The role of illocutionary status in the usage conditions of causal connectives and in coherence relations
- The meaning of linguistic connectives has often been characterized in terms of their position in a bipartite (semantic, pragmatic) or a tripartite (content, epistemic, speech act) structure of domains, depending on what kinds of entities are being connected (largely: propositions or speech acts). This paper argues that a more fine-grained analysis can be achieved by directing some more attention to the characterization of the entities being related. We propose an inventory of categories of illocutionary status for labelling the spans that are being connected. On this basis, the distinction between the content and the epistemic domain, in particular, can be made more explicit. Focusing on the group of causal connectives in German, we conducted a corpus annotation study from which we derived distinct pragmatic 'usage profiles' of the most frequent causal connectives. Finally, we offer some suggestions on the role of illocutions in relation-based accounts of discourse structure.
Author details: | Manfred StedeORCiDGND, Andreas PeldszusGND |
---|---|
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.01.004 |
ISSN: | 0378-2166 |
Title of parent work (English): | Journal of pragmatics : an interdisciplinary journal of language studies |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Place of publishing: | Amsterdam |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of first publication: | 2012 |
Publication year: | 2012 |
Release date: | 2017/03/26 |
Tag: | Coherence relation; Connective; Illocutionary force; Speech act |
Volume: | 44 |
Issue: | 2 |
Number of pages: | 16 |
First page: | 214 |
Last Page: | 229 |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Institution name at the time of the publication: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft |