Outside the Clause: Form and function of extra-clausal constituents

458 Pages·2016·3.81 MB·English

by  Gunther Kaltenböck

 
 

 
Outside
the Clause
Edited by
Gunther Kaltenböck
Evelien Keizer
Arne Lohmann
   
Outside the Clause
Studies in Language Companion Series (SLCS)
issn 0165-7763
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Studies in Language.
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Editors
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University of Vienna / University of Munich Arizona State University
Editorial Board
Bernard Comrie Christian Lehmann
University of California, Santa Barbara University of Erfurt
William Croft Marianne Mithun
University of New Mexico University of California, Santa Barbara
Östen Dahl Heiko Narrog
University of Stockholm Tohuku University
Gerrit J. Dimmendaal Johanna L. Wood
University of Cologne University of Aarhus
Ekkehard König Debra Ziegeler
Free University of Berlin University of Paris III
Volume 178
Outside the Clause. Form and function of extra-clausal constituents
Edited by Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer and Arne Lohmann
Outside the Clause
Form and function of extra-clausal constituents
Edited by
Gunther Kaltenböck
Evelien Keizer
Arne Lohmann
University of Vienna
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
doi 10.1075/slcs.178
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isbn 978 90 272 5943 1 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6655 2 (e-book)
© 2016 – John Benjamins B.V.
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John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com
Table of contents
Extra-clausal constituents: An overview 1
Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer & Arne Lohmann
Part 1. The multifunctionality of ECCs
Pragmatic markers as constructions. The case of anyway 29
Karin Aijmer
The (the) fact is (that) construction in English and Dutch 59
Evelien Keizer
Planning what to say: Uh and um among the pragmatic markers 97
Gunnel Tottie
Part 2. The diachronic development of ECCs
Mirativity and rhetorical structure: The development and prosody of disjunct
and anaphoric adverbials with ‘no’ wonder 125
Caroline Gentens, Ditte Kimps, Kristin Davidse,
Gilles Jacobs, An Van linden & Lot Brems
From clause to adverb: On the history of maybe 157
María José López-Couso & Belén Méndez-Naya
Towards a unified constructional characterisation of the nonfinite periphery:
On verbal free adjuncts and absolutes in English 177
Carla Bouzada-Jabois & Javier Pérez-Guerra
Left-dislocated strings in Modern English epistolary prose:
A comparison with contemporary spoken Left Dislocation 203
David Tizón-Couto
Part 3. ECCs in bilingual settings
Extra-clausal constituents and language contact: The case of discourse markers 243
Bernd Heine
The role of extra-clausal constituents in bilingual speech: The emerging
of regular patterns in a bilingual corpus 273
Eugenio Goria
 Table of contents
Part 4. ECCs: A grammar of their own?
The syntax of confirmationals: A neo-performative analysis 305
Martina Wiltschko & Johannes Heim
On the grammatical status of insubordinate if-clauses 341
Gunther Kaltenböck
Intensifying adverbs ‘outside the clause’: A cognitive analysis 379
Alexander Haselow
Aspects of discourse marker sequencing: Empirical challenges and
theoretical implications 417
Arne Lohmann & Christian Koops
Index 447
Extra-clausal constituents
An overview
Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer & Arne Lohmann
University of Vienna
1.  What are extra-clausal constituents?
Extra-clausal constituents (ECCs) have received increased interest in recent years,
albeit under various different guises, such as parentheticals, disjuncts, pragmatic/dis-
course markers, interjections, tails and afterthoughts, insubordinate clauses, vocatives,
left-dislocands, formulae of social exchange. This development is, no doubt, a direct
result of the availability of large amounts of spoken data in the form of electronic
corpora, which has led to a rethinking of the notions of grammar and grammatical
competence. It is now widely believed that an adequate description of a speaker’s com-
petence also needs to account for features of spoken interaction and that what has for-
merly been seen as distracting “noise” is in fact central for successful communication.
Despite their generally acknowledged importance in communication, ECCs are
often given short shrift in grammars. As elements which are largely context-dependent
and concern speaker-hearer interaction, they clearly represent a challenge for syntac-
tic modelling and it is therefore tempting to conveniently relegate them to the domain
of pragmatics. One of the first attempts to integrate them into a grammatical model
under a common heading is Simon Dik’s (1997) Functional Grammar, which accords
them a place of their own as a separate category in addition to, and complementing,
that of the clause. Dik (1997: 379) describes them in the following way:
Especially in spoken discourse … we often produce a variety of expressions which
can be analysed neither as clauses nor as fragments of clauses. These expressions
may stand on their own, or precede, follow, and even interrupt a clause, being
more loosely associated with it than those constituents which belong to the clause
proper. These expressions will here be called extra-clausal constituents (ECCs).
While the term still assigns a more central role to the ‘clause’, with ECCs being defined
in negative terms as something that is ‘extra’ and ‘outside’ the clause, Dik’s concept for
the first time unites a range of different elements under one common heading. Dik
doi 10.1075/slcs.178.01kal
© 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer & Arne Lohmann
(1997: 383) distinguishes four types of ECCs, depending on their position in relation
to the clause: (i) Absolute or free-standing ECCs, (ii) Preclausal ECCs, (iii) Clause-
internal or parenthetical ECCs, and (iv) Postclausal ECCs. They fulfil a variety of dif-
ferent functions (see Section 4), but all share the following typical properties:
(1) Recurrent properties of ECCs (Dik 1997: 380–381)
a. They either occur on their own, or are typically set off from the clause
proper by breaks or pause-like inflections in the prosodic contour.
b. They are never essential to the internal structure of the clause with
which they are associated; when they are left out, the clause still forms
an integral whole.
c. They are not sensitive to the grammatical rules which operate within
the limits of the clause, although they may be related to the clause by
rules of coreference, parallelism, and antithesis.
d. They are especially common in the spoken register.
e. They are typical of linguistic expressions in ongoing discourse.
f. They are rather loosely associated with the clause, and cannot easily be
described in terms of clause-internal rules and principles.
g. They can only be understood in terms of pragmatic rules and
principles.
In a similar vein, Biber et al.’s (1999: 1082ff) reference grammar acknowledges the
existence of units outside the clause. This is not entirely surprising given their corpus-
based approach and attention to spoken language. Unlike Dik (1997), however, they
limit their discussion to units which are outside the clause category by virtue of their
internal form: “segments consisting entirely or partly of non-clausal material” (Biber
et al. 1999: 1069). These ‘non-clausal units’ come in two different categories: (i) inserts
and (ii) syntactic non-clausal units. Inserts are single words like Hi, which stand alone
and “are characterized in general by their inability to enter into syntactic relations
with other structures” (ibid.). They include interjections (oh, ugh), greetings and fare-
wells (hi, good morning, bye), discourse markers (well, right), attention signals (hey,
yo), response elicitors (eh? see?), response forms (yeah, okay, mhm), hesitators (uh),
various polite speech-act formulae (please, thanks, excuse me), and expletives (God,
damn). Syntactic non-clausal units, on the other hand, “differ from inserts in that they
can be given a syntactic description in terms of the structures and categories of sen-
tence grammar” (ibid.: 1099). Typical examples are, for instance, elliptic replies (A:
Where did you guys park? B: Right over here), condensed questions (Not your thing?),
echo questions, exclamations (That boy!), and vocatives (darling).
A grammatical category which is in essence similar to that of Dik’s ECCs is that
of ‘supplementation’ in Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 1350–62). Supplements are
syntactically not integrated into the host construction and as such unable to function
Extra-clausal constituents 3
as a dependent to any head. Consequently, they are elusive to an analysis in terms of
coordination or subordination, or of parataxis or hypotaxis. They are also intonation-
ally separate from the host clause (or set off in writing by punctuation) and semanti-
cally non-restrictive. In terms of position, supplements are either interpolated in or
appended to some host clause, but do not include stand-alone elements as in Dik’s cat-
egory. Typical forms of supplements are non-restrictive relative clauses, appositions,
content clauses (The excuse he gave – that the train had been late – seemed to satisfy his
boss), interjections, non-finite clauses (all things considered), PPs like in my opinion
and AdvPs like frankly.
A more recent attempt to capture the category of ECCs is the concept of Theti-
cal Grammar (Kaltenböck et al. 2011; Heine et al. 2013). Although building on the
notions of ECCs and supplements, the term ‘thetical’ is adopted as a reduced form
of parenthetical. This is to reflect that not all instances of this category are in fact
parenthetical in the sense that they are interpolated in a host clause or require a host
clause in the first place. Crucially, however, Kaltenböck et al. (2011) reject the terms
ECC and supplement as they imply a privileged status of the clause or, more gener-
ally, Sentence Grammar, vis-à-vis theticals (ibid.: 2011: 856). Instead, theticals are seen
here as belonging to a separate domain of grammar, Thetical Grammar, which is on a
par with Sentence Grammar, rather than an appendix to it. In principle, any element
(a word, a phrase, a clause) can be used as a thetical, which can be identified by the
following properties.
(2) Properties of theticals (Kaltenböck et al. 2011: 857; Heine et al. 2013: 159)
a. They are syntactically independent from their environment.
b. They are set off prosodically from the rest of the utterance.
c. Their meaning is non-restrictive.
d. They tend to be positionally mobile.
e. Their internal structure is built on principles of SG but can be elliptic.
Linguistic categories identified as theticals include comment clauses, vocatives, for-
mulae of social exchange, imperatives, interjections, left/right-dislocands, non-
restrictive relative clauses, discourse markers, phrasal appositives, tag questions, and
afterthoughts. The concept of Thetical Grammar is thus more encompassing than that
of ECCs or supplements.
Although, as we have seen, various labels have been used to describe elements that
are extraneous to the clause,1 we have, for the purpose of the present volume chosen
1.  In addition to the concepts of ECCs, non-clausal units, supplements and theticals, as dis-
cussed above, various other labels have been used. These include, for instance, parenthetic
adjunct (Corum 1975), disjunct (Quirk et al. 1972: 507–20; 1985: 612–31; Espinal 1991), jux-
taposed element (Peterson 1999: 237), epistemic adverbial phrase (Thompson & Mulac 1991;