Discourse Markers Across Languages

A Contrastive Study of Second-Level Discourse Markers in Native and Non-Native Text with Implications for General and Pedagogic Lexicography

Siepmann Dirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134272471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers a corpus-based comparative study of an almost entirely unexplored set of multi-word lexical items serving pragmatic or text-structuring functions. Part One provides a descriptive account of multi-word discourse markers in written English, French and German, focussing on dicussion of interlingual equivalence. Part Two examines the use of multi-word markers by non-native speakers of English and discusses lexicographical and pedagogical implications.

Part I
Linguistic considerations

1
Observing languages

Introduction to Part I

Begin with the end in mind.

Stephen R.Covey, The Seõen Habits of Highly Effectiõe People

Anyone reading academic treatises, reference books or quality newspapers with any regularity will be struck by the recurrence of a particular kind of multi-word unit. Typical examples are it is argued that, it is a fair guess that or the same goes for. Curiously enough, such firmly established phrases seem to have escaped scholarly notice until fairly recently. As a result, they have never been dealt with in any extensive manner, with the exception perhaps of Gallagher’s (1992) ground-breaking article on the translation of the German discourse device erschwerend kommt hinzu, dass, Grieve’s (1996) dictionary of French connectors and four recent articles by Siepmann (2000, 2001a) and Oakey (2002a, 2002b). The first part of this study, then, may be seen as an attempt to redress a perceived imbalance between the poor stock of knowledge about the routine formulae in question and the somewhat larger body of research on related one-word connectives.

1.1 Aims, scope and methodology

The core aim of the present work is for a contrastive analysis of such multi-word units. The term ‘contrastive analysis’ is here taken to refer to the processes involved in identifying, recording and describing lexical items which assume identical or similar functions in actual manifestations of English, French and German language use (for further detail, see Section 1.1.2.3 below). Such an analysis depends on two prerequisites: first, an inventory of the lexical class under consideration; second, a categorization, or taxonomy, of the members of this class. Since previous work on phraseology has severely neglected multi-word units of the type exemplified above, both the inventory and the taxonomy used in the present study had to be built up from scratch. There being no copyright on lexicographic material, the full-size inventory underlying this study will, however, be published in a separate work (Gallagher et al., in preparation). The taxonomy therefore confines itself to typical instances of each category, and the contrastive analysis is restricted to three major categories of multi-word units.

The account given here of this part of the phrasicon situates itself within the Firthian tradition of British text linguistics. Accordingly, it is essentially descriptive and data-driven rather than theoretical and introspective. The present chapter discusses the essential foundation of such an approach and the methodological choices entailed by it. Section 1.1 is concerned with general questions regarding the use of corpora and the setting up of interlingual equivalence, while Section 1.2 focuses on corpus compilation.

Chapter 2 sets out to define the object of study. I shall argue that it forms a separate sub-class of the lexicon whose members can be described as ‘second-level markers’. Unfortunately, there is as yet no agreed-upon conceptual framework for describing the items belonging to this class. Traditional grammars have tended to classify some of its members, such as à cet effet or pour ce faire under the ‘ragbag’ heading of adverbials; other items, such as the sentence fragments exemplified above, have been altogether excluded from consideration. A satisfactory definition can, however, be arrived at by drawing on two distinct strands of current linguistic research: discourse analysis or text linguistics on the one hand, and lexicology on the other. Drawing on the discourse-analytical literature, I show that second-level markers bear close similarities to oral discourse markers. Drawing on the phraseological literature, I argue that they constitute a distinct type of phraseological unit. Having thus provided a functional-lexicological definition of second-level markers, I move on to outline the entire gamut of syntactic forms they can take.

The sheer size of the lexical class under investigation forbids a detailed contrastive analysis for all the members of the class. Chapter 3 therefore sets up a broad taxonomy predicated on the general functions of second-level markers.

After these methodological and theoretical preliminaries, the way is open for a finely honed contrastive analysis of three functional categories of second-level markers: exemplifiers, reformulators and inferrers. This is the subject of Chapter 4. In a first step, I give a detailed description of the behaviour of particular items, including their frequency. On this basis, I then consider to what extent interlingual equivalence obtains between items of the functional type under investigation. With the most complex categories it seems wise to follow a stepwise approach proceeding from monolingual analysis to multilingual comparison, thus allowing the reader to form a just understanding of the rationale behind particular equivalences. Where equivalence relations turn out to be more straightforward, discussion will move directly to the multilingual comparison.

straightforward, discussion will move directly to the multilingual On the basis of these investigations, Part II looks at

• how successfully non-native writers and translators cope with multi-word markers;
• what implications research into multi-word markers has for general and learner lexicography.

1.1.1 Theoretical foundation

The present research locates itself squarely within the British tradition of text analysis established by Firth (1957). This empiricist tradition has a number of features which distinguish it from theory-driven approaches to the study of language. To begin with, the Firthian tradition, the most prominent present-day adherents of which are Halliday, Sinclair, Stubbs, Francis and Hunston, views linguistics as an applied social science (Stubbs 1993:3). On the theoretical side, it foregrounds social interaction as the main determinant of linguistic form. This is in keeping with state-of-the-art discussions of language science such as Feilke (1996), who convincingly argues that whatever disposition for language a child may have, it is a ‘silent’ disposition which only develops into a functioning language through communicative interaction and the institutional practices such interaction puts in place (Feilke 1996:32). On the practical side, a dominant current in the British tradition aims at direct relevance to both the L1 (Coulthard and Sinclair 1975) and the L2 language classroom (cf. the long list of COBUILD publications).

Second, the Firthian tradition takes actual occurrences of language as the object of study. Introspective data are considered to be invalid as a primary source of evidence. In this sense, Firth adopts a different approach from Chomsky, who relies almost entirely on invented, sentence-level examples. In the Firthian tradition the data comes first, and the theory is built up from the data.

Closely linked with these fundamental features of the Firthian approach is a third one: linguistics is regarded as the study of the meaning of linguistic units. It thus views language from a different angle than Chomskyan linguistics, which stresses the autonomy of particular components of the language system—most importantly syntax (Chomsky 1957:17). Corpus linguists working in the Firthian tradition have ingeniously suggested that much if not all syntax is lexis-driven, thereby at least complementing the Chomskyan view:

syntax is driven by lexis: lexis is communicatively prior. As communicators we do not proceed by selecting syntactic structures and independently choosing lexis to slot into them. Instead, we have concepts to convey and communicative choices to make which require central lexical items, and these choices find themselves syntactic structures in which they can be said comfortably and grammatically.

(Francis 1993:142)

The lexico-grammars (Francis et al. 1996, 1998) produced under the supervision of Sinclair provide ample proof of the close association between sense and syntax posited by Francis, specifying, as they do, the behaviour of the major lexical classes (verbs, nouns and adjectives) in terms of their meaning and syntactic preferences. The results show clearly that particular semantic sets are linked with particular syntactic choices and that, conversely, particular syntactic patterns cluster around particular semantic sets.

By the same token, linguists working in the Firthian tradition see meaning as at least partially determined by typical combinations of lexical choices or ‘collocability’ on the one hand, and typical combinations of grammatical choices or ‘colligation’ on the other (Hunston 2001). That is, words obtain at least part of their meaning from the contexts in which they typically occur, and, more specifically, from collocates with which they typically team up. In this sense the Firthian tradition is far removed both from componential analysis and from semantic field theory as framed by Trier (1931), where the meaning of a word arises from its position in an abstractly conceived paradigmatic field. A crucial aspect of an item’s meaning is its ‘semantic prosody’, a term which reflects the realization that lexical items become infused with particular connotations due to their typical linguistic environment (Sinclair 1991; Louw 1993; Stubbs 1995). Thus, Sinclair (1991:73–75) demonstrates that the phrasal verb set in carries unfavourable connotations because it co-occurs significantly with words denoting undesirable events or processes such as decay, bad weather or disillusionment. Similarly, the French multi-word unit NP n’a(ura) qu’à bien se tenir, which is unaccountably absent from the major dictionaries, is imbued with a semantic prosody of ‘rivalry’, with the referent of the noun phrase being in competition with another entity mentioned in the surrounding discourse:

L’essence n’a qu’à bien se tenir, la lutte pour le titre de carburant le moins nocif s’est resserrée.

(L’Humanité, 11.8.2001)

This example conveniently brings us to a fourth major characteristic of the Firthian tradition: it recognizes the pervasiveness of what Sinclair (1991) has called the idiom principle, whereby ‘a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments’ (Sinclair 1991:110). Corpus work in the Firthian tradition has shown that between 50 and 80 per cent of all text is made up of habitual word associations (Gross 1988; Stubbs 1997; Altenberg 1998). Most importantly for this study, around 20 per cent of all academic text has been shown to consist of lexical bundles of the type by the fact that, similar to that of the, presence of the, it is interesting to, size and shape or theory and prac-tice (Biber et al. 1999:995ff.), and it is reasonable to put the amount of academic text taken up by various types of collocation, including multi-word markers, at a minimum of 30 per cent. From a Firthian perspective, then, the negotiation of meaning between language users relies on conventionalized, multi-word sense units rather than isolated words. It is interesting to note that this view of language was anticipated by Bally as early as 1909; he viewed phraseological items as ‘conceptual units’ (unité de conception, Bally [1909] 1951:76):

Ainsi, l’unité lexicologique, telle qu’elle est donnée par l’écriture, le «mot» enfin, est une unité trompeuse et illusoire dans beaucoup de cas et ne correspond pas toujours aux u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• What this book is about
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Linguistic considerations
• Part II A contrastive interlanguage analysis with implications for dictionary making
• Notes
• Bibliography