Discourse Markers in Spoken Italian the Functions of Senti and Guarda
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UNIVERSITÄT BIELEFELD Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft Discourse markers in spoken Italian The functions of senti and guarda Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde vorgelegt von Laura Fuschi Oktober 2013 Erstgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Barbara Job Zweitgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Bettina Kluge Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier °° ISO 9706 CONTENTS Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 3 2. Definition of discourse markers ............................................................................................................... 7 2.1. “Discourse markers” and other labels .............................................................................................. 7 2.2. Definitions of the category ............................................................................................................... 10 2.2.1. Deborah Schiffrin: a coherence‐based view on discourse markers ..................................... 10 2.2.2. Gisela Redeker: a revised model of discourse coherence ..................................................... 12 2.2.3. Bruce Fraser: a grammatical‐pragmatic perspective ............................................................. 14 2.2.4. Carla Bazzanella: an interactional‐pragmatic perspective ................................................... 16 2.3. Commonly recognized features of discourse markers ................................................................. 18 2.3.1. Morphosyntactic heterogeneity, functionally determined categorization ......................... 19 2.3.2. Syntactic non‐integration, scope variability ........................................................................... 20 2.3.3. Externality to propositional, truth‐conditional content ........................................................ 21 2.3.4. Functioning on a pragmatic level ............................................................................................ 23 2.4. The concept of discourse markers in the present work ............................................................... 24 3. Overview of existing approaches ........................................................................................................... 31 3.1. Approaches in Italian discourse markers research ....................................................................... 31 3.2. Deverbal discourse markers in other languages ........................................................................... 34 4. Senti and guarda: a state of the art ........................................................................................................... 37 5. Aims of the present study ....................................................................................................................... 46 6. Data and method ...................................................................................................................................... 50 6.1. Data ..................................................................................................................................................... 50 6.2. Method ................................................................................................................................................ 52 7. Analysis...................................................................................................................................................... 64 7.1. Senti ..................................................................................................................................................... 64 7.1.1. Opening a turn, gaining attention ........................................................................................... 64 7.1.2. Interrupting the current speaker ............................................................................................. 67 7.1.3. Managing formulation troubles ............................................................................................... 69 7.1.4. Introducing a new activity: topics, sequences, and parts of conversation ......................... 70 7.1.5. Expressing a speaker’s attitude ................................................................................................ 76 7.1.6. Marking quoted speech ............................................................................................................. 81 7.1.7. A unified account: a basic function of senti ............................................................................ 82 7.2. Guarda ................................................................................................................................................ 88 1 CONTENTS 7.2.1. Opening a turn ............................................................................................................................ 88 7.2.2. Interrupting the current speaker, gaining attention .............................................................. 89 7.2.3. Managing formulation troubles ............................................................................................... 90 7.2.4. Expressing a speaker’s attitude ................................................................................................ 91 7.2.5. Marking quoted speech ............................................................................................................. 96 7.2.6. A unified account: a basic function of guarda ......................................................................... 97 7.3. The use of senti and guarda: a comparison .................................................................................. 105 7.3.1. Relation to the organization of turns and the scope ............................................................ 106 7.3.2. Relation to speakers’ actions ................................................................................................... 108 7.3.3. Relation to sequence organization, global conversation structure, and topics ................ 117 7.3.4. Senti vs guarda in quoted speech ............................................................................................ 123 7.3.5. Conclusions ............................................................................................................................... 125 8. Excursus – Native speakers’ interpretations of senti and guarda: an empirical investigation ...... 126 8.1. Method .............................................................................................................................................. 126 8.1.1. Deletion and substitution tests ............................................................................................... 127 8.1.2. Questionnaires .......................................................................................................................... 129 8.1.3. Test dialogues ........................................................................................................................... 129 8.1.4. Respondents .............................................................................................................................. 132 8.2. Results ............................................................................................................................................... 133 8.2.1. Some preliminary remarks on the respondents’ answers ................................................... 133 8.2.2. Do senti and guarda affect utterance interpretation? ............................................................ 134 8.2.3. What effects do senti and guarda have? .................................................................................. 134 8.3. Discussion ......................................................................................................................................... 136 8.3.1. Speakers’ interpretations and the proposed description of senti and guarda ................... 136 8.3.2. Suitability of the method ......................................................................................................... 140 9. Summary and prospects ......................................................................................................................... 141 References .................................................................................................................................................... 144 Appendix 1: Transcription conventions ................................................................................................... 155 Appendix 2: Test dialogues ....................................................................................................................... 157 Appendix 3: Questionnaires ...................................................................................................................... 160 2 INTRODUCTION 1. Introduction This work presents a functional analysis of the Italian discourse markers senti (‘listen’/‘hear’) and guarda (‘look’). Based on two corpora of natural data, the study intends to offer a detailed description of the pragmatic tasks accomplished by these two linguistic items in present‐day spoken Italian, and to point out differences in their functioning by comparing features of their contexts of use. It has often been emphasized that discourse markers were for a long time neglected by linguists; they were disdained as a sort of “linguistic detritus” (Schourup 1999: 228) or discounted as