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The intonation of expectations: On marked declaratives, exclamatives, and discourse particles in Castilian Spanish

Jan Fliess­bach
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7929375
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/387

This book pro­vides a new per­spec­tive on prosod­i­cal­ly marked declar­a­tives, wh-excla­ma­tives, and dis­course par­ti­cles in the Madrid vari­ety of Span­ish. It argues that some marked forms dif­fer from unmarked forms in that they encode modal eval­u­a­tions of the at-issue mean­ing. Two epis­temic eval­u­a­tions that can be shown to be encod­ed by into­na­tion in Span­ish are obvi­ous­ness and mira­tiv­i­ty, which present the at-issue mean­ing as expect­ed and unex­pect­ed, respec­tive­ly. An empir­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tion via a pro­duc­tion exper­i­ment finds that they are asso­ci­at­ed with dis­tinct into­na­tion­al fea­tures under con­stant focus scope, with stances of (dis)agreement show­ing an impact on obvi­ous declar­a­tives. Wh-excla­ma­tives are found not to dif­fer sig­nif­i­cant­ly in into­na­tion­al mark­ing from neu­tral declar­a­tives, show­ing that they need not be mira­tives. More­over, we find that into­na­tion­al mark­ing on dif­fer­ent dis­course par­ti­cles in nat­ur­al dia­logue cor­re­lates with their mean­ing con­tri­bu­tion with­out being ful­ly deter­mined by it. In part, these find­ings quan­ti­ta­tive­ly con­firm pre­vi­ous qual­i­ta­tive find­ings on the mean­ing of into­na­tion­al con­fig­u­ra­tions in Madrid Span­ish. But they also add new insights on the role into­na­tion plays in the nego­ti­a­tion of com­mit­ments and expec­ta­tions between inter­locu­tors.

Modal particles in Italian: Adverbs of illocutionary modification and sociolinguistic variation

Mar­co Favaro
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10259474
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/382

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.

Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages

Pekka Posio & Peter Her­beck
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8123675
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/376

This vol­ume brings togeth­er con­tri­bu­tions by researchers focus­ing on per­son­al pro­nouns in Ibero-Romance lan­guages, going beyond the well-estab­lished vari­able of expressed vs. non-expressed sub­jects. While fac­tors such as agree­ment mor­phol­o­gy, top­ic shift and con­trast or empha­sis have been argued to account for vari­able sub­ject expres­sion, sev­er­al cor­pus stud­ies on Ibero-Romance lan­guages have shown that the expres­sion of sub­ject pro­nouns goes beyond these tra­di­tion­al­ly estab­lished fac­tors and is also sub­ject to con­sid­er­able dialec­tal vari­a­tion. One of the fac­tors affect­ing choice and expres­sion of per­son­al pro­nouns or oth­er ref­er­en­tial devices is whether the con­struc­tion is used per­son­al­ly or imper­son­al­ly. The use and emer­gence of new imper­son­al con­struc­tions, even­tu­al­ly also new (im)personal pro­nouns, as well as the vari­a­tion found in the expres­sion of human imper­son­al­i­ty in dif­fer­ent Ibero-Romance lan­guage vari­eties is anoth­er inter­est­ing research area that has gained ground in the recent years. In addi­tion to vari­able sub­ject expres­sion, sim­i­lar meth­ods and the­o­ret­i­cal approach­es have been applied to study the expres­sion of objects. Final­ly, the ref­er­ence to the addressee(s) using dif­fer­ent address pro­nouns and oth­er address forms is an impor­tant field of study that is close­ly con­nect­ed to the vari­able expres­sion of pro­nouns. The present book sheds light on all these aspects of ref­er­ence to dis­course par­tic­i­pants. The vol­ume con­tains con­tri­bu­tions with a strong empir­i­cal back­ground and var­i­ous meth­ods and both writ­ten and spo­ken cor­pus data from Ibero-Romance lan­guages. The focus on dis­course par­tic­i­pants high­lights the spe­cial prop­er­ties of first and sec­ond per­son ref­er­ents and the fac­tors affect­ing them that are often dif­fer­ent from the anaphor­ic third per­son. The chap­ters are orga­nized into three the­mat­ic sec­tions: (i) Vari­able expres­sion of sub­jects and objects, (ii) Between per­son­al and imper­son­al, and (iii) Ref­er­ence to the addressee.