Is “Back to my Point” a Pragmatic Marker? An Inquiry into the Historical Development of some Metatextual Discourse Management Markers in English
Abstract
Discourse management markers (DMMs) that “signal a meta-comment on the structure of the discourse” (Fraser 2009) are widely attested in historical data. Most discourse management markers (e.g. and, anyway, by the way, but, now, then) meet well-known criteria for pragmatic markers such as multifunctionality, opacity, optionality, (inter)subjectivity, relatively high frequency, and shortness. However, several cited in Fraser (2009), many of them topic-orientation markers, do not (e.g. back to my original point, to return to my previous topic, if I might continue). I propose that an account of the development of DMMs make a distinction between adverbial adjuncts, conjunct adverbials, and pragmatic markers (e.g. Hasselgård 2010). By hypothesis, change may occur along the cline: adverbial adjuncts > conjunct adverbials (> DMMs). This approach accounts for gradual form-meaning shifts and is consistent with a usage perspective on language as a dynamic system grounded in usage events (Kemmer & Barlow 1999; Langacker 2008).Keywords
diachrony, discourse management markers, discourse markers, English, pragmatic markersReferences
Data bases
COCA The Corpus of Contemporary American English. 1990-2017. Compiled by Davies, Mark. Brigham Young University. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
DOEC Dictionary of Old English Corpus. 2009. Compiled by Healey, Antonette diPaolo, Holland, Joan, McDougall, Ian & McDougall, David, with Xiang, Xin. University of Toronto. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/DOEC/index.html
EEBO Early English Books Online, 1470s to 1690s. Corpus created as part of the SAMUELS PROJECT (2014-2016). https://www.english-corpora.org/eebo/
OED Oxford English Dictionary. 2018. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/
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