Metadiscursive parametering with position and cooccurrence: the case of 'adverbial THOUGH' - Archive ouverte HAL
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Metadiscursive parametering with position and cooccurrence: the case of 'adverbial THOUGH'

Résumé

Discourse markers may be defined as markers (lexical items, constructions, etc.) that signal an operation of utterance regulation, targeting some operation or operations constitutive of the event of utterance itself (Ranger 2018). In earlier work I have characterised the operations constitutive of the event of utterance into 1) operations of representation, i.e. matching linguistic forms with cognitive representations, and 2) operations of reference assignment, i.e. situating representations relative to a set of spatio-temporal and subjective coordinates and, ultimately, to the speech situation. In addition, operations of intersubjective adjustment can be derived from these two basic sets. A significant number of terms typically characterised as discourse markers involve operations of concession. Indeed, concession involves various types of regulation, as a representation is situated relative to some other potentially counter-oriented representation, the relationship between the two being, in turn, situated relative to a subjective instance. In this way, concessive markers may engage questions relative to representation (typicality, hedges, etc.), to relevance (insofar as the relevance of one representation is specified by its localisation relative to another), to subjective positioning (as speakers commit to representations) and to intersubjective positioning (as speakers attribute opposing representations to other subjective instances). The subordinating conjunction THOUGH is, together with ALTHOUGH, often presented as a core member of the class of concessive discourse markers. The less often cited 'Adverbial THOUGH', is generally presented as a concessive discourse marker, found in clause final position, typically in spontaneous oral discourse, e.g. It always comes to a question of cost though. G4U 325. In fact, a small but significant number of occurrences of adverbial THOUGH figure in medial, or post-initial position, e.g. What I'd like to agree on though is at least a date J9Y 759 (medial), Sometimes though dogs only bark when people are in the house, they protect the person, the owner, rather than the building. (post-initial) GY4 813. More remarkably, a BNC corpus query targeting non-final occurrences of adverbial THOUGH reveals that this configuration, contrary to clause-final adverbial THOUGH, is far more frequent in written material and in fact rather rare in spoken conversation. An example of such an occurrence might be: A word of caution is in order, though, about the names of exhibiting groups. A04 1306. In this presentation I aim to present several different configurations in which 'adverbial THOUGH' appears, and to show how the marker operates different types of discourse regulation, or discourse marking, depending on a number of regular parameters, including position (post-initial, medial, final) and surrounding context. In final position, adverbial THOUGH performs concessive functions, retroactively reconciling potentially counter-oriented representations, while simultaneously managing intersubjective relations. In medial position, adverbial THOUGH additionally performs sequencing functions, typically flagging key elements and guiding utterance interpretation by highlighting key terms. Our presentation will thus study adverbial THOUGH both in discourse (taking into account factors of position and collocation) and on discourse (sequencing, coherence and accommodation), in line with the central themes of this conference. The presentation will use the theoretical framework of the Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations. Examples and quantitative data will be taken from the British National Corpus, queried with the BNCweb interface.
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hal-04622596 , version 1 (24-06-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04622596 , version 1

Citer

Graham Ranger. Metadiscursive parametering with position and cooccurrence: the case of 'adverbial THOUGH'. Discourse markers: markers in discourse and and markesr on discourse, Université de Lorraine, Campus de Metz, IDEA / ANR CODIM, Jun 2024, Metz, France. ⟨hal-04622596⟩
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