New book:
PUBLISHED JULY 2007
Regina Weinert (ed), Spoken Language Pragmatics. Analysis of form-function relations. London/New York: Continuum. (www.continuumbooks.com)
Regina Weinert is Reader in Germanic Linguistics at the University of Sheffield (r.weinert@sheffield.ac.uk).
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Regina Weinert
Chapter 1
Demonstrative and personal pronouns in formal and informal conversations
Regina Weinert
Chapter 2
Grammatical past time reference in spontaneously produced language
Torsten Müller
Chapter 3
The structure and function of wenn-clauses and their role in problem-solving discourse
Regina Weinert
Chapter 4
The relationship between deixis and modality
Regina Weinert
Chapter 5
Modal particles and emotion
Natalie Braber
Chapter 6
Speech rate, time pressure and emotion in English and German football commentary
Torsten Müller and Robert Mayr
Chapter 7
Multivoicedness and artistic reformulations in directing-conversations
Andrea Milde
Chapter 8
Intercultural positioning: Tandem conversations about word meaning
Jane Woodin
Synopsis:
The eight chapters in this volume provide fine-grained analyses of form-function relations in spontaneous spoken language and are essentially discourse-pragmatic investigations. Some studies focus on specific linguistic devices, others take as their starting point informational levels or language external events, and the final two place speakers and their roles at the centre of the analysis. The data includes everyday conversations, academic consultations, football commentaries, task-based dialogues, interviews, radio-play productions and intercultural conversations. The volume draws attention to the varied nature of spontaneous spoken language, highlighting the need to develop data-sensitive methodology and analysis which then nevertheless have implications for wider theoretical and empirical issues.
Regina Weinert opens this volume with an account of pronoun use in German, comparing third person demonstrative and personal pronouns in formal and informal conversations. The role of demonstratives has hitherto been underestimated and they have often been considered as indicative of `colloquial´ speech. The analysis of two sets of data reveals that both demonstrative and personal pronouns are central to spoken language discourse cohesion and that, contrary to expectations, demonstratives outnumber personal pronouns in formal discourse. The chapter embeds the analysis of pronouns in a discussion of wider theoretical concepts such as topicality, information status and salience, and examines the potential social significance of pronoun use. Analysis of the distribution and functions of the two pronoun classes thus raises questions regarding the nature of anaphora and topic development on an informational level as well as demonstrating the potential contribution of interpersonal factors to pronoun choice.
The question at the heart of Torsten Müller´s study is: how does proximity and distance to the present moment influence the choice of grammatical past time marking in spontaneously produced spoken language? He shows that in German live radio football commentary the temporal distance between extra-linguistic event and linguistic reference to it has a strong influence on whether a Präteritum or Perfekt form is used. Furthermore, this time factor appears to allow ablauting Präteritum forms which in everyday German are often considered unusual. Temporal distance seems to have no effect on the choice of past tense vs present perfect in English language commentaries. In addition, the present perfect seems to be surprisingly stative in this text type. The commentators´ choices therefore call into question established views of what English and German time reference forms express. The methodology adopted in this study and its results have implications for our understanding of the functional distribution of various means of past time reference.
Regina Weinert follows with an investigation of adverbial wenn-clauses - the most frequent adverbial clause in spoken German - which takes a two-pronged approach. It first presents an overview of wenn-clause constructions and their semantic and discourse-pragmatic functions. Wenn-clauses fall into broad structural categories, including integrated, deictically linked, unintegrated and independent clauses, the first two being associated with semantic relations, the latter two with discourse-pragmatic functions. The second part of the chapter then explores the use of wenn-¬clauses from the perspective of their larger discourse roles in problem-solving tasks. The analysis shows that wenn¬-clauses adhere to typical spoken language structure and complexity in that most are syntactically relatively independent. Their success can be explained in terms of structural and functional versatility, arising out of their potential to be used as temporal, conditional and situational frames. The study also underlines that discourse context contributes centrally to form-function relationships and that certain tasks can result in a division of labour among structures.
The relationship between deixis and modality is the subject of Regina Weinert´s next chapter. It examines the deictic, non-deictic and modal uses of the German spatial deictic da. The study begins with a general discussion of subjectivity, deixis and modality, outlines the functional and formal characteristics of German modal particles and discusses evidence of non-deictic and modal uses of demonstratives and temporal deictics in German and other languages. It then provides a comprehensive analysis of da, which includes comparison with alternative linguistic sets in order to test if, in a particular context, it is aligned with objective, referential expressions or with markers of subjectivity. In many cases analysis of individual occurrences of da in isolation, even in their discourse context, does not do justice to their role and the modal aspect is revealed on the basis of extensive discourse sections. While da has important functions as a deictic and is not (yet) a modal particle, there would appear to be evidence of modal functions in terms of epistemic status, attitude and affect.
Natalie Braber continues this theme with an exploration of the relationship between emotion and language with respect to the use of modal particles in German. Eben, halt and eigentlich are examined in a corpus of conversations with former East and West Berliners discussing the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. These interviews show that the events were highly emotional for one side, but much less so for the other. Rather than establishing a distinction between these groups of speakers, however, the focus of interest is on whether a particular function of speech can reflect upon a particular usage of modal particles. The main question is whether there is a correlation between the increased use of modal particles and the speakers´ emotional states. Eben/halt and eigentlich both occur frequently in the spoken accounts, but rarely together or in the same discourse sections. Eben/halt are associated with particularly emotional contexts, whereas eigentlich appears to be used more as a narrative device and in more distanced accounts. The use of eigentlich in particular goes beyond the functions which have been observed in previous research.
The influence of informational levels and emotion on the prosodic structure of utterances is investigated by Torsten Müller and Robert Mayr. Utterances referring to events in English and German football games that take place at the moment of speaking (i.e. on-line references), utterances that are less dependent on the immediate deictic context (i.e. off-line references) and utterances which do not directly refer to events in the game are compared in terms of speech rate and fundamental frequency. The results show a complex relationship between event type, speech rate and syntactic complexity, whereby the time pressure under which on-line utterances are produced can be neutralized by use of simple syntax which thus obviates the need for a high speech rate. Compared with utterances which do not report events of the game, on-line and off-line reference are characterized by information that is conveyed at a high fundamental frequency. This can cut across these two informational levels and is interpreted as being a result of the commentators´ emotional involvement in, and the perceived significance of, the events described. The methodology used in this chapter can in principle be adapted to study the role of time pressure, informational content and emotion on prosody in other contexts.
The final two chapters place speakers and the roles they adopt in talk at the centre of their analysis. Andrea Milde´s work deals with artistic task-oriented spoken communication between directors and actors in radio play productions. The interactive situation of the directing-conversations (Regiegespräche in German) makes the communication partners reveal multiple voices, as they have to act, reformulate, and repeat the text in a collaborative way, with the director as the leading responsible person. The phenomenon of multivoicedness occurs particularly in the speech of directors, as they often quickly shift back and forth between their own voice, the actor´s or the character´s voice in order to demonstrate what they want the actor to do with the text, as well as having to deal with different members of the production team. While all forms of directing conversations, including those in film theatre or opera productions, involve multivoicedness, radio play productions create a rich (possibly the richest) ground for their manifestations since communication - mainly carried out in separate rooms by using microphone - mostly takes place in an exclusively spoken manner. The study demonstrates how the director reformulates the acting versions carried out by the actors, how artistic spoken reformulations can be characterized, and finally, how multivoicedness is revealed in his/her working process.
In the final chapter Jane Woodin adds an intercultural dimension in her exploration of the positioning of participants in dyadic native – non-native speaker conversations. Tandem learners - native speakers of Spanish and of English - discuss the meaning of a given word in a semi-structured conversation. Through this discussion, interlocutors adopt a variety of positions. At some points they make distinctions between their own and their partner´s meaning. These are realized through the use of `I´, `you´ or indeed language/country distinction (English/Spanish, UK/Spain). At other points personal or intercultural differences are not highlighted and convergence of perspectives is evident. Still other points reveal evidence of the adoption of one´s partner´s perspective by the other, as opposed to a joint perspective of the meaning. Attention is drawn to the points in the conversation where positioning, or movement between positions, is evident and how these are marked linguistically and strategically (for example through turn-taking, repetition etc.). The study examines the implications of its findings for our understanding of intercultural encounters, especially with regard to ownership of meaning by native/non-native speakers, and questions the role of the native speaker as a model for intercultural competence.