute a general mechanism involved in accounts of
polysemy and language change (e.g. Goldberg 1995; Mosegaard Hansen 1998, 2008;
Himmelmann 2004).
While both interpretations are equally plausible, they presuppose fundamentally
different inferential processes in interaction. In the MP interpretation of the novel use of
already speakers in interaction are taken to make inferences about why this speaker is saying
this now. The MP provides a clue by indicating what the kind of contents are to which to the
current utterance is oriented and how to identify these. In the contextual extension
6
interpretation, speakers are taken to calculate the intended reference time of already from the
context.
The two authors found their different views may be influenced in part by their
different language backgrounds. While in German, a large class of items exists that are
specially devoted to the MP function proposed for already (see Diewald & Fischer 1998;
Diewald 2006, 2008; Fischer 2007), in English, no such class has traditionally been thought to
exist and the marking of the argumentative role of an utterance has been said to be rare
(Fillmore 1984; but see Schwenter & Waltereit 2010). However, it has been suggested that
such a class may have been developing since c1700 (see clause-final uses of then, however,
actually, Haselow 2012).
Sources
COCA The Corpus of Contemporary American English. 1990–2015. Compiled by Mark Davies. Brigham
Young University. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
COHA Corpus of Historical American English. 1810–2009. Compiled by Mark Davies. Brigham Young
University. http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.
SOAP Corpus of TV soap operas from the early 2000s. Compiled by Mark Davies. Brigham Young University.
http://corpus.byu.edu/soap/
References
Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Diewald, G. (2006). Discourse particles and modal particles as grammatical elements. In K. Fischer (Ed.),
Approaches to discourse particles (pp. 403-425). Amsterdam [etc.]: Elsevier.
Diewald, G. (2008). The catalytic function of constructional restrictions in grammaticalization. In E. Verhoeven,
S. Skopeteas, Y.-M. Shin, Y. Nishina & J. Helmbrecht (Eds.), Studies on grammaticalization (pp. 219240). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Diewald, G. 2015. Modal particles in different communicative types. Constructions and Frames 7,2.
Diewald, Gabriele & Fischer, Kerstin (1998): Zur diskursiven und modalen Funktion der Partikeln aber, auch,
doch und ja in Instruktionsdialogen. Linguistica 38,1, 75-99.
Fillmore, Charles J., 1984. "Remarks on contrastive pragmatics". In: J. Fisiak (ed.), Contrastive Linguistics:
Prospects and Problems [Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 22]. Mouton, Berlin etc., 119141.
Fischer, Kerstin (2007): Grounding and Common Ground: Modal Particles and their Translation Equivalents. In:
Fetzer, Anita & Fischer, Kerstin (eds.): Lexical Markers of Common Grounds. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Foolen, A. (1989). Beschreibungsebenen für Partikelbedeutungen. In H. Weydt (Ed.), Sprechen mit Partikeln
(pp. 305–317). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Goldberg, A. E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard. 1998. The Function of Discourse Particles. A Study with Special Reference to
Spoken Standard French. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hansen, M.-B. Mosegaard. 2008. Particles at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic
Issues. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Haselow, A. 2012. Subjectivity, intersubjectivity and the negotiation of common ground in spoken discourse:
Final particles in English. Language & Communication 32: 182–204.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2004. Lexicalization and grammaticization: Opposite or orthogonal? In W. Bisang,
N. P. Himmelmann & B. Wiemer, eds., What Makes Grammaticalization. 21-42. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Schwenter, Scott A.& Richard Waltereit. 2010. Presupposition accommodation and language change: From
additivity to speech-act marking. In K. Davidse, L. Vandelanotte & H. Cuyckens, eds., Subjectification,
Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization, 75-102. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 7
Reanalysis at discourse level and at speech community level:
the French est-ce que question
Richard Waltereit, [email protected], Newcastle University
In diachronic linguistics, “reanalysis” is used with respect to two broad types of scenarios that
are not always distinguished as such. In the first use, it refers to a specific type of language
change led by hearer inferences, as a result of which an underlying representation changes to
accommodate new usage effects (note that this wording is meant to include syntax, semantics,
and phonology). I will speak of “discourse-level reanalysis” here (cf. Langacker 1977,
Hopper & Traugott 2003, Eckardt 2009). In the second use, “reanalysis” refers to an assumed
diachronic stage in structuralist-generative (i.e. non-variationist) thinking on the relationship
between innovation and spread in language change, namely when a prior innovation is
accepted by the speaker as the form they will use in subsequent speech. I will speak of
“speech community level reanalysis” here (cf. Detges & Waltereit 2002). Discourse-level
reanalysis is one type of language change among many; for a type of language change to
qualify as “reanalysis”, a plausible hearer inference needs to be identified. By contrast,
speech-community-level reanalysis does not require any specific inference. It is merely an
assumed stage, for which no specific evidence needs to be presented, in any kind of language
change.
In a trivial sense, discourse-level reanalysis is a form of speech-community reanalysis
– if all language change needs to be “ratified” by the speech community, then that includes
discourse-level reanalysis. Another question is whether also in a non-trivial sense, discourselevel reanalysis can be reduced to speech-community reanalysis. Discourse-level reanalyses
as discussed in the literature arise in historical scenarios where in heterogeneous communities
adult-to-adult-innovation (diffusion, as opposed to transmission, in the terminology of Labov
2007), helped by inferencing, leads to change. This includes scenarios of language contact.
The aims of my talk are twofold:
- On a theoretical level, I will discuss a range of reanalysis scenarios (with assumed
inferences) as discussed in the literature, with a view to establishing the relationship
between the change and characteristics of the speech community involved.
- On an empirical level, I will revisit the French est-ce que question, where a matrix
clause [est-ce S[que VP[…]]] ‘is it that’ underwent reanalysis to a monomorphematic
question particle in Middle French (Waltereit & Detges 2008), based on new analysis
of diachronic corpora (Base de français médiéval, Frantext). The objective here is to
illustrate the relationship between assumed inferences in discourse and communitylevel language change.
8
Why independent possessive person-forms are longer: Diverse sources conspiring
toward a uniform result
Susanne Michaelis, [email protected], Universität Leipzig
Martin Haspelmath, [email protected], Universität Leipzig
It seems to be a robust empirical observation that independent possessive person forms (such
as English mine, yours, hers) are always longer than (or at least as long as) the corresponding
adnominal possessive person forms (such as English my, your, her). Since adnominal forms
are also much more frequent in discourse than independent forms, this universal can be
subsumed under the grammatical form–frequency correspondence principle (Haspelmath et
al. 2014, and related work). In other words, the fact that independent possessive forms are
longer can be seen as a functional response to the need to highlight rarer, less predictable
forms.
Such functional-adaptive explanations have a diachronic component (Bybee 1988):
Since the current system is rigidly conventional, the adaptive forces must have been active in
earlier diachronic change. Now one could object to the functional-adaptive story that the
current patterns can be explained exclusively on the basis of the sources and the kinds of
changes that commonly give rise to independent (and adnominal) possessive forms. Thus,
Bybee (2006) claims that the sources and processes of change are “the true universals of
language”. If so, the observed patterns would result from general mechanisms and general
source constructions, not from an adaptation to a need to bring predictability and formal
length in line. In this talk, we present a wide range of diachronic sources of independent possessive
person-forms in languages of Europe and the Mediterranean as well as creole and pidgin
languages (based on data from the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures). We
show that the sources and diachronic processes are very diverse, while the result (independent
forms being longer than adnominal forms) is uniform. We interpret this finding as favouring
the functional-adaptive explanation over the diachronic-universal explanation.
References Bybee, Joan. 2006. Language change and universals. In Ricardo Mairal & Juana Gil (eds.), Linguistic universals,
179–194. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bybee, Joan L. 1988. The diachronic dimension in explanation. In John A. Hawkins (ed.), Explaining language
universals, 350–379. Oxford: Blackwell. Haspelmath, Martin, Andreea Calude, Michael Spagnol, Heiko Narrog & Elif Bamyacı. 2014. Coding causalnoncausal verb alternations: A form-frequency correspondence explanation. Journal of Linguistics 50(3).
587–625. Michaelis, Susanne, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath & Magnus Huber (eds.). 2013. The Atlas of Pidgin and
Creole Language Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
9
Personal and personalized "generic" uses of German du/you: inference and change
Peter Auer, [email protected], Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Anja Stukenbrock, [email protected], Université de Lausanne
In our paper, we investigate inferences involved in the processing of what is known as the
generic usage of the personal pronoun du ("you"). Inferences in conversation are usually
invisible and can at best be reconstructed from next speakers' responses to inferentially rich
firsts. It is only in exceptional cases that inferences are overtly negotiated (e.g. in inference
repair sequences). We will look at both kinds of inference management in conversation in
order to reconstruct the situated meaning of du. As in many other European languages, the
German second person pronoun du is claimed to have developed into a generic pronoun partly
replacing the indefinite pronoun man ("one"). We argue that this claim is too simple to
capture the on-going changes in which several phases need to be distinguished. In the most
recent phase of this development, the speaker uses the non-addressee-specific du as a resource
to coerce the addressee into adopting his or her perspective via pseudo-genericity.
10
Te lo tengo dicho muchas veces. Resultative constructions between implicature and
coercion
Ulrich Detges, [email protected], Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität
München
In Germanic and Western Romance, HAVE-resultatives have evolved into anteriors. In line
with Harris (1982), I assume that first step within the evolutionary cycle of HAVE-perfects is
that they come to refer to iterated and durative past events which extend to the moment of
speech and beyond (Dahl 1985: 136-137; Detges 2006: 65-69; Rosemeyer 2012: 164), e.g. I
have told you many times not to call me in my office. Due to the uncertain empirical bases
available, attempts to explain this change rest on shaky grounds. In my paper, I will focus on
Spanish tener + past participle, a HAVE-resultative common in present-day Spanish, which as I will show - is used for particular argumentative purposes. Even though this construction
has not turned into an anterior (and perhaps never will), it allows interesting insights into the
question of how and why the change from present resultative to iterative/ durative anterior
takes place. In my paper, I will show that this change proceeds in two distinct steps. In the
first step, the resultative construction - originally restricted to combinations with telic verbs starts to admit certain non-telic verbs (a case in point in my corpus is decir ‘to say, to tell’).
This is of course motivated by the interesting argumentative implicatures conveyed by the
construction. However, the combination of a resultative construction with a non-telic verb
gives rise to an extremely abstract and hence highly instable mental model. In a second step
(which in the case of tener + past participle is purely hypothetical), this conceptually instable
constellation is reanalysed as an iterated or durative past event. Spanish tener + past
participle has taken step 1 (as is documented by examples like te lo tengo dicho muchas veces
‘I have told you many times (now)’ in my corpus) but not step 2 (which explains the
inacceptability of *te lo tengo prestado muchas veces ‘I have borrowed it to you many times
(now)’). I assume that step 2 is brought about by a reanalysis replacing the resultative reading
of te lo tengo dicho (muchas veces) ‘I have told you (many times now)’ by an iterative
anterior one. Put more simply, as a result of this reanalysis a pragmatically useful but
conceptually instable reading is replaced by a conceptually more coherent interpretation. This
step qualifies as an instance of type coercion. However, in Modern Spanish tener + past
participle is extremely stable in that this construction shows no signs of reanalysis in the
aforementioned direction. This shows that pragmatic motivation can overrule conceptual
plausibility. Thus, the inferences my paper will be concerned with are argumentative
implicatures on the one hand and conceptually driven explicatures (type coercion) on the
other hand.
11
Contrasts and inferences in but-prefaced interrogatives: a synchronic and
diachronic analysis of Spanish
Oliver Ehmer, [email protected], Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
Freiburg
Malte Rosemeyer, [email protected], KU Leuven & AlbertLudwigs-Universität Freiburg
It is well known that interrogatives can fulfill different discourse functions. Although they are
most commonly used to request information, they frequently also serve as rhetorical questions
or as exclamatives. In addition, interrogatives can be combined with particles such as and
(Heritage 1994, Matsumoto 1999), leading to specific discourse functions. In our paper, we
analyze the function of Spanish interrogatives with the preposed connector pero ‘but’, a topic
that has not yet been studied (but cf. Jol/van der Houwen 2014 for Dutch). Specifically, we
consider the opposition between interrogatives with and without a preposed but (cf. 1–2) and
analyze it in terms of discourse function.
(1) ¿Qué pas-a?
what say-PRS.3.SG
‘What’s happening / What’s up?’
(2) ¿Pero qué
pas-a?
but
what say-PRS.3.SG
‘But what’s happening / But what’s up?’
We assume that the discourse function of these interrogatives is based on an inference
process, which is in turn intimately related to the degree to which the question proposition is
presupposed. Simply put, if a discourse participant “asks” for something that is known to all
discourse participants, he does not request information but rather performs an interactional
challenge. For instance, he may signal his unwillingness to accept what has been said.
We show that these considerations are highly relevant to the description of the
difference between Spanish interrogatives with the preposed connector pero ‘but’. In
particular, pero-prefaced interrogatives are more likely to function as an interactional
challenge than unprefaced interrogatives. The general function of pero of expressing contrast
is exploited in such contexts to express a contrast between what has been said and the
speaker’s views.
We argue that this rhetorical function of pero-prefaced interrogatives is related to a
diachronic process of entrenchment that can be traced both in modern spoken data and
historical texts. Using a synchronic corpus of spoken Spanish, we show that pero-preposed
interrogatives can be used to express different discourse functions. However, in its function of
interactional challenge, pero-preposed interrogatives have a prototypical formal realization
where unpreposed interrogatives show a broader range of formal realizations. This synchronic
analysis informs our diachronic study of the alternation. Using historical data from texts dated
1700–1975, we find entrenchment processes in other parts of the paradigm. We argue that
these differences are due to the differences in the roles of speaker/writer and
interlocutor/reader. However, the same inference processes are responsible for the differences
regarding both the discourse functions of unpreposed and pero-preposed interrogatives and
the entrenchment processes in the use of pero-preposed interrogatives.
In summary, our study evaluates means of successfully combining qualitatively
oriented interactional linguistics and quantitative (historical) variationist linguistics.
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Texts of Law as model case of conditional reasoning. Why German lost conditional
"ob" and found "wenn" instead
Regine Eckardt, [email protected], University of Konstanz
English and German conditionals differ in an interesting way. Whereas English maintained
if as the standard conditional coordination, German lost cognate ob between 1200 and 1400,
adopting the modern conditional conjunction wenn in its stead. I argue that this change
originates in texts of law in German after 1200, the so-called Spiegel tests. Several pieces of
internal and comparative evidence support this hypothesis.
(1) In German, the patterns of conditional constructions in the Spiegel law texts is markedly
different from conditionals in other MHG texts.
- The conjunction ob in law was restricted to contexts that did not convey "standard"
conditionals.
- "Standard" conditionals in law used free relative constructions on basis of swer, swem,
swez, ... which pattern with (s)wenn(e).
- No other type of text has ever been reported as showing similar asymmetries. Some
samples will be discussed in the talk.
(2) Comparing English and German, English law texts either dated back to pre-1000 when
they exclusively used if as conditional coordination, or were written in Latin as the
dominating Romance language of jurisdiction. Thus, English if was never challenged in its
function as the "best" conditional conjunction.
(3) Finally, other Germanic varieties (Dutch, Friesian) support the correlation between the
form of conditional conjunction and the language of law.
The development has wider implications. We can infer that laws are prototypical
instances of conditionals. We also learn that there are uses that do not define the semantics of
a word: The range of ob in Spiegel texts was not suited to survive as a narrower reading
(disregarding fossilized “ob p oder nicht” as well as ob-wohl which are more narrow still).
Thinking in terms of cultural history, the study allows us to draw inferences about the
social importance of legal language in medieval Europe. On basis of grammatical evidence
alone we can infer that court sessions must have been watched with great interest and were
imitated just as TV shows, soccer matches or debates are today.
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Reading history backwards: Clues in contemporary conversational usage to past
processes of subjectivization
John Heritage, [email protected], University of California Los Angeles
Focusing on the discourse particles oh and well, this paper examines contemporary patterns of
conversational usage as a source of clues to past grammaticalization processes. In the case of
oh, movement from the vocative article to a contemporary role indexing a 'change of
(subjective) state' involves a dramatic process of subjectivization. In the heavily studied case
of well, it has been difficult to fashion a plausible pathway by which the discourse particle has
evolved to its present sentence-initial usage. This paper argues that present, and relatively
prominent, commonplace usages of both particles give important clues as to the likely
pragmatic 'inflection points' through which both of them became launched on the
subjectivization pathway.
Even though both particles are produced outside standard sentence structure have no
referential meaning, and lack inflection, it is certainly possible to view them as functioning
grammatically, at least from a construction grammar perspective (Fischer 2015). This kind of
grammatical function is 'positionally sensitive' (Schegloff 1996), in the sense that the
indexical field (Eckert 2008) evoked by the particles systematically varies with their position
within turns and sequences.
This paper will focus on the distinctive sequential positions which the particles can
occupy, using these as leverage to entertain past processes of change. The fundamental
method is conversation analytic (Sidnell and Stivers 2013), with a particular focus on the
relationship between turn design and sequence organization.
References
Eckert, Penelope (2008). "Variation and the Indexical Field." Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 453-476.
Fischer, Kerstin (2015). "Conversation, Construction Grammar, and Cognition." Language and Cognition 7(4):
563-588.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1996). Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction. In Elinor Ochs,
Sandra Thompson and Emanuel Schegloff, (Eds.) Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press: 52-133.
Sidnell, Jack and Tanya Stivers (2013). Handbook of Conversation Analysis. Boston MA, Wiley-Blackwell.
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The joint production of an inference: Sequential and linguistic aspects of Oh that’s
right as a practice for claiming ‘just-now recollection’
Uwe Küttner, [email protected], Universität Potsdam
Conversation analysts have repeatedly taken note of the fact that speakers of English can use
Oh that’s right to implicitly claim “‘just now’ recollection of something known but not
previously taken into account as relevant” (Heritage 1984: 339; see also Schegloff 1991;
Local 1996; Stivers 2005). However, from a linguistic perspective, it is not readily transparent
how a combination of the tokens Oh and That’s right can serve to embody such an implicit
claim. Using an interactional linguistic approach (cf. Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2001), this
paper will elucidate just how this practice works.
First, I will show that the format is most commonly used as a composite sequenceclosing third (cf. Schegloff 2007: 127-142) in sequences that appear to be virtually dedicated
to generating the conversational inference of momentary forgetfulness or confusion and
subsequent recollection on the part of the Oh that’s right speaker. Participants engage in these
sequences to deal with interactionally problematic first actions (such as questions, requests or
conjectures whose presuppositions are flawed, inapposite inquiries, etc.) and to implicitly
construct a (‘cognitivized’) account for their occurrence. A central feature of these sequences
is that the co-participant’s response to the problematic first action typically positions the Oh
that’s right speaker as ‘actually knowing better than what his/her first turn suggests’ and thus
already invokes a memory lapse or momentary confusion as a possible trouble source (cf.
Drew 2005). This means that the inference of forgetfulness/confusion and recollection is
systematically, jointly, procedurally and interactively generated by both the Oh that’s right
speaker and his/her co-participant over the course of these sequences.
Moreover, I will argue that the implicit workings of this practice can be explained by
reference to linguistic and pragmatic features of responsive (i.e., second-positioned) uses of
Oh and of That’s right, respectively. On the one hand, Oh that’s right makes use of the
general ‘change-of-state’ semantics that has been shown to inform the various uses of Oh as a
response particle (cf. Heritage 1984, 1998, 2002, 2005). That’s right, on the other hand, can
be used responsively to endorse a prior turn by making an explicit, affirmative linguistic
judgment of the ‘rightness’ of that prior turn’s substance. These second-positioned That’s
rights therefore typically embody a tacit claim to independent (i.e., prior) epistemic access
(cf. Küttner 2016, see also Barnes 2011, 2012). It is precisely these linguistic and pragmatic
features that participants systematically mobilize when using Oh that’s right as a composite
sequence-closing third in the abovementioned sequential environments.
Not only do these findings enable us to formulate a form-function fit and to explicate
how Oh that’s right can do the interactional job it does, they also point to a possible way in
which this practice could have developed diachronically. Additional support for this latter
idea comes from cross-linguistic research, which suggests that similar token combinations are
used for similar purposes in other languages as well (e.g., Betz & Golato 2008; Emmertsen &
Heinemann 2010; Koivisto 2013).
Data are in English and consist of audio-recorded telephone calls.
References
Barnes, Scott E. (2011). Claiming mutual stance: On the use of “that’s right” by a person with aphasia. In:
Research on Language and Social Interaction 44(4), 359-384.
Barnes, Scott E. (2012). On “that’s right” and its combination with other tokens. In: Journal of Pragmatics
44(3), 243-260.
Betz, Emma & Golato, Andrea (2008). Remembering relevant information and withholding relevant next
actions: The German token 'ach ja'. In: Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41(1), 55-98.
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth & Selting, Margret (2001). Introducing Interactional Linguistics. In: Selting, M. &
Couper-Kuhlen, E. (Eds.). Studies in Interactional Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1-22.
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Drew, Paul (2005). Is confusion a state of mind? In: te Molder, H. & Potter, J. (Eds.). Conversation and
cognition. Cambridge: CUP, 161-183.
Emmertsen, Sofie & Heinemann, Trine (2010). Realization as a device for remedying problems of affiliation in
interaction. In: Research on Language and Social Interaction 43(2), 109-132.
Heritage, John (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In: Atkinson, J.M. &
Heritage, J. (Eds.). Structures of social action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: CUP, 299345.
Heritage, John (1998). Oh-prefaced responses to inquiry. In: Language in Society 27(3), 291-334.
Heritage, John (2002). Oh-prefaced responses to assessments: A method of modifying agreement/disagreement.
In: Ford, C.E., Fox, B.A. & Thompson, S.A. (Eds.). The language of turn and sequence. New York:
OUP, 196-224.
Heritage, John (2005). Cognition in discourse. In: te Molder, H. & Potter, J. (Eds.). Conversation and cognition.
Cambridge: CUP, 184-202.
Koivisto, Aino (2013). On the preference for remembering: Acknowledging an answer with Finnish Ai Nii(n)
(“Oh That’s Right”). In: Research on Language and Social Interaction 46(3), 277-297.
Küttner, Uwe-A. (2016). That-initial turns in English conversation. [doctoral dissertation] Potsdam, Germany:
University of Potsdam.
Local, John (1996). Conversational phonetics: Some aspects of news receipts in everyday talk. In: CouperKuhlen, E. & Selting, M. (Eds.). Prosody in conversation: Interactional studies. Cambridge: CUP, 177230.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1991). Conversation Analysis and socially shared cognition. In: Resnick, L.B., Levine,
J.M. & Teasley, S.D. (Eds.). Perspectives on socially shared cognition. Washington D.C.: American
Psychological Association, 150-171.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in Conversation Analysis (Vol.
1). Cambridge: CUP.
Stivers, Tanya (2005). Modified repeats: One method for asserting primary rights from second position. In:
Research on Language and Social Interaction 38(2), 131-158.
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Cyclic phenomena in the evolution of pragmatic markers
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen, [email protected], University of
Manchester
It has been known at least since Jespersen (1917) that certain types of linguistic items or
constructions tend to evolve in a cyclic fashion across languages. Thus, van Gelderen (2011)
identifies a total of seven well-documented diachronic cycles pertaining to (morpho-)syntactic
items and constructions across a wide variety of languages. Similar cyclic developments have
been discovered in the domain of phonology (e.g. Bermudez-Otero & Trousdale 2012).
This paper will investigate the nature and cross-linguistic importance of cyclicity at a
third level of linguistic description, i.e. that of semantics and pragmatics. The idea that there
might be cyclic movements at the level of semantics and pragmatics was first adumbrated and
subsequently explicitly proposed by Hansen (2013, 2014), as well as (independently) by
Ghezzi/Molinelli (2014).
In this paper, I introduce a distinction between the following basic types of
semantic/pragmatic cyclicity:
(i) Semasiological (or form-focused) cyclicity, in which a linguistic item with a given
etymology can be observed to renew its functions in a cyclic fashion across different
stages of language evolution, starting each cycle with a similar content-level source
meaning/function and subsequently developing context-level extensions that are
largely identical to, or at least significantly overlap with, the context-level
meanings/functions of its etymon/etyma.
(ii) Onomasiological (or function-focused) cyclicity, in which etymologically different
items with similar content-level source meanings/functions can be observed to
subsequently develop similar context-level extensions across different stages of
language evolution.
I will briefly adduce a range of examples of both types of cyclicity from across various
Romance languages. In addition, where Hansen (2014) focused on the semasiological case
represented by the evolution from Latin IAM (‘as of now/already’) through Old French ja to
Modern French déjà (‘already’; < dès+ja), this paper will consider in greater depth a case of
onomasiological cyclicity, namely the respective semantic/pragmatic developments of Latin
NUNC and French or and maintenant, whose content-level source meanings are in all cases
equivalent to English now. The analysis will pay particular attention to the role of metonymic
inference, of so-called bridging contexts, and of the monologal or dialogal nature of the
discourse.
I will argue that cyclicity at the level of semantic/pragmatic evolution takes place
because source items that are semantically similar will favor similar types of contextual
inferences. At the same time, however, the fact that the range of uses of the items under
consideration is not necessarily exactly identical from one cycle to the next supports an
instructional view of semantics.
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Information
Research training group GRK DFG 1624/1 "Frequency effects in language"
http://frequenz.uni-freiburg.de/abstract&language=en
Frequency as a determinant in usage-based models of language change, language processing
and language acquisition
The research training group (RTG, 'DFG-Graduiertenkolleg') aims to carry out empirically
rich and methodologically co-ordinated research on frequency effects in language, with an
empirical focus on standard and non-standard varieties of European languages. Frequency is
defined in terms of number of occurrences of a given linguistic structure in a particular
linguistic system or sub-system (as approximated by a suitable corpus). Frequency is assumed
to be a possible determinant in usage-based models of language change, language acquisition
and language processing. While the default assumption is that there is a non-trivial relation
between frequency of occurrence thus defined and mental and structural representation, the
frequency factor will be investigated with a view both to its explanatory potential and to its
limitations. In its integration of descriptive-linguistic and cognitivist approaches and its broad
empirical corpus base, the envisaged research is without parallel, both on the national and
international levels, and opens up a new, constructively critical approach to usage-based
modelling in linguistics. The two-pronged approach – extending the breadth of empirical
coverage, while at the same time increasing the sophistication of the theoretical models – is a
timely one that has great innovative potential.
Selected publications
Behrens, Heike; Pfänder, Stefan, eds. (2016). Experience Counts: Frequency Effects in
Language. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Madlener, Karin (2015). Frequency Effects in Instructed Second Language Acquisition.
Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton (ACL 29).
Rácz, Péter (2013). Salience in sociolinguistics. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Rosemeyer, Malte (2014). Auxiliary selection in Spanish. Gradience, gradualness, and
conservation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schneider, Ulrike (2014). Frequency, Hesitations and Chunks. A Usage-based Study of
Chunking in English. Freiburg: NIHIN Studies.
Schäfer, Michael (2014). Phonetic Reduction of Adverbs in Icelandic. On the Role of
Frequency and Other Factors. Freiburg: NIHIN Studies.
Dankel, Philipp (2015). Strategien unter der Oberfläche. Die Emergenz von Evidentialität im
Sprachkontakt Spanisch – Quechua. Freiburg/Berlin/Wien: Rombach.
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Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies – FRIAS
https://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/en/home?set_language=en
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