Functions of Language - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2010

The aim of this study is to identify the relation between the interpretation of epistemic parentheticals in discourse and their prosodic realisation. Data drawn from a corpus of British English speech suggests that epistemic parentheticals (comment clauses such as I think, I believe) convey a spectrum of meaning from propositional to interpersonal. They have long been categorised simply as sentence adverbials with a meaning that relates to the truth value of the proposition. However, a study of their prosodic realisation suggests that they occupy a transitional place in the process of semantic change. They can express a wide range of meanings from propositional (sentential) meaning, through discourse meaning to the status of verbal filler. The analysis draws on theories of discourse, historical change and prosody. It makes an important contribution to the understanding of how prosody conveys apparently subtle shades of meaning that are nonetheless crucial for utterance interpretation, including degrees of speaker certainty, the identification of disfluency and the expression of politeness.

Bakhtin introduced the concept of chronotope (chronos = time; topos = space) to facilitate his exploration of the ways in which space-time intersections occur in literary texts. However, he also suggests that chronotopes characterise non-literary texts — indeed, that “every entry into the sphere of meaning is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope” (1981: 258) — this historical, biographical and social time-space configuration. This formulation immediately suggests that these categories should be accessible via the categories of language and indeed, in English, they are most generally expressed via the Mood categories Subject and Finite. These same Mood categories of English are crucially involved in the identification of a unit of discourse — the rhetorical unit (Cloran 1994). Thus, this discourse unit provides a useful means of concretising, from a linguistic perspective, Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope and investigating the presence of such chronotopes in the everyday mundane discourse of mother-child interaction. Selections from such interaction are illustrations of authentic cultural chronotopes, and provide exempla of a (sub)cultural chronotopic motif within the broader culture, i.e. social positioning at a particular historical point in time (the late 20th century Australian culture).

This paper presents aspects of the results of a long-term research project on the relations between language and ideology in text-teacher-student interaction in Social Science and Natural Science classrooms in northern Colombia and their implications for citizenship education. The results presented here concern a grammatical conspiracy (Martin 1988) of historical determinism found in the transitivity and grammatical metaphors of a history textbook. I present examples of each of the grammatical features in question, arguing for the inclusion in the category of grammatical metaphor of historical present, inanimate Sayers and Behavers and some non-ergative processes. I then consider how the various grammatical features conspire to present a deterministic view of history which precludes the possibility of change as a result of human intervention. Finally, I suggest that Colombia, in striving towards a more harmonious society, has need of a different view of historical processes as susceptible to human agency.