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Causal Connectives and Perspective Markers in Chinese: the Encoding and Processing of Subjectivity in Discourse

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Causal Connectives and Perspective Markers in Chinese: the Encoding and Processing of Subjectivity in Discourse Causal connectives and perspective markers in Chinese: The encoding and processing of subjectivity in discourse Published by LOT phone: +31 30 253 6111 Trans 10 3512 JK Utrecht e-mail: [email protected] The Netherlands http://www.lotschool.nl Cover illustration: A bridge that connects Netherlands and China. Photographed by Yibin Gu; edited by Xinyao Jin. ISBN: 978-94-6093-266-3 NUR 616 Copyright © 2018: Yipu Wei. All rights reserved. Causal connectives and perspective markers in Chinese: The encoding and processing of subjectivity in discourse Causale connectieven en perspectiefmarkeerders in het Chinees: corpus- en verwerkingsstudies naar subjectiviteit in discourse ( met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof.dr. G.J. van der Zwaan, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op woensdag 15 januari 2018 des ochtends te 10.30 uur door Yipu Wei geboren op 13 oktober 1988 te Henan, China Promotor: Prof.dr. T.J.M. Sanders Copromotoren: Dr. J. Evers-Vermeul Dr. W.M. Mak This thesis was accomplished with financial support from China Scholarship Council (grant number: 201307720042). Table of Contents Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Chapter 2. Collocational analyses at the discourse level using Chinese corpora 15 Chapter 3. The use of perspective markers and connectives in expressing subjectivity: Evidence from collocational analyses 37 Chapter 4. Causal connectives as indicators of source information: Evidence from the visual world paradigm 63 Chapter 5. The role of connectives and perspective markers in the on-line processing of subjective relations 95 Chapter 6. General discussion and conclusion 117 References 129 Appendices 141 Samenvatting in het Nederlands 183 Acknowledgements 195 Curriculum Vitae 199 Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1 Defining subjectivity People communicate via linguistic elements that are connected in discourse. They have the role of reporter or narrator for all utterances they produce to describe what is happening in the real world or to express what language users think and feel about certain situations. However, the way in which they are present may differ: in example (1), the speaker reports a description of an event, while in the sentences in (2) and (3), the speaker expresses personal opinions or judgements with the linguistic elements may and perhaps. The speaker can explicitly introduce herself by an expression like I think, as illustrated in example (4). In this case, the speaker I can be held responsible for the statement of ‘Mary is angry at John’. Hence, in examples (2), (3) and (4), the sentence is expressed from someone’s perspective, which introduces subjectivity. This subjectivity is absent in (1), which is therefore seen as an objective utterance: the speaker is only present as an objective reporter. (1) Mary is angry at John. (2) Mary may be angry at John. (3) Perhaps Mary is angry at John. (4) I think Mary is angry at John. Subjectivity is an encompassing linguistic phenomenon (Finegan, 1995) as well as an important cognitive notion in discourse representations. It is considered to be a gradient phenomenon which concerns ‘the degree of the grounding in the perspective of the speaker’ (Traugott, 1995: 34). An important distinction between the conceptual representations of subjective and objective sentences is whether an intentional mind is involved or not. According to Finegan (1995: 1): ‘subjectivity concerns the involvement of a locutionary agent in a discourse, and the effect of that involvement on the formal shape of discourse – in other words, on the linguistic expression of self’ (cf. Lyons, 1977). In all instances, the speaker is involved as the reporter or narrator of the discourse, but in subjective utterances, the speaker is also involved as the locutionary agent who is responsible for the evaluation, judgement, or reasoning in the sentence. The locutionary agent can be either the speaker of the utterance or a character in the discourse (Sanders, Sanders, & Sweetser, 2009). In examples (2), (3) and (4), the speaker is the locutionary agent who is making the judgement that Mary is angry at John. In example (5), the locutionary agent is another character – Peter. In (2)-(4) and (5), a high degree of subjectivity is introduced because the thoughts arise from someone’s mind and are not a mere description of reality. 2 | Chapter 1 (5) Peter thinks Mary is angry at John. At the linguistic level, subjectivity is encoded by perspective markers such as may, perhaps, I think and Peter thinks, or it can be derived from the propositional content of the sentence that a claim or judgement is involved instead of a description of facts. No such perspective markers are present in example (1), and the author/speaker is just reporting the events he/she observes. In examples (2) to (5), however, the linguistic cues that encode subjectivity introduce the perspective of the narrator or some other character in the discourse. For instance, linguistic cues such as I think in (4) and Peter thinks in (5) explicitly attribute the claim in the utterance to a source of information; markers such as may and perhaps in (2) and (3) indicate the presence of a source of information without explicitly mentioning this source. These and other observations in language use lead to the question of what exactly the relation between perspective and subjectivity is. At the conceptual level, readers/hearers need to represent subjectivity in their mental representations of a discourse, guided by the linguistic cues. Subjectivity, by definition, involves personal opinions/feelings that arise from someone’s perspective. Therefore, in the representation of subjectivity, the source to whom the information is attributed is important. In other words, in the representation of subjectivity, perspective taking is important. In the literature, perspective and subjectivity have been treated as one notion (Finegan, 1995), or analyzed separately, focusing on one of the two (Graesser, Olde, & Klettke, 2002; Nuyts, 2001). An exception is found in the work of Sanders & Redeker (1996: 293), who define perspective as “the introduction of a subjective point of view that restricts the validity of the presented information to a particular subject (person) in the discourse.” In the current thesis, the notion of perspective is used as a tool to operationalize subjectivity in discourse. While subjectivity indicates that someone’s opinion or attitude about the information is involved, perspective concerns who that ‘someone’ is, for instance the speaker/writer or a character in the discourse, and how he/she is involved, for example expressing either an attitude or emotion, or his/her degree of certainty about the utterance. In other words, perspective markers provide a window on the mental representation of subjectivity. 1.2 Subjectivity in causal relations Subjectivity phenomena can be observed in utterances, as well as in relations between utterances, and in discourse as a whole. In the case of causal relations, a subjective relation concerns the reasoning attributed to a person’s mind, in contrast to an objective relation which expresses the causal chains between concrete facts in the real Introduction | 3 world (Sanders et al., 2009; Sanders, Sanders, & Sweetser, 2012). A causal relation is objective if the speaker reports that events are connected in the real world, as in example (6). A relation is subjective if the causal connection between two segments is constructed in the speaker’s mind instead of in the real world, as in example (7). In the latter case, the speaker is not merely reporting the causal relation “out there in the world”, but constructs the causality based on his/her own subjective inference (Kamalski, Sanders, & Lentz, 2008; Stukker & Sanders, 2012). (6) A strong storm stroke the city last night, so the public traffic system was temporarily paralyzed. (7) The public traffic system was temporarily paralyzed after the storm, so the storm must have been very strong. In (6) and (7), the connective so is used to explicate that the relation between the connected segments is causal. The fact that this connective can be used in both the objective relation in (6) and the subjective relation in (7) indicates that so is underspecified in terms of subjectivity – the connective itself does not encode whether the relation is subjective or objective. Readers need to use the propositional content of the connected clauses to derive that the relation between these clauses is either objective or subjective. For example, must in (7) indicates that the second clause is a claim rather than a description of facts, and readers can use this information to come to the interpretation that they are dealing with an argument-claim relation and not with a cause-consequence relation. 1.3 The linguistic encoding of subjectivity Researchers have studied connectives based on individual examples and intuitions, in order to find out how lexicons of connectives are organized to express relations: which relations can be expressed by which connectives in various languages (Sweetser, 1990). Following the theoretical proposals that came out of this, linguists over the last decades have tested these theories in actual corpora of language use, applying quantitative techniques and methodologies. Recently, automatic analyses such as collocational analysis have obtained attention as tools to explore the semantic and pragmatic profiles of connectives. For several languages, the corpus-based findings have revealed the categorization of connectives in terms of the degree of subjectivity they encode: as illustrated in Figure 1, some connectives are specifically used for subjective relations, some are mainly used to express objective relations, and others are neutral in subjectivity and can be used generically for both subjective and objective relations. 4 | Chapter 1 Hypernym: underspecified connectives (for subjective & objective relations) Hyponym 1: Hyponym 2: specific subjective specific objective connectives connective (for subjective relations) (for objective relations) Figure 1.
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