The relation between pragmatic markers and the peripheries of clauses, utterances and/or turns has been a topic of linguistic interest for the last few decades. Many issues continue to be debated, however, such as “how should the notion of periphery be defined?”, “to what extent do pragmatic markers in the left versus the right periphery fulfill different functions?” and “which factors determine the order of multiple pragmatic markers in a periphery?”. This volume brings together a number of studies addressing these and other questions. It presents new data from a diverse range of languages – including less researched ones in this context like Ainu, Latvian and Lithuanian – and on a variety of types of pragmatic marker – including emoji. The volume as a whole offers new insights into, among other things, the subjectivity intersubjectivity peripheries hypothesis, the idea of left-to-right movement and the matrix clauses hypothesis.

This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form, meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages, along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts, often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collected in this volume also discuss different factors at play in processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, which include contact-induced change and pragmatic borrowing, socio-interactional functional pressures and sociopragmatic indexicalities, constraints of cognitive processing, together with regularities in semantic change. Putting the traditional issues concerning the status, delimitation and categorization of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles somewhat off the stage, the eighteen articles collected in this volume deal instead with general questions concerning the development and use of such procedural elements, explored from different approaches, both formal and functional, and from a variety of perspectives – including corpus-based, sociolinguistic, and contrastive perspectives – and offering language-specific synchronic and diachronic studies.

Presents an examination of the methods and theories for studying pragmatic markers cross-linguistically. This work also explores the comparison of pragmatic markers across languages in order to offer important insights into the similarities and differences between languages.

In interactive discourse we not only express propositions, but we also express different attitudes to them. That is, we communicate how our mind entertains those propositions that we express. A speaker is able to express an attitude of belief, desire, hope, doubt, fear, regret or pretence that a given proposition represents a true state of affairs. This collection of papers explores the contribution of particles and other uninflected mood-indicating function words to the expression of propositional attitude in the broad sense. Some languages employ this type of attitude-marking device extensively, even for the expression of basic moods and basic speech act categories, other languages use such markers sparsely and always in interaction with syntactic form. Both types of language are examined in this volume, which includes studies of attitudinal markers in Amharic, English, Gascon, Occitan, German, Greek, Hausa, Hungarian, Japanese, Norwegian and Swahili. The theoretical emphasis is on issues such as interpretive vs. descriptive use of utterances or utterance parts, procedural semantics, linguistic underdetermination of the proposition expressed and the speaker's communicated attitude to it, higher-level explicatures in the relevance-theoretic sense, the explicit — implicit distinction, as well as processes of grammaticalization and negotiation of propositional attitude in spoken interaction.

Based on a rich set of historical data, this book traces the development of pragmatic markers in English, from hwæt in Old English and whilom in Middle English to whatever and I'm just saying in present-day English. Laurel J. Brinton carefully maps the syntactic origins and development of these forms, and critically examines postulated unilineal pathways, such as from adverb to conjunction to discourse marker, or from main clause to parenthetical. The book sets case studies within a larger examination of the development of pragmatic markers as instances of grammaticalization or pragmaticalization. The characteristics of pragmatic markers - as primarily oral, syntactically optional, sentence-external, grammatically indeterminate elements - are revised in the context of scholarship on pragmatic markers over the last thirty or more years.

This book combines theoretical work in linguistic pragmatics and sociolinguistics with empirical work based on a corpus of London adolescent conversation. It makes a general contribution to the study of pragmatic markers, as it proposes an analytical model that involves notions such as subjectivity, interactional and textual capacity, and the distinction between contextual alignment/divergence. These notions are defined according to how information contained in an utterance interacts with the cognitive environment of the hearer. Moreover, the model captures the diachronic development of markers from lexical items via processes of grammaticalisation, arguing that markerhood may be viewed as a gradient phenomenon. The empirical work concerns the use of like as a marker, as well as a characteristic use of two originally interrogative forms, innit and is it, which are used as attitudinal markers throughout the inflectional paradigm, despite the fact that they contain a third person singular neuter pronoun. The author provides an in-depth analysis of these features in terms of pragmatic functions, diachronic development and sociolinguistic variation, thus adding support to the hypothesis that adolescents play an important role in language variation and change.

In this paper, we investigate the evolution from imperatives to discourse markers in Romance, with a corpus-based approach. We focus on the case of items coming from verbs meaning 'to look', in a semasiological perspective: Spanish and Catalan mira, Portuguese olha, Italian guarda, French regarde, Romanian uite. We show that they all share many uses, among which turn-taking, introduction of reported speech, hesitation phenomenon, topic-shifting and modalization, except for French regarde. We then establish (against Waltereit, 2002) that the development of these uses is the result of a process

A basic property of human language is that it unfolds in time; the left and right margin of discourse units do not behave in a symmetrical fashion. The working hypothesis of this volume is that discourse elements at the left periphery have mainly subjective and discourse-structuring functions, whereas at the right periphery, such elements play an intersubjective or modalising role. However, the picture that emerges from the different contributions to this volume is far more complex. While it seems clear that the working hypothesis cannot be upheld in a “strong” way, most of the chapters – especially those based on corpus data – show that an asymmetry between left and right periphery does exist and that it is a matter of frequency.

This book presents the multifunctional nature of pragmatic discourse markers in English and Catalan oral narratives from the point of view of text linguistics and contrastive analysis. It is argued that English and Catalan markers are distributed and operate differently at four different levels in the varied discourse structures of the text, i.e. at the ideational, the rhetorical, the sequential, and the inferential levels. The results confirm the distinctions in functional-systemic levels, and indicate that the nature of the two languages has a direct influence on the presence and nature of markers in the texts. The study is built up on a corpus of English and Catalan elicited narratives of native speakers, adopting the sociolinguistic "Labovian" framework adapted to the situation of educated adults.The study results in a better understanding of the contribution of pragmatic markers to the organization and the interpretation of oral texts, bringing insights from relevance and cognitive approaches to text structure, and moving from descriptive to theoretical levels of analysis and discussion.

An original study of pragmatic markers in a corpus of spoken English, with a focus on the functions performed by the markers in different types of text.