Discourse Pragmatics and the Verb

The Evidence from Romance

Suzanne Fleischman, LINDA WAUGH

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315403564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

First published in 1990, this collection investigates grammatical categories associated with the verb as they are used by speakers and writers in real discourses and texts. Focusing on tense, aspect, mood, and voice in French, Spanish, and Italian, each chapter underscores the importance of context in our understanding of how grammatical categories work. Above and beyond their basic 'grammatical functions', categories of the verb are shown to operate in such capacities as structuring information in discourse, establishing point of view in a text, and creating textual cohesion. Importantly, this volume reflects the crucial role discourse-pragmatics factors play in our interpretation of the meanings of categories of grammar.

1 Introduction

Suzanne Fleischman and Linda R. Waugh

Over the last two decades a growing number of linguists have come to acknowledge the need to look at various linguistic phenomena, particularly morphological and syntactic phenomena, from the viewpoint of their functional motivation in actual human communication, in real discourses and texts - in preference, that is, to concentrating exclusively on the formal algorithmic properties of syntax, and considering in isolation often implausible sentences that can be contextualized only with great difficulty. In particular, there is increasing recognition that whatever intrinsic meaning grammatical categories may have, pragmatic factors and discourse context play a crucial role in the interpretation of their meaning. We understand pragmatics here, as most linguists and philosophers of language do, to refer to the use of language in actual contexts of communication, that is to the ways in which speakers - or writers - manipulate the resources of their language to accomplish particular communicative objectives. This view of discourse-pragmatics subsumes a variety of different notions having to do with structuring information (e.g. the encoding of topic-focus relations, foreground-background, assertion, and presupposition), creating textual cohesion and connectivity, establishing discoursal point of view, expressing speaker attitudes in discourse, and conveying information pertinent to the relations between speech-act participants and the text. Such a view implies, then, that grammatical categories, properties of the text, and characteristics of the context (in particular the speech-act context) are inextricably interwoven, and thus collectively provide the appropriate foundation for a general and explanatory functional analysis of the categories in question.

Grammatical categories associated with the verb, such as tense, aspect, mood, or voice, have served as an important arena for demonstrating the relevance of discourse-pragmatic approaches to grammar (see, for example, the pertinent contributions in Givón 1979; Hopper 1982; Hopper and Thompson 1982; Klein-Andreu 1983.) Though the Romance languages have been a significant testing ground (e.g. as evidenced in several papers in Vincent and Harris 1982), they have also been used to demonstrate more formal approaches to categories of the verb (see the Romance-based studies in Tedeschi and Zaenen 1981 and Lo Cascio and Vet 1986). The present volume is intended as a further contribution to the ongoing dialogue on the verb and its grammar, and one which seeks specifically to underscore, with reference to the major Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian), the extent to which discourse-pragmatic considerations are crucial in the process of our coming to understand the work that verbal categories do in actual language use, work that clearly transcends what we normally think of as their basic grammatical functions.

The studies in this volume have been grouped according to their focus - in terms of the particular verbal category they treat and the language(s) at issue.

The first four chapters each deal with questions involving the interpretation of tense-aspect categories in relation to their discourse-pragmatic contextualization.

Co Vet examines problems in the interpretation of texts involving the perfective (passé simple) and imperfective (imparfait) past tenses in French. He argues that an analysis of tense which makes use of the notions of "setting" (a period in the past or an object or event located therein which functions to provide temporal reference), "change" (of setting), and "perspective" (consideration of the point of view from which the setting or change of setting is perceived), is capable of solving certain problems that cannot be resolved by positing an anaphoric relation between sentences in which the perfective and imperfective occur. Analyses of the latter type assume that sentences in the simple past introduce temporal antecedents or a temporal reference point for states of affairs reported by sentences in the imperfect. Vet shows that the "overt" tense markers and adverbials of a text must be supplemented by information conveyed by the Aktionsart of the sentence and/ or by purely pragmatic factors. His analysis also provides a fine-grained semantic base for research on the discourse functions of tense/aspect which posits a continuum from foreground to background.

The next two chapters, by Suzanne Fleischman and Giulia Centineo, both deal with pragmatic functions of tense - and specifically of tense alternation - in several varieties of Romance narrative discourse. Fleischman's chapter looks at tense as a marker of point of view, and at how tense alternations operate to discriminate the different "focalizations" or perspectival filters through which a story-world is presented. Using data drawn from French, Spanish, and Italian narrative fiction, she considers such phenomena as free indirect discourse and interior monologue in terms of the tenses that mark these varieties of discourse off from the narrations into which they are embedded, the tense shifts enabling subtle transitions into and out of the minds of story participants. Though the focus of this chapter is on literary narration, Fleischman points to the existence of similar discourse strategies in natural narration in an attempt to narrow the gap many investigators perceive between poetic discourse and natural language.

Giulia Centineo's chapter takes as its point of departure the failure of extant grammatical descriptions of Italian to account adequately for the contrast in narrative discourse between the two perfective tenses of the past system: the compound past (passato prossimo) and the simple past (passato remoto). The explanations traditionally offered dialect differences or speech vs. writing - fail in particular to account for the contrast in discourse forms where both past tenses can occur and at times co-occur. One such discourse form is "natural" narration. Through this investigation into tense selection - and specifically tense switching - in Italian natural narratives, Centineo seeks to provide a more compelling analysis of the functions of these two past tense categories, and of the historical present, based on a number of grammatical and pragmatic factors involved in the structuring of narrative discourse: clause type, foregrounding, evaluation, and subjectivity vs. objectivity of representation. The various patterns of tense usage identified in Italian narration today are then shown to correlate with diachronic shifts in meaning observed in several varieties of Romance with respect to simple and compound pasts.

In their contribution, Monique Monville-Burston and Linda Waugh study the French present tense, which they characterize as a rich communicative device having the potential for two or more simultaneous meanings, given the appropriate context. This semantic multivalency is linked on the one hand to the possibilities inherent in the present as the unmarked tense of the French system and on the other hand to the types of contexts in which it may be used. The authors focus on the historical present in journalistic discourse, which supports and perhaps even favors the proposed multisemanticity, and show that in certain contexts there may be oscillation for a given present tense form between a historical present interpretation and one or more of the other interpretations of present, producing temporal multivalency. Moreover, there are also cases of aspectual multivalency. This coexistence of two (or more) meanings is linked to the nature of journalistic discourse and to specific characteristics of the local context: temporal adverbs, date of the newspaper, nature of titles/leads, lexical meaning of the verb, and the presence of other tenses.

The chapter by Béatrice Lamiroy and Pierre Swiggers claims that some imperative forms of the verb in French, Spanish, and Italian function as discourse signals, since they are connectors rather than co'mmands, and thus serve as linkers between different segments of an utterance and/or between the participants in a communicative exchange. In terms of the authors' typology of discourse signals, these forms are morphologically analyzable and undergo some of the paradigmatic alternation characteristic of the general class of imperatives (e.g. alternation between singular and plural), but they exhibit few of the normal discourse-pragmatic properties of true imperatives. Rather, they have basically a pragmatic function, subsuming a number of morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties which are related to that function. Thus, the authors argue, these verbal forms have undergone functional displacement.

The next two chapters deal with the Spanish verb form in -ra (amara, tuviera), currently classified as an imperfect subjunctive, but formerly in Spanish, and etymoiogically in Latin, a pluperfect indicative.

Patricia Lunn and Thomas Cravens' examination of the use of -ra in journalistic texts provides motivation for the current classification of the -ra form as a bona fide subjunctive within a unified description of mood choice in Spanish centered on the notion of "discourse relevance." Departing from the traditional view linking the use of the subjunctive with the reality status of events (i.e. correlation with irrealis), they argue that the subjunctive marks information that a speaker takes to be of lesser relevance to the addressee, i.e. information that has lower priority, or is backgrounded, in the discourse. This characterization then provides the descriptive framework for a reappraisal of the traditional understanding of the -ra form's functions in the earliest Spanish texts, and demonstrates that the usage condemned by the Real Academia is solidly motivated on pragmatic grounds and in fact has a long history.

Flora Klein-Andreu looks at the -ra form along similar lines of discourse saliency, focusing on its development from pluperfect indicative to imperfect subjunctive. Taking issue with accounts which give primary importance to the -ra form's early role in the apodosis of conditional sentences, which led eventually to its usage in the protasis and thence to its current function for non-assertive reference, she claims that the shift in meaning was motivated by the competition between it and the new periphrastic pluperfect (habia amado). By examining examples from the period when the new and old pluperfect indicatives were both still used, she contrasts their functions in terms of the relative "focus of attention" the speaker wishes to place on an event (high vs. low focus).

The last two chapters in this volume treat complementation in Spanish, one continuing the discussion of mood, the other focused in particular on transitivity.

Jorge Guitart presents a pragmatic analysis of the selection of indicative vs. subjunctive mood in Spanish in the complements of two predicate types: "knowledge" and "acquisition-of-knowledge" predicates (e.g. saber, darse cuenta, and notar, descubrir respectively). His treatment differs significantly from both traditional accounts and from certain current analyses, particularly from the theory of mood selection based on semantically grounded notions of assertion and presupposition. Arguing that there are no invariable correlations between semantic notions like presupposition and the use of one or the other mood, he distinguishes semantic presupposition, which is independent of speaker and hearer relationships, from pragmatic presupposition, which is equivalent to an assumption on the part of the speaker that the information in the sentential complement is shared by the hearer and uses the latter as a crucial basis for his analysis. Moreover, he provides a pragmatic explanation for certain phenomena observed in the syntax of Spanish negation.

The chapter by Elizabeth Weber and Paola Bentivogiio presents a discourse profile of two verbs of cognition in Spanish, creer "believe" and pensar "think," through an examination of the syntactic variation exhibited by clauses in which these verbs occur. The syntactic properties characteristic of the class of cognition verbs (transitivity, complement type, tense-aspect, lexical choice, intonation contours, and relative ordering of main and subordinate clauses) are specifically related to the syntagmatic patterns associated with these verbs in actual discourse. Inspired by recent work arguing for the discourse origins of grammatical phenomena, this chapter seeks to explain the emergence of the syntactic patterns identified in terms of the demands which discourse use places on these verbs.

While the chapters in this volume have in common a general commitment to a more contextualized treatment of grammatical meaning, as may be inferred from the characterizations just given, they do not all operate with a uniform approach to discourse-pragmatics. Nevertheless, there are various notions that recur in several of the chapters, such as: the pragmatic functions of tense switching (Fleischman, Centineo, Monville-Burston and Waugh); the use of verbal categories for signaling discourse saliency, i.e. the marking of textual foreground and background (Vet, Centineo, Lunn and Cravens, Klein-Andreu), for showing point of view (Fleischman, Vet), and for conveying irony (Guitart, Lunn and Cravens); the pragmatic determinants of language change (Lamiroy and Swiggers, Lunn and Cravens, Klein-Andreu, Weber and Bentivogiio); the interrelation of system, i.e. paradigmatic comparison, and use, i.e. contextualization (Monville-Burston and Waugh, Lamiroy and Swiggers, Klein-Andreu); and the pragmatic functions of the lexical meanings of verbs (Vet, Monville-Burston and Waugh, Lamiroy and Swiggers, Weber and Bentivogiio).

It is the recurrence of these and other themes, as well as the insights they offer into the functions and uses of grammatical categories associated with the verb, which will, we hope, induce those interested in the analysis of verbal categories - from whatever perspective - to explore further the contribution of discourse-pragmatic approaches.

We would like to thank the editors of this series, Nigel Vincent and Martin Harris, for their support of this project.

(Copyright information: A revised version of Suzanne Fleischman s chapter appears in chapter 7 of her book Tense and Narrativity, London: Routledge, 1990.)

References

Givón, Talmy (ed.) (1979) Syntax and Semantics, vol. 12 Discourse and Syntax, New York: Academic Press.

Hopper, Paul (ed.) (1982) Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hopper, Paul and Thompson, Sandra (eds) (1982) Syntax and Semantics, vol. 15 Studies in Transitivity, New York: Academic Press.

Klein-Andreu, Flora (ed.) (1983) Discourse Perspectives on Syntax, New York: Academic Press.

Lo Cascio, Vincenzo and Vet, Co (eds) (1986) Temporal Structure in Sentence and Discourse, Dordrecht: Foris.

Tedeschi, Philip and Zaenen, Annie (eds) (1981) Syntax and Semantics, vol. 14 Tense and Aspect, New York: Academic Press.

Vincent, Nigel and Harris, Martin (eds) (1982) Studies in the Romance Verb, London: Croom Helm.

2 The temporal structure of discourse: setting, change, and perspective

Co Vet

1. Intro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The temporal structure of discourse: setting, change, and perspective
• 3 Verb tense and point of view in narrative
• 4 Tense switching in Italian: the alternation between passato prossimo and passato remoto in oral narratives
• 5 Multivalency: the French historical present in journalistic discourse
• 6 The status of imperatives as discourse signals
• 7 A contextual reconsideration of the Spanish -ra "indicative"
• 8 Losing ground: a discourse-pragmatic solution to the history of -ra in Spanish
• 9 The pragmatics of Spanish mood in complements of knowledge and acquisition-of-knowledge predicates
• 10 Verbs of cognition in spoken Spanish: A discourse profile
• Index of subjects
• Index of names