2 - Semantic and syntactic development of pragmatic markers

Summary

Introduction

This chapter looks at the semantic development of pragmatic markers (about which there seems to be considerable agreement) and their syntactic development (which has not been fully explored). While it is recognized that pragmatic markers come from a wide variety of sources, ranging from individual lexemes to phrasal collocations and clauses, little attention has been given to the syntactic paths of development. The question explored in this chapter is whether we find syntactic clines in the development of pragmatic makers comparable to the semantic–pragmatic clines that have been postulated. A working hypothesis is that semantic–pragmatic change and syntactic change go hand-in-hand: that is, the shift from content meaning based in the argument structure at the clausal level to pragmatic–procedural meaning at the discourse level will be accompanied by a syntactic shift from an item having scope over phrasal and then clausal elements and, ultimately, to its having scope over more global elements of the discourse.

Semantic Development

As pragmatic markers are typically seen as “empty” markers devoid of lexical content, “bleaching” was the traditional way to account for their development. However, in a groundbreaking study, Traugott (1982) argued that a variety of different forms in language, including pragmatic markers, follow a semantic–pragmatic path in their evolution from propositional meaning to textual meaning to expressive or interpersonal meaning. Traugott adapted these three levels of meaning from Halliday's functional components: the ideational (“language as representation”), the textual (“language as relevance”), and the interpersonal (“language as interaction”) (1979).