Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2005

In this study, I look at the history of several non-standard discourse markers in Quebec French. I attempt to explain how certain markers have become specialized so as to take on a conventional role in spoken discourse. Furthermore, my current interest focuses on discourse markers and their relationship with discursive structures.I will illustrate the organization of discursive “networks” through the presentation of two case studies, the exemplification/opposition network — from the study of par exemple —, and the exemplification/approximation network, from the study of mettons, disons, comme, genre and style.Data are taken from sociolinguistic corpora of French spoken in Montreal, which total approximately 300 hours of sociolinguistic interviews carried out in 1971, 1984 and 1995 with speakers who are representative of the Montreal francophone sociolinguistic community.

This paper investigates the historical origins, both syntactic and functional, of a set of discourse particles commonly used in present-day spoken Swedish: hör du ‘(you) listen’, vet du ‘you know’, ser du ‘you see’, and förstår du ‘you understand’. From a synchronic perspective, the particles seem to be a morpho-syntactically unified phenomenon, and have been treated as such in earlier linguistic works. However, there is no diachronic account of these particles. This paper presents a number of hypotheses concerning the syntactic and functional sources of the discourse particles; we also evaluate the hypotheses against the background of historical linguistic data collected from Old Swedish, Middle Swedish, and Modern Swedish sources. The Modern Swedish period is covered by a large corpus of plays from the 1700s to the late 1900s. Comparisons are also made to Old and Modern Icelandic data. The historical data show that the particle hör du is of imperative, functionally directive origin, while the rest of the particles include a verb in present tense indicative, thus presumably originating from minimal clauses with a declarative or an interrogative function. Hence, historical formal and functional differences are hidden behind the apparent uniform present-day forms and functions of the discourse particles.

In this paper the Italian scalar particles perfino and addirittura are investigated in a diachronic perspective, from their origins in spatial and temporal meanings to the scalar value they have in Present Day Italian. The data documenting the shift are discussed in Section 2, where it is argued that the lexical semantics of the particles plays a crucial role in constraining the contexts in which they appear, and hence their change. Section 3 defines the evolution of Italian scalar particles as an instance of subjectification, i.e. as an increased degree of encoding of the Speaker’s attitude, and considers the syntactic evolution of both perfino and addirittura as the structural reflection of the subjectification process that they undergo at the semantic level. Section 4 addresses the question of whether the development of perfino and addirittura is a case of grammaticalisation, reconsidering the definition of both the concept of grammaticalisation and its relationship to subjectification. Section 5 concludes and points out at some directions of further research work.

In this paper we provide a synchronic and diachronic analysis of an instance of so-called “expletive” negation in the Spanish approximative adverb por poco. Synchronically, we show that this adverb, when combined with the sentence negator no, is ambiguous between ~p (“expletive”) and ~~p (“canonical”) meanings. Diachronically, we show that this ambiguity arose due to a change in the negation system of Spanish around the fifteenth century. As a result, the supposed instances of “expletive” negation found in present-day uses of por poco are not really expletive at all, but rather are a holdover from the Old Spanish requirement of preverbal negative concord.

The quantitative and qualitative analysis of spontaneous conversational data reveals that T/V usage in Cypriot Greek (CG) is realised sometimes as a code-switch into Standard Modern Greek (SMG), and sometimes as an integral part of the Cypriot code. Moreover, a consideration of the interactional motivations underlying particular types of exchanges supports an analysis in terms of form-function reanalysis, in which the ongoing grammaticalisation of V forms is realised as the subjectification of their semantics. This analysis has important theoretical implications for the distinction between standardisation and conventionalisation, and for the question of the gradualness of semantic change.

This article presents changes (1982–2002) in the way Portuguese speakers have attributed importance to individual address forms and to the factors important in their selection, as well as differences in pragmatic interpretation. While laypersons cite a lack of respect and generalized use of tu, the data (observations, interviews, questionnaires) contradict these statements. Over time, the number of factors cited as “most important” by significant numbers of informants has fallen, with “Respect” being the most important in 2002. In the same period the number of forms informants consider “very important” has increased. Power and Solidarity appear to be more closely tied to a particular type of interaction rather than to a fixed relationship between speakers. Two planes of interaction are presented, one loosely tied to Power, the other to Solidarity, along with a mechanism for demonstrating how one plane can become more salient than the other in communicative events.