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RRL, LXV, 3, p. 207–211, Bucureşti, 2020

EDITORIAL NOTE

This issue proposes a selection of the papers presented at the International Workshop Approaches to Discourse-Relational Devices (DRDs): Textual Connectors, Discourse Markers, Modal Particles, organised at the University of Bucharest on 15–16 October 20191.

Analysing discourse-relational devices is crucial in order to understand the acquisition, functioning, and evolution of natural languages. The general class of DRDs includes textual connectors (TCs) and discourse markers (DMs), which are universal linguistic elements, and the class of pragmatic (modal) particles and markers (MPs).

Numerous (comparative) studies embracing various methodological approaches have led to a clearer demarcation of these classes. However, even if sometimes it is still difficult to differentiate TCs from syntactic conjunctions and/or DMs, or DMs from MPs in one language (Cuenca 2013), when we study these items across different vernaculars and we compare cross- linguistic categorizations with language-specific classifications, taking into account various procedural characteristics, we see that these theoretical distinctions are valid.

Degand et al. (2013) ask themselves if DMs and MPs are not, in fact, “two faces of the same coin”; the answer to this question is positive, they say, since DMs and MPs codify two aspects of the general indexical function of the language, i.e. the DMs give indications on the linguistic context – in Schiffrin’s terms (1987), they signal connections between the structural units of discourse –, while MPs indicate the situational context – in Schiffrin’s terms or in broader pragmatic terms, they signal connections between the attitudes of the participants in the act of communication (i.e. intersubjectivity).

A similar question may be asked regarding the relation between some conjunctions and TCs (and, because, but, etc.): are they two faces of the same coin too? The answer seems to be positive in this case as well. Some syntactic connectors not only establish local cohesion relations between clauses (a mechanism that gives texture to discourse), but they also introduce non-local coherence relations (Sanders et al. 1992) between two discourse arguments (which may or may not coincide with clauses). The differences between these classes are not to be found at the level of their members (some of them may belong to both), but in the methods, parameters and the focus used in their analysis (sentence meaning vs. discourse meaning). Let us not forget that discourse is more complex than the sentence, it has a communication apparatus (Charraudeau 1992) that includes both the structural way of organizing the linguistic expression and the situation of communication, i.e. the intentions, finality, and the way in which the participants receive the message; in brief, discourse is made up not only of texture, but also as a coherent meaning within a social practice of communication (Martin 2001, Martin and Rose 2007). In this respect,       

1 The organizing committee of this workshop was made up of: Ariadna Ştefănescu, Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Romanian Academy Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Sorina Postolea, Faculty of Letters, Alexandru Iona Cuza University of Iaşi. Further information may be found at: https://bucharestdiscourse.home.blog.

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experts in the field state that DRDs belong to the pragmatic class of contextualisation cues (Gumperz 1982) that index various types of sociolinguistic and discourse variation, starting from gender, age, education, social status, or dialect, and ending with mental attitudes and relations between the participants to the act of communication (Pichler 2016, Andersen 2000, Jucker and Ziv 1998).

From a functional perspective, several members of the classes of TCs, DMs, and MPs may be multifunctional, because they operate at several discourse levels, triggering different procedural meanings; from a grammatical perspective, they may change their word class membership. This is one of the reasons why TCs, DMs, and MPs are seen as fuzzy categories.

The study of DRDs has had a seminal effect in the development of pragmatics, discourse and conversation analysis, text linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Often described as communication ‘lubricants’, as elements that make utterances felicitous, DRDs play an important role in (second) language acquisition too. The interdisciplinary research devoted to natural language processing and human-machine communication (artificial intelligence) is also interested in this field. Degand (2019) talks of the following paradox that is often noticeable in the use of DMs, but her statement may be extended to the other pragmatic classes mentioned above: DMs have an utmost importance in the realisation of textual and discourse coherence, in spite of the fact that most of them are optional at the sentence level (syntax and semantics).

From a cognitivist point of view, the study of these language elements is important in revealing a plethora of mechanisms of interpersonal communication, such as inferential processes. In grammaticalization approaches and in comparative linguistics, the analysis of textual connectors and discourse markers traces processes such as those of recategorisation or gradience between different categories, and highlights aspects of language evolution and interlanguage variation (Brinton 1996).

This issue proposes a series of studies which, being anchored in various theoretical frameworks, focus more on empirical results and less on purely theoretical issues, putting forth several descriptions of items specific to the class of discourse relational devices in Romanian, German, French, or English.

Manfred Stede deals with connectives expressing contrast. Their treatment in some well-known approaches (Rhetorical Structure Theory, Penn Discourse Treebank, and Prague Discourse Treebank) is presented along with the divergent results of applying different annotation schemes on a German corpus, which are to be explained through the different goals, perspectives and methodological empowerments given by each theory. A key point in inventorying the meanings of connectives, in establishing relations between their meanings, and, eventually, in giving an account of the entire realm of connectives, is relying on or starting the analysis from real texts and complementing it with lexicographic semantic analysis. This is the bottom-up approach that the author proposes and also illustrates with German contrast connectives, for which he derives a set of functions, described, exemplified, and tested against a corpus, thus showing their applicability and relevance. At the same time, the corpus was also annotated with Penn Discourse Treebank relations, and this double annotation highlighted the correspondences between the proposed functions and the coherence relations, with possible consequences on reconsidering the set of functions.

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Sofiana-Iulia Lindemann starts from the general assumption that the devices used to maintain referential continuity and ensure topic transitions contribute to discourse coherence and that the use of a referring expression depends on the degree of prominence of its antecedent expression. Discourse processing is guided by a set of forward-looking expectations concerning the upcoming topic transitions. In this context, the author discusses the indefinite use of English this and German so’n within an NP as linguistic devices that contribute to the ‘discoursehood’ of a multi-sentence text, i.e. as DRDs. The indefinite this (more precisely, NPs with this having an indefinite meaning) and the indefinite so’n affect topic transition. Her study interprets the data gathered during a multi-sentence story- continuation test which show that the use of these constructions functions as a mechanism that announces an upcoming topic shift, when the topic shift happens after two or three sentences thus introduced. The findings of her test extend the existing data on referent accessibility and prominence. The two DRDs, En. this and Ge. so’n, have a greater discourse structuring potential than the NPs headed by simple indefinites.

Andrea di Manno analyzes the discourse role played by the pragmatic particle že (‘Ø, and, but’) in the Old Church Slavonic translation of the Gospels in comparison with the prior Greek versions. The author considers that the particle že is mainly a development marker whose core function is to signal the interruption of a preceding thematic chain and the beginning of a new one, even if it can also function as an additive and adversative conjunction.

The next articles in this issue focus on several DMs that have entered Romanian from French or English through code-switching or various kinds of borrowing – pragmatic, nonce, or lexical –, at various stages in the evolution of the Romanian language and culture.

The DM features mentioned in these studies are the theoretical nucleus from which various descriptions of these linguistic items with multiple pragmatic functions stem.

Valentina Cojocaru takes into account a series of English DMs that have entered Romanian informal conversations which the author identified in a personal corpus of Romanian computer mediated discourse (blogs and social media communications). The question asked in this contribution is whether the English discourse markers discussed, selected based on their high frequency in the corpus, are a case of code-switching or pragmatic borrowings. The answer is the following: because so, anyway, Jesus!, oh, my God!/ omg preserve their pragmatic functions from the donor language but tend to suffer certain degrees of adaptation to Romanian (orthographic, phonological and syntactic adaptation), they are susceptible to passing from code-switching to the status of pragmatic borrowings. Postulating the existence of a continuum between code-switching, pragmatic, nonce and lexical borrowings, the author is of the opinion that the English DMs that have entered informal Romanian may lie at various points along this line depending on various factors, such as their frequency, the Speaker’s attitude towards these units, or their degree of orthographic, phonological or grammatical adaptation.

Anabella-Gloria Niculescu Gorpin and Monica Vasileanu deal with the practical case of several English DMs introduced recently in Romanian via borrowing as a result of the cultural phenomenon of globalization that has made English a lingua franca, and through bilingualism. In the donor language the chosen words have a double use, as full- fledged lexical items and as DMs; they enter the host language as DMs first, and then, through diastratic, diaphasic and diatopic variation, they begin to be used as full-blown lexical items, following an evolution process that is contrary to the one they followed in

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their source language. The fact that the English DMs develop lexical meanings in Romanian is a sign that these borrowings have been completely adapted in their host language.

Cecilia-Mihaela Popescu places her study within the framework of pragmatic lexicology. The author also focuses on the concept of pragmatic borrowing and on a group of DMs, apropo, mersi, pardon, which were borrowed by Romanian from French in the 19th century and play a role in politeness. The author shows that besides their basic interrelational function the three items also code occasional meanings which signpost local discursive, class, gender and cultural variation in the recipient language, being placed at several discourse levels: argumentative, metadiscursive and interpersonal. After a presentation of the historical-cultural context that favored these lexical borrowings in Romanian, the author discusses the values of these DMs that have become conventional in the host language, making a distinction between those taken over from the donor language and those developed in Romanian.

Mihaela Mladenovici (Ionescu) analyzes the DM actually using the method of translation spotting (Cartoni et al. 2013), i.e. she inventories the way in which the marker is rendered in Romanian in the translation of a series of English scientific documentaries. The author presents the main features of this type of discourse, among which its specific type of rhetoric, which favors the presence of actually. The previous research on this DM depict it as a trigger of higher level explicatures. The author shows that actually links two discourse segments that encompass different types of contrast. The DM is frequently omitted in the Romanian translation, and this is explained by the fact that, as it does not influence the propositional content of the utterance, its omission does not change the meaning, but only the degree of argumentativeness of the sequence, and by the fact that the subtitle is a fast paced version of the original material.

The last contribution in the volume, signed by Ariadna Ştefănescu, Sorina Postolea, and Verginica Barbu Mititelu, approaches a highly versatile couple of Romanian DMs, de altfel and de altminteri (‘as a matter of fact, in fact, indeed’). Based on the annotation of 150 sample sentences containing the DMs and on an in-depth analysis of their features in current use, the study identifies their three main variation patterns and shows that, as far as discourse coherence is concerned, they have specialised in signalling the relation of Specification, mainly in the rhetorical domain (Crible and Degand 2019).

However, regardless of the specific structural pattern in which they appear (sentence-initial after a full stop; mid-sentence, intonationally isolated; or in the vicinity of a causal connector), the DMs are characterized by the fact that they signal the Speaker/Writer’s epistemic stance on what is being said and that they place the segment they introduce in the discourse background by presenting it as a side comment, an afterthought or the post- expansion of an opinion. Thus, the study highlights the multifunctional and fuzzy nature of de altfel and de altminteri, which operate somewhere at the border between TCs, DMs, and MPs.

Ariadna Ştefănescu2, Verginica Barbu Mititelu3 and Sorina Postolea4       

2 University of Bucharest, [email protected].

3 Romanian Academy Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, [email protected].

4 Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Ia i, [email protected].

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REFERENCES

Andersen, G., 2000, Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation. A Relevance Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents, Amsterdam / Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Blakemore, D., 1992, Understanding Utterances: An Introduction to Pragmatics, Blackwell.

Brinton, L. J., 1996, Pragmatic Markers in English. Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions, Berlin, New York, Mouton de Gruyter.

Cartoni, B., S. Zufferey, T. Meyer, 2013, “Annotating the Meaning of Discourse Connectives by Looking at Their Translation: The Translation Spotting Technique”, Dialogue and Discourse, 4, 2, 65–86.

Charraudeau, P., 1992, Grammaire de sens et d’expression, Paris, Hachette.

Crible, L., L. Degand, 2019, “Domains and Functions: A Two-Dimensional Account of Discourse Markers”, Discours 24, Varia, 3–35.

Cuenca, M. J., 2013, “The fuzzy boundaries between discourse marking and modal marking”, in:

L. Degand, B. Cornillie, P. Pietrandrea (eds), Discourse Markers and Modal Particles.

Categorization and description, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 191–216.

Martin, J. R., 2001, “Cohesion and Texture”, in: D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton (eds), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 35–53.

Martin, J. R., D. Rose, 2007, Working with Discourse. Meaning Beyond the Clause, London/New York, Continuum.

Degand, L., 2019, “Contextual constraints on discourse marker use”, presented at the Bucharest Discourse Workshop, University of Bucharest, 15-16 October 2019. Abstract available online at https://bucharestdiscourse.home.blog/book-of-abstracts/, accessed on 1 September 2020.

Degand, L., B. Cornilie, P. Pietrandrea, 2013, “Two Sides of the Same Coin?”, in Discourse Markers and Modal Particles. Categorization and Description, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1–18.

Gumperz, J., 1982, Discourse Strategies. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Jucker, A. H., Y. Ziv (eds), 1998, Discourse Markers. Descriptions and Theory, Amsterdam /Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Pichler, H., 2016, “Uncovering discourse-pragmatic innovations: innit in Multicultural London English”, in: H. Pickler (ed), Discourse Pragmatic Variation and Change in English, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 59–85.

Sanders, T. J. M., W. P. M. Spooren, L. G. M. Noordman, 1992, “Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations”, Discourse Processes, 15, 1, 1–35.

Schiffrin, D., 1987, Discourse Markers, Cambridge University Press.

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