The scimitar, the dagger and the glove: intercultural differences in the rhetoric of criticism in Spanish, French and English Medical Discourse (1930–1995)

The Comment Clause in English: List of abbreviations

1. Introduction: comment clauses, parentheticals, and pragmatic markers 2. Semantic and syntactic development of pragmatic markers 3. Processes of change 4. Comment clauses with say 5. I mean 6. Comment clauses with see 7. If you will and as it were 8. Comment clauses with look 9. What's more and what else 10. Epistemic/evidential parentheticals - I gather and I find 11. Concluding remarks.

The Comment Clause in English: Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development

This book approaches cohesion and coherence from a perspective of interaction and collaboration. After a detailed account of various models of cohesion and coherence, the book suggests that it is fruitful to regard cohesion as contributing to coherence, as a strategy used by communicators to help their fellow communicators create coherence from a text. Throughout the book, the context-sensitive and discourse-specific nature of cohesion is stressed: cohesive relations are created and interpreted in particular texts in particular contexts. By investigating the use of cohesion in four different types of discourse, the study shows that cohesion is not uniform across discourse types. The analysis reveals that written dialogue (computer-mediated discussions) and spoken monologue (prepared speech) make use of similar cohesive strategies as spoken dialogue (conversations): in these contexts the communicators’ interaction with their fellow communicators leads to a similar outcome. The book suggests that this is an indication of the communicators’ attempt to collaborate towards successful communication.

Collaborating Towards Coherence: Lexical Cohesion in English Discourse

Laurel J. Brinton. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Topics in English Linguistics 19. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996. xvi + 412 pp. $124.45 cloth. Laurel Brinton's ground-breaking new book is a meticulously researched study of Old English and Middle English (OE, ME) "mystery features"-items that have hitherto resisted grammatical and semantic categorization. Brinton proposes to analyze these quite diverse particles and phrases as pragmatic markers, thereby linking them with accounts of similar items in purely oral discourse which, since Deborah Schiffrin's seminal study Discourse Markers (1987), have been at the center of recent research in discourse analysis. Brinton, as a historical linguist, is one of the few scholars currently applying discourse-analytical methodology to OE and ME texts. This area of research has now acquired the name "historical pragmatics" and is being practised most prominently in Finland by Nils Erik Enkvist and the Helsinki School (Matti Rissanen, Irma Taavitsainen, Anneli Meurman-Solin, Terttu Nevalainen-the producers of the invaluable Helsinki Corpus of English historical texts) and by Brita Warvik at Turku (Abo). What makes this highly specialized linguistic study a suitable object for a review in Style? Brinton's results, I argue, should be popularized among narratologists concerned with medieval texts since they repeatedly recur to narratological parameters. Many of Brinton's insights suggest that the pragmatic markers on which she concentrates relate to the discourse structure of episodic narrative (such as I myself have characterized it in Towards a 'Natural' Narratology). Brinton's results are therefore apt to feed back into narratological research, just as her own discourse model (based on the episode structure of oral discourse and on grounding features) can be usefully supplemented with more particularly narratological factors. After an extensive review of recent research on mystery features in chapter 1, Brinton's second chapter is concerned with establishing the concept of "pragmatic markers," and provides a great number of definitions of the term as well as describing a variety of functions for pragmatic markers such as they have been proposed in the linguistic literature. Pragmatic markers, for instance, relate an utterance to preceding context or introduce "level shifts" and new "moves" (structural functions), serve as response signals, facilitate speaker interaction, and help to process oral messages and to provide for conversational continuity (30-31). They are characterized by their preponderant use in oral discourse, their high frequency of occurrence, their predominantly (though not exclusively) initial clause position and their optional use. Pragmatic markers operate multifunctionally both on the local and the global levels of discourse (31-35). In chapters 3 to 8 Brinton analyzes seven selected pragmatic markers and follows their diachronic development (if applicable) from OE to ME to PresentDay English. These selected markers are (1) the intensive construction gan ("And ryght anon the wympel gan she fynde"-Chaucer, Legend of Good Women 819, qtd. 68); (2) the discourse particle anon; (3) the OE episode-boundary marker gelamp (Hit a gelamp [ ... aet[ ... 1), a construction that, in ME, is replaced with (4) it befel; (5) the syntactic preposing of whan-clauses; (6) the OE mystery particle hwaet (familiar from the first line of Beowulf); and (7) the ME first-person epistemic parenthetical I gesse, which, as a narratorial intervention, has particular narratological relevance. This narratological relevance is confirmed further by Brinton's summary of grounding as an important textual feature (44-50). The term "grounding" has been coined in discourse analysis to refer to the foregrounding and backgrounding functions of linguistic or textual elements. Linguistic research on grounding has brought to light the consistent foregrounding of plot-line clauses in narrative texts, and it has also pointed to a graded scale of foregrounding features (thus allowing for a maximal foregrounding of episode beginnings and less prominent foregrounding for ordinary action clauses). …

Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions

The system of participant reference allows narrators not only to keep track of who is who, but it also serves to reveal the structure of the text and the ranking of the participants in the text. As narratives are typically built around storylines, participant reference systems interact and participate in signalling text structure and storylines in narrative texts. The aim of this article is to study the interaction of þa ‘then’ and participant continuity in structuring Old English narratives. In Old English narratives the adverb þa serves several discourse functions, which are related to the core function of foregrounding, or signalling the main line of narrative. However, it has been argued that þa is a signal of discontinuity, whose main function is to mark discourse-unit boundaries. On the basis of co-occurrence patterns of þa and signals of participant continuity in a sample of Alfrician sermons, I wish to argue that, at the intersection of participant continuity and foregrounding, þa has the function of reintroducing major participants into the story, simultaneously signalling text structure and continuity and cohesion in the text, and that the discontinuity associated with þa arises from its interaction with other structuring signals.

Brita Wårvik

Papers

Participant continuity and narrative structure: Defining discourse marker functions in Old English

“When you read or hear this story read”

On grounding in English narratives: a diachronic perspective

Organization in discourse : proceedings from the Turku conference

On the history of grounding markers in English narrative: style or typology?