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 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

Beyond aspect: will be -ing and shall be -ing

This article discusses the synchronic status and diachronic development of will be -ing and shall be -ing (as in I’ll be leaving at noon).2 Although available since at least Middle English, the constructions did not establish a significant foothold in standard English until the twentieth century. Both types are also more prevalent in British English (BrE) than American English (AmE). We argue that in present-day usage will/shall be -ing are aspectually underspecified: instances that clearly construe a situation as future-in-progress are in the minority. Similarly, although volition-neutrality has been identified as a key feature of will/shall be -ing, it is important to take account of other, generally richer meanings and associations, notably ‘future-as-matter-of-course’ (Leech 2004), ‘already-decided future’ (Huddleston & Pullum et al. 2002) and non-agentivity. Like volition-neutrality, these characteristics appear to be relevant not only in contemporary use, but also in their historical expansion. We show that the construction has evolved from progressive aspect towards more subjectivised evidential meaning