Pragmatics - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2007

Prescriptivists have long proscribed sentence-initial And (SIA), and sentence-initial But (SIB). However, SIA and SIB are increasingly used in newspapers and style guides have softened strictures against their use. Moreover, SIA and SIB are amongst the most frequently occurring sentence-initial connectives within their respective semantic groups of additives and contrastives. Given their use despite prohibitions, this paper examines the patterns of occurrence and function of SIA and SIB in academic writing. The data come from 1 million words of academic prose: 11 journals representing science, social science, and humanities. The data confirm the findings of Biber et al. (1999) that while coordinator and is more frequent in academic prose than but, SIA is much less frequent than SIB. The data also reveal a marked difference between low SIA and SIB occurrences in scientific writing and much higher occurrences in social science and humanities. Plus, SIA is the preferred additive connective compared with moreover, furthermore, and in addition, etc., and SIB is the second most preferred contrastive connective after however. SIA and SIB in academic writing function in three very similar ways: (i) to mark off a discourse unit by indicating the last item on a list, (ii) to indicate the development of an argument, and (iii) to indicate a discontinuity or shift with a previous discourse unit. Whereas the most common function of SIA is that of indicating the last item on a list, the most common use of SIB is in the development of arguments. SIA and SIB perform special functions that the alternatives of asyndetic or “zero” coordination, the use of similar discourse markers: moreover, furthermore, in addition, and however, respectively, or intrasentential coordination cannot perform. These special functions are derived from their particular semantic meanings, their role as coordinating conjunctions, and their reduced phonological prominence. These features allow SIA and SIB to preface a wider range of lexico-grammatical units such as interrogatives, stance adverbs and other discourse connectives and to create a tighter form of cohesion. It is these special features of cohesion rather than a move to colloquiality which are held to explain the occurrence of SIA and SIB in academic writing.

This paper takes two behavioural principles which have been suggested as explanatory models for human conversation, and tests them on a corpus of task-oriented dialogues (the HCRC Map Task Corpus). The principles chosen are Clark’s Collaborative Theory and Shadbolt’s Principle of Parsimony, which are both interested in notions of effort although they come from entirely different subfields of linguistics. The aim of the study is to compare the explanatory power of each of these principles when they are applied to real language data. Each of the principles was converted into a set of representative hypotheses about the types of behaviour which they would predict in dialogue. Then, a way of coding dialogue behaviour was developed, in order that the hypotheses could be tested on a suitably sized dataset. In particular, the coding system tried to distinguish between the levels of effort which participants used in their utterances. Finally, a series of statistical tests was undertaken to test the predictions of the hypotheses on the information generated by the coding system. The strongest support was found for the Principle of Parsimony and its associate Principle of Least Individual Effort, at the expense of the Collaborative Principle and the Principle of Least Collaborative Effort. There is certainly evidence that speakers try to minimise effort, but this seems to be occurring on an individual basis – which can be to the cost of the overall dialogue and task performance – rather than on a collaborative basis.

This article explores the insights that research on the emergence of ideologies of modernity and recent discussions of commensurability can offer for the understanding of the construction and maintenance of sociolinguistic hierarchies in Barbados. It takes as its focus (1) the ways in which the drawing of the boundaries of language communities has been linked to broader ideological and political economic processes that surround and depend on linguistic stratification and (2) specific, interaction-level ways in which sociolinguistic stratification is enacted today. It argues that the inclusion of Barbados in the colonial project of producing the modern speaker was underpinned by ideologies of modern governance and was predicated on the political need to transform the enslaved population into modern subjects. This inclusion defined new terms of exclusion and engendered in the speakers a reflexive distance from their English voice.

The article discusses humorous conversational activities ((e.g. jokes, teasing, joint fantasizing) in the context of genre theory. The high degree of creativity, emergent construction and artistry typical of humor call for a flexible concept of genre which makes sense of modifications and transgressions in communicative processes. Some forms of conversational humor are generic, for example, standardized jokes, joint fantasizing or teasing. Other forms exploit our knowledge of serious genres and activity types (thereby relying on it): e.g. humorous stories about problems, humorous gossiping or counseling. Here the keying is done from the start in such a way that a serious mode of understanding is undermined. Generic boundaries are often transgressed and hybridized in joking; new sub-types arise, such as absurd meta-jokes which violate the well-known expectation of a punch-line or other features of the genre. Nevertheless, the realizations of these genres are related only by a sort of family resemblance. The concept of intertextuality plays another important role in analyzing oral genres of humor. Genre knowledge is also employed when the speakers violate expected patterns in such a way that further information is located precisely in the violation. The article shows humorous co-construction as an emergent phenomenon, which plays with genre knowledge.

This paper presents an ethnographically sensitive account of a family of modal constructions in Sakapultek, a Mayan language spoken in highland Guatemala. The constructions in question share many characteristics with those that have been analyzed as ironic in English and are dubbed “moral irony,” due both to their similarities to irony in other languages and to their primary interactional function. The morphosyntactic composition and semiotic processes involved in moral irony are described and the proposed account of these semiotic properties makes use of Goffman’s distinction between author, animator and principal as dimensions of the speaker role. The indexical properties of moral irony are demonstrated and it is argued that they play a greater role in determining ironic meaning than speaker intentions. Using extended examples from naturally-occurring talk, the paper also demonstrates how irony functions in evaluative stance-taking in Sakapultek. Such examples illustrate both the relatively presupposing and entailing aspects of moral irony’s indexical meaning. Moral irony is argued to be modal in that it projects hypothetical or unreal possible worlds and ironic in that it indirectly and negatively evaluates the stances of an imagined principal. Finally, on the ethnographic level, moral irony is examined in light of what it reveals about Sakapultek notions of moral personhood.