The meaning and functions of the Swedish discourse marker alltså-Evidence from translation corpora

The topic of this paper is to study to what extent a contrastive analysis can contribute to the analysis of discourse markers. Another issue which is explored is whether the contrastive analysis can be enriched by considering the grammaticalization and pragmaticalization of discourse markers. I have chosen to study the Swedish discourse marker alltså and its German cognate also with inferential meaning. It is shown that alltså (and German also) develops either into a question marker or a reformulation marker. By distinguishing two types of reformulation markers we can explain that the consecutive adverb develops meanings such as that is or in other words. It is also shown that there are differences between Swedish and German which can be explained by grammaticalization.L'objectiu d'aquest article és estudiar la contribució que pot fer l'anàlisi contrastiva a l'anàlisi dels marcadors del discurs, així com explorar si l'anàlisi contrastiva es pot enriquir considerant la gramaticalització i la pragmaticalització dels marcadors del discurs. Hem triat l'estudi del marcador del discurs suec alltså i la seva correspondència alemanya also, amb significat inferencial. En l'article mostrem que alltså (i also en alemany) es converteix en un marcador de pregunta o de reformulació. Si diferenciem dos tipus de marcadors de reformulació, podem explicar que aquest adverbi consecutiu desenvolupi significats equivalents als dels connectors és a dir o en altres paraules. Igualment, posem de manifest que hi ha diferències entre el suec i l'alemany que poden ser explicades per mitjà de la gramaticalització

The Mysterious Dead and the Generation of Life:——John K. Shryock’s Anqing Ethnography Revisited

This essay explores a selection of John K. Shryock’s field data from a hundred years ago, from the province of Anhui. Focus is on the ceremonialism of ancestry and the cultural semantics of ancestor worship. The account tries to demonstrate how certain phases of such rituals connect with the construction of continuity in social life, either through the cultural idiom of the cultivation of rice, or the idiom of procreation of children. The liturgies and paraphernalia employed show symbolic complexities, the understanding of which may lead us to new insights into the culture of southern China

The enigmatic clans of the Palaung: kinship clusters and continuity in Upper Burma

This essay tries to bring some clarity to the notion of ‘clan' as employed by early British ethnographers and administrators of Upper Burma, especially with regard to the Palaung population of the Shan States. Several aspects of the ethnographic records of a hundred years ago are examined and discussed. It is suggested that in terms of positivist sociological morphology the actual inconsistent social formations existing at that time remain very elusive. It is suggested that they may be better understood as being formed in processes in which a common, ‘inward-looking', cultural template as to social continuity was, when socially realized, influenced pragmatically by varying discourses and changing realities. The social clusters that resulted showed significant diversity, while still modally honouring the template

Ancestors on high: musings on an east Chinese case

The focus of this article is on the conventions of ancestor worship in the province of Jiangsu, directing light on certain ethnographic data that do not accord with the general, synthesized sociological picture established for southern China. Exploring Myron L. Cohen's 1990 field data, together with what is known from elsewhere in the province, the tentative discussion in this article concerns the nature of ancestry and the construction of social continuity in a local society with its roots in rice-farming. Here ancestor worship as a cultural grammar takes the form of a pragmatic variation, the search for blessings (continuity) being strongly contrasted with the avoidance of implied malevolence (discontinuity). It is further suggested that ancestry and divinity are interacting iconic forces in the stream of social life

The Mystery as a Symbolic Idiom — A Buddhist Temple in South China

This essay explores a southern Chinese Buddhist temple as an assembly of symbolic spaces and of objects distributed over these spaces. The symbolic construction is regulated by explicit rules as to distinctions and directions. The objects fill the spaces with a Buddhist story line by clustering elements of Buddhist creeds that are largely unknown to worshippers. These objects have been provided with an artistic form. Taken together, beautiful things and the design of the halls form an aesthetic iconic vision which carries a nebulous moral message. In the temple, exclusive discourse is converted into inclusive iconic displays, theological speculations into demotic transcendental experiences

<i>‘Je sais et tout mais...’</i> might the general extenders in European French be changing?

This paper addresses contemporary trends in the use of general extenders in two recent corpora of spontaneous French stratified by age. In these corpora, certain variants (e.g. et tout) are highly prevalent in the speech of young people compared to older speakers, while others are not. Other studies have shown that general extenders’ form as well as frequency tends to vary with respect to speakers’ age, while some extenders may also undergo grammaticalisation. The present study includes a comparison with a late 20th-century corpus of spoken French, and finds that not only age grading but also generational change might be occurring. This conclusion is supported by qualitative and quantitative analysis of the contemporary data, showing that the forms most frequent among young people appear to have acquired new pragmatic functions

"Thank you for a lovely day!" Contrastive thanking in textbooks for teaching English and Spanish as foreign languages

Thanking, as other speech acts such as apologizing or requesting,can be performed in numerous contexts and, for their analysis, many crucial variables must be taken into consideration (eg. social distance, gender, age,etc.), which often are difficult to control. Besides these variables, speech acts are carried out in different situations, taking into account the culture in which they are performed. For example, thanking might be performed after alighting a bus in the UK, the USA or Australia, but this might not necessarily happen in Spain. The aim of the study on which this paper is based, in to explore thanking contrastively in British English and in Peninsular Spanish from a pragmatic viewpoint,by looking at specific independent variables: the context and situation in which this speech act is performed, the relationship between the interlocutors who perform it, which includes social power and distance, and the reason for expressing gratitude. For the purpose of this investigation, a corpus of 128 textbooks (64 for each language) for the learning and teaching of Spanish and English as foreign languages was used. It is important to note that, although these corpora are built on prefabricated dialogues and these can be regarded as abstractions of reality, the communicative situations found in the textbooks are aimed at depicting exchanges and linguistic patterns representing what naturally occurs in real conversations in both cultures

Text-organizing metadiscourse: Tracking changes in rhetorical persuasion

Published academic writing often seems to be an unchanging form of discourse with its frozen informality remaining stable over time. Recent work has shown, however, that these texts are highly interactive and dialogic as writers anticipate and take into account readers' likely objections, background knowledge, rhetorical expectations and processing needs. In this paper, we explore one aspect of these interactions and how it has changed over the past fifty years. Focusing on what has been called interactive metadiscourse (Hyland 2005; Hyland and Tse 2004), or the ways authors organise their material for particular readers, we analyze a corpus of 2.2 million words compiled from articles in the top journals in four disciplines to discover whether, and to what extent, interactive metadiscourse has changed in different disciplines since 1965. The results show a considerable increase in an orientation to the reader over this period, reflecting changes in both research and publication practices