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Discourse particles in early English: Clause structure, pragmatics and discourse management

What it is about

The paper treats three Old English adverbs, þa, þonne and nu, used inside the clause rather than at its start, as discourse particles, on the model of present-day Dutch and German. The data come from the YCOE corpus (texts from 850–1050), searched by clause type: main-clause questions, imperatives, hwæt-exclamatives, preposed correlative clauses and subject-initial clauses. Each particle has a clear clause-type preference. þonne occurs in questions, imperatives and conditionals, which the authors tie to non-factual contexts; þa is favoured in temporal correlatives, exclamatives and subject-initial clauses; nu marks surprise or irritation in questions and impatience in imperatives. The particle sits at a fixed position, after given information and before new nominal subjects. In the corpus of earlier English, pronominal subjects precede the particle in 99.6% of embedded cases, and nominal subjects follow it in 64%. The particles were lost in Middle English, except in questions and imperatives, and final "then" took over the discourse-linking role.

Ideas

For Mova

Chapters: 8. Word order and phrase structure, 9. The subjunctive, conditions and wishes (for the conditional and non-factual contexts), 36. Discourse relations and coherence, 38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech. Code: en/src/lin.rs, prag (common-ground response). Measure: position accuracy for subject placement against a hand-checked sample, and the discourse-marker precision on the school dialogues. The paper's counts are from a parsed historical corpus, so use them only as a guide to the rules.

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.1020

@article{kemenade2020discourse,
  title = {{Discourse particles in early English: Clause structure, pragmatics and discourse management}},
  author = {Kemenade, Ans van and Links, Meta},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.1020},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1020}
}

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  37. How to cite this article: van Kemenade, Ans and Meta Links. 2020. Discourse particles in early English: Clause structure, pragmatics and discourse management. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 3. 1–23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ gjgl.1020 ↗ our card
  38. Accepted: 30 October 2019 find
  39. Published: 07 January 2020 find
  40. Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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