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First published February 2005

Pragmatic markers and discourse coherence relations in English and Catalan oral narrative

Montserrat GonzálezView all authors and affiliations
Volume 7, Issue 1
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605048767

Abstract

This article explores the role that markers play in the pragmatic discourse structure of Catalan and English oral narratives. It is argued that their meaning is directly related to the sort of coherence relation that they establish with preceding and following propositions and discourse segments, centring the discussion on four discourse structures/components: ideational, rhetorical, sequential and inferential. The aim is to show the textual form-pragmatic function relationship by means of specific lexical units placed at specific parts of the narrative. The hypothesis held in this article is that pragmatic markers help in the organization of narrative segments and that their semanticopragmatic traits make them appropriate for their use in specific segments.

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1.
1. I adopt Brinton’s (1996) list of features as basis of what is considered a marker in this study. There is a summarized version of them in Jucker and Ziv (1998: 3).
2.
2. Referential or descriptive meaning.
3.
3. Anscombre and Ducrot (1983), Blakemore (1987), Moeschler (1989, 1992), Nolke (1990) and Luscher (1994) are among the most representative.
4.
4. The author of this study personally elicited, recorded and transcribed the Catalan narratives. I am indebted to M. Teresa Turell, who provided me with the English narratives. They were elicited and recorded by her graduate students from the University of Barcelona during the academic year 1992-93. The author of this study did the transcription of data in CHILDES format (see MacWhinney, 1995).
5.
5. That is, context that is ‘encoded in the structure of language’.
6.
6. According to Grice (1975), there are pragmatic principles that operate above logic: the cooperative principle facilitates the bridge between truth-based logical semantics and natural language operators.
7.
7. Bueno is a Spanish borrowing widely spread among Catalan speakers, formally equivalent to English well. The study has shown that, in fact, Catalan speakers make use of this marker much more often than the standard Catalan form bé, also formally equivalent to English well (see González, 1998, 2004).
8.
8. These two units are formally equivalent to English then. However, from the functional point of view, the study has proved that whereas aleshores has a core structural role, opening and closing the narrative segments mainly and initiating the developing action, llavors is a rich rhetorical marker that organizes the sequencing of the events (see González, 2004).
9.
9. According to Sanders (1997), ‘A relation is semantic if the discourse segments are related because of their propositional content, i.e., the locutionary meaning of the segments.’ Thus, ‘Theo was exhausted because he had to run to the university’, is a coherent sequence because the fact that running causes fatigue is part of our ‘world knowledge’ (p. 122); ‘A relation is pragmatic if the discourse segments are related because of the illocutionary meaning of one or both of the segments. In pragmatic relations the CR [coherence relation] concerns the speech act status of the segments.’ Thus, ‘Theo was exhausted, because he was gasping for breath’ is a coherent sequence because the cause-consequence relationship determined by the connector is based on a ‘real-world link’: ‘the state of affairs in the second segment is not the cause of the state of affairs in the first segment, but the justification for making that utterance’ (p. 122).
10.
10. Although distinctions similar to Sanders’s ‘source of coherence’ have previously been made: pragmatic vs semantic connectives (Van Dijk, 1977; Briz, 1994), internal vs external uses of conjunctions and relations (Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Martin, 1992), presentational vs subject-matter relations (Mann and Thompson, 1988) or pragmatic vs ideational discourse markers (Redeker, 1990), to mention some. Bateman and Rondhuis (1997: 25) present an insightful account of both coherence relations that, according to them, provide two kinds of information.
11.
11. By this I am referring to the degree of grammaticalization: the more lexicalized - or grammaticalized - a unit is, the higher its pragmatic value. Traugott (1995a, 1995b) and Cuenca and Marín (1998) offer a thorough discussion on the process of semantic loss of lexical units that have progressively acquired a strong pragmatic value and, with it, a change of their discourse use and grammatical category (1998: 383). See also Pavlidou (1991) and King (1992), who refer to ‘the grammaticalization of particles’ and the different types of meaning they can combine.
12.
12. Polanyi (1988) calls such operational move pop and push, so she refers to push marker if the unit signals the creation of a new constituent, and pop marker if it signals the recovery of a previous constituent. Thus, well would be a push marker because it has a significant segment opening function, whereas so would be a pop marker because one of its primary functions is the recovering of train of thought.
13.
13. See Cuenca (1997).
14.
14. Since the functions ascribed to the ideational structure are well-known logico-argumentative relations, I will not illustrate them here.
15.
15. Marsà (1992: 329) pointed out such finding, too, between English and Spanish discourse (transition) markers.

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Published In

Volume 7, Issue 1
Pages: 53 - 86
Article first published: February 2005
Issue published: February 2005

Keywords

  1. Catalan
  2. coherence
  3. discourse
  4. English
  5. oral narratives
  6. pragmatic markers

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Montserrat González
Pompeu Fabra University, [email protected]
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