Grammaticalization of Discourse Markers: From conceptual to procedural meaning
(2009) International Conference on Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspective — Location: Madrid, Spain (15.October.2009)
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- The aim of this contribution is to shed some light on the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning in the area of discourse markers by calling on evidence provided by grammaticalization theory. The question addressed here is to what extent the grammaticalization process of discourse markers can be considered as a mirror of their semantic shift from the conceptual/objective domain to the procedural/subjective one. To this end we follow Fraser’s (2006) proposal that goes against the traditional distinction in Relevance Theory between (i) strictly procedural meaning for linguistic items such as discourse markers (Blakemore 2002), and (ii) strictly conceptual meaning for linguistic items such as parenthetical verbs (Rouchota 1998). Rather, we argue that diachronic studies of discourse markers may carry out Fraser’s suggestion to recognize a simultaneous (i) ‘procedural’, (ii) ‘conceptual’ and (iii) ‘combinatorial’ semantic component within every linguistic form. The first aim is thus to discover under which circumstances linguistic items may express either type of semantic content. Secondly, we will investigate whether the historical functional shift from the propositional domain to the causal/ pragmatic domain (Traugott 1982) of these elements correlates with their semantic shift from primary conceptual to primary procedural content. Our analysis concentrates on two discourse markers which are derived from the French verb voir (‘to see’): the causal conjunction vu que (‘since’), and the parenthetical construction tu vois (‘you see’). At stake is the semantic shift from the perceptive domain (1-2) to either the causal domain (3) (vu que ‘since’), or the pragmatic domain (4) (tu vois ‘you see’). (1) Elle avança la main ; et le roi de la Chine ne sut que dire, quand il eut vu que c'était la bague d'un homme. (A. Galland, Les Mille et une Nuits, Prose, 18e s.) “She moved her hand forwards; and the king of China didn’t know what to say when he saw that it was the ring of a man” (2) - … Tu vois bien cette porte-là, à côté de l’escalier? - Oui, mon bon monsieur, je la vois. (E. Sue, Les Mystères de Paris, Drama, 19e s.) “- … You do see that door next to the stairs, don’t you? - Yes, sir, I see it” (3) Mais elle regardait sous les lits et c'était même drôle, lorsqu'on pense que les lions étaient la seule chose au monde qui ne pouvait pas lui arriver, vu qu'à Paris il n'y en a pour ainsi dire pas, car les animaux sauvages se trouvent seulement dans la nature. (E. Ajar/ pseud. R. Gary, La Vie devant soi, Prose, 20e s.) “But she was looking under the beds and it was actually funny when one considers that lions are the only thing in the world which could not happen to her, since there are so to say no lions in Paris, because wild animals belong to nature” (4) L1 on avait été euh / nous on y va souvent le vendredi soir L2 |- à cet endroit là donc tu vois pour tout préparer -| oui oui (Valibel, Spoken, 20e s.) “L1 we were er / we often go there on Friday evening L2 |- to that place you see to prepare everything -| yes yes” The shift from conceptual/perceptive vu que to procedural/causal vu que (1-3), on the one hand, and from conceptual/perceptive tu vois to procedural/pragmatic tu vois (2-4), on the other hand, spreads out over time, which calls for a diachronic analysis. That’s why we collected data from corpora including prose, essays, drama, and speech in historical and present-day French (from the 17th to the 20th c.). Diachronic data were mainly taken from the Frantext database and contemporary oral data from the Valibel corpus (Francard et al. 2002 – http://www.uclouvain.be/valibel). At the same time, this semantic shift presents a number of characteristic properties of grammaticalization (Hopper 1991; Lehmann 1995) such as reduction/ expansion in syntactic scope, syntactic independence and variability, coalescence, semantic bleaching, pragmatic strengthening, subjectification. Our focus will be on the interaction between syntactic and semantic factors, in particular the relationship between syntactic independence, semantic bleaching, and pragmatic strengthening (Traugott 1995). Thus, our working hypothesis is that procedural uses will increase over time as a consequence of changing contexts (Heine 2002), more specifically that variety in syntactic position opens up possibilities for semantic change. In view of a satisfying account of this progressive semantic evolution, we claim that there is a need for a more gradual and contextual characterization of semantic content (be it mainly procedural, conceptual, or combinatorial) which in turn could challenge the debatable issue of how to re-think the grammar/pragmatics interface.
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Bolly, C., & Degand, L. (2009). Grammaticalization of Discourse Markers: From conceptual to procedural meaning. International Conference on Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspective, Madrid, Spain. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/241823