Hoe kan een woord zijn negatieve lading nou verliezen, laat staan integendeel? Over betekenisverschuiving bij ontkennende woorden

Causaliteit en subjectiviteit in een taalgebruiksbenadering van de grammatica van het Nederland

Interjections and the Language Functions Debate

Five views of the function of interjections, developed in the first half of the 20th century by the psychologist-linguist Bühler, the linguists Gardiner, and Jakobson, and the psychologists Révész and Duijker, are discussed. All five scholars reject the earlier psychologism that reinforced the traditional emotion-expressive view of interjections; all of them argue for a listener-directed, communicative view of language in general, and all include a specific appeal-to-the-listener-function in their model of language functions. My original hypothesis was therefore that these scholars would reject the one-sided traditional view that interjections mainly express the speaker’s emotions, acknowledging instead that the central function of most interjections is to make some appeal to the listener (a view supported by recent investigation of a corpus of spoken Dutch, which shows that only 7% fulfils a purely expressive function). As it turns out, however, all five scholars support the traditional view and attributed an expressive function to interjections. In this paper I try to explain this unexpected result

Niederländisch 'toch' und Deutsch 'doch': Gleich oder doch nicht ganz?

In this paper, a semantic analysis is presented of the Dutch particle 'toch' and its German cognate 'doch'. On the formal level they may appear as either adverb, conjunction or interjection, and they also occur in different sentence types. It is argued that the core meaning of both particles is the same. The range of uses differs, however, between the two languages. For example, German 'doch' can be used as an 'answering particle in reaction to a negative statement or question. This is not possible in Dutch. The core meaning of the particles can be explicated in terms of three steps: the utterance with 'toch'/'doch' represents a positive step. This step is preceded (implicitly or explicitly) by a negative step, which is in turn preceded by a positive step wich is identical to the actual positive step. For certain uses of 'toch' and 'doch', however, we have to assume a modification of this general schema. A Dutch novel (by Maarten 't Hart, 1983) and its German translation was used as a corpus. The original text contained 270 occurrences of 'toch', and the translation 230 'doch's

Diskursmarker: Begriffsgeschichte – Theorie – Beschreibung. Ein bibliographischer Überblick

Der Aufsatz beschreibt Grundlinien der Diskursmarkerforschung von ihren Anfängen bis in die Mitte der 2010er Jahre. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf einer fachgeschichtlichen und systematischen Rekonstruktion des Diskursmarkerbegriffs. Im ersten Schritt werden Herausbildung und Entwicklung des Terminus nachgezeichnet und zu verwandten Termini wie Partikel, Gesprächswort und (pragmatischer) Operator in Beziehung gesetzt. Dabei werden unterschiedliche Forschungstraditionen in Germanistik, angelsächsischer Linguistik und Romanistik sowie ihre wechselseitigen Verflechtungen berücksichtigt. Im zweiten Schritt werden inhaltliche Bestimmungen des Diskursmarkerbegriffs in morphologischer, prosodischer, syntaktischer, semantischer, pragmatischer und sprachgeschichtlicher Hinsicht zusammengestellt und gewichtet. Zum Schluss werden unterschiedliche Richtungen der Diskursmarkerforschung in einen systematischen Zusammenhang gestellt, der die notorischen Unschärfen des Diskursmarkerbegriffs verständlich macht und ihre Überwindung absehbar erscheinen lässt.This paper describes the main lines of development in research on discourse markers, from its beginnings to the mid 2010s. The focus lies on a systematic and historiographic reconstruction of the notion of discourse marker. In a first step, we trace the origin and development of the term and relate it to similar notions like particle, conversational cue and (pragmatic) operator. We give an overview of the different research traditions in Germanic, Anglo-American and Romance linguistics, including the ways in which they have influenced each other. In a second step, we review how discourse markers have been defined in terms of their morphological, prosodic, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic/interactional and diachronic properties. Finally, we relate the different approaches in discourse marker research to each other along the dimensions of form vs. function and object vs. process. This schema offers insights into the notorious difficulties involved in defining discourse markers, providing perspectives for solving these problems