Discourse functions at the left and right periphery : : crosslinguistic investigations of language use and language change / / edited by Kate Beeching and Ulrich Detges.

• Superior document: Studies in Pragmatics, Volume 12
• TeilnehmendeR: Beeching, Kate,; Detges, Ulrich,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands : : Brill,, 2014.; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in pragmatics ; Volume 12.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (265 p.)
• Notes: Includes index.

A basic property of human language is that it unfolds in time; the left and right margin of discourse units do not behave in a symmetrical fashion. The working hypothesis of this volume is that discourse elements at the left periphery have mainly subjective and discourse-structuring functions, whereas at the right periphery, such elements play an intersubjective or modalising role. However, the picture that emerges from the different contributions to this volume is far more complex. While it seems clear that the working hypothesis cannot be upheld in a “strong” way, most of the chapters – especially those based on corpus data – show that an asymmetry between left and right periphery does exist and that it is a matter of frequency.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- 1 Introduction / Kate Beeching and Ulrich Detges -- 2 Moi je ne sais pas vs. Je ne sais pas moi: French Disjoint Pronouns in the Left vs. Right Periphery / Ulrich Detges and Richard Waltereit -- 3 Motivations for Meaning Shift at the Left and Right Periphery: well, bon and hao / Kate Beeching and Yu-Fang Wang -- 4 On the Function of the Epistemic Adverbs Surely and No Doubt at the Left and Right Peripheries of the Clause / Elizabeth Closs Traugott -- 5 Setting Up a Mental Space: A Function of Discourse Markers at the Left Periphery (lp) and Some Observations about lp and rp in Japanese / Noriko O. Onodera -- 6 Italian guarda, prego, dai. Pragmatic Markers and the Left and Right Periphery / Chiara Ghezzi and Piera Molinelli -- 7 ‘So very fast then’ Discourse Markers at Left and Right Periphery in Spoken French / Liesbeth Degand -- 8 On the Development of Sentence Final Particles (and Utterance Tags) in Chinese / Foong Ha Yap , Ying Yang and Tak-Sum Wong -- 9 The Interplay of Discourse and Prosody at the Left and Right Periphery in Korean: An Analysis of kuntey ‘but’ / Sung-Ock S. Sohn and Stephanie Hyeri Kim -- Author Index -- Subject Index.