Introduction
Autor:
Henk Zeevat und Manfred Stede
Aufsatztitel:
Introduction
Jahrgang:
28
Heft:
1 (2004)
Seiten:
5-7
Abstract:
Discourse
particles are more and more investigated from a formal perspective.
This is due to the fact that a proper formal understanding of them is
related to a number of strategic goals. Discourse particles seem to
challenge some foundational tenets of NL semantics and pragmatics as it
is currently taught. A curious semantic property of particles is that
they seem to stand in semantic opposition with the sentence without
them, which seems to entail or implicate that the marked property is
false. This goes directly against the compositional picture where the
meaning of a complex is a function of the meaning of its parts (and not
of their non-parts). A similar foundational question is whether
particles can be regarded as presupposing whatever they express or
whether they conventionally implicate that (and what that would mean).
There are various systematic ways in which they seem to differ from
other presupposition triggers and a proper understanding of that
difference and of the way in which they do function could lead to deeper
insights in the nature of presupposition and/or conventional
implicature. Finally, particles are simple representatives of a class of
grammaticalisation processes, and a better understanding promises
progress in the understanding of grammaticalisation.
In computational
linguistics, a better understanding of particles would contribute to
the naturalness of automatically generated text. At the moment,
intuition somehow tells us that a generated sentence is unnatural
because some particle must be inserted. But it is very easy to come up
with rules for inserting particles that make the text even less natural
than it was without the particle. Hence, particle selection and
placement have to be carefully synchronized with other generation
decisions. In NL understanding, it is generally assumed that one would
do better with particles as they would help in understanding what move
the speaker or writer is making. This in turn has a strong bearing on
inferring the discourse relation, the resolution of pronouns and
presuppositions, and the meaning of the tense and aspect operators.
Generation and understanding come together in spoken dialog systems,
where indeed particles play a major role, since it is well known that in
spoken language they are even more abundant than in writing. – All in
all, progress with the particles (or their translation equivalents)
seems to open up perspectives in linguistic theory and natural language
processing that seem currently out of reach.
The papers in this
volume, which grew out of a workshop held at the ESSLLI Summer School
2003 in Vienna, are representative of the formal interest in discourse
particles, but also address other issues. The most surprising new theme
is the investigation of particles by means of empirical methods like
corpora and experiments. The first five papers are instances of this new
development, in which Spenader and Soffner are doing classical
semantics/pragmatics with new methods, and Alexandris & Fotinea and
Alonso
et al. develop theoretical understanding in pursuit of
computational goals. Spenader uses parallel corpora to test and refine
various analyses about the Swedish particle „ju“ which is notorious for
being hard to describe. The parallel corpus gives a variety of English
lexical items or constructions that express different uses of „ju“.
Alexandris and Fotinea give the theoretical results of applied research
into politeness marking and speech acts, using both corpus investigation
and experiments. While they aim for results that can be applied in
fielded dialogue systems, they find that a group of particles have the
double function of marking speech acts and expressing respect for the
interlocutor.
Alonso, Castellon, Shih and Padro exploit the ease of
recognition that particles provide for shallow processing of discourse
structure. Annotation schemes are proposed and evaluated for drawing
conclusions from particles and other discourse markers to the structure
and intention of the utterances. Soffner develops an interesting
methodology of corpus experimentation. The method consists in trying to
find consequences from theoretical ideas that are observable in a
corpus. The method is applied to the idea that „but“ always expresses
denial of expectation. This would predict that „but“-clauses can never
be marked as expected. This is tested on one such marking, by tantamount
tag questions. (And then John sang, did he?) Thomas also studies „but“,
and in particular reflects on the relationship between
denial-of-expectation and frustrated-plan usages in different types of
dialogs – where a frustrated-plan „but“ would cover cases like „John
searched the entire building but didn‘t find his cat“, where arguably an
expectation to be violated is at best well-hidden.
The last three
papers use classical formal semantics/pragmatics methods and are
targeted towards particular particles. They all represent a recent
tendency in which real progress is made in the formal analysis of
discourse particles. This seems due on the one hand to progress in the
development of formal pragmatics and on the other to a wave of interest
in these particles. Karagjosova gives the first working theory that
unifies „doch“ and „DOCH“. This pair of particles seem to arise from
each other (by accenting or deaccenting) and to be provided with
opposite meanings: „doch“ marks the utterance as common ground between
speaker and hearer, whereas „DOCH“ seems to indicate that the utterance
is the negating part of the common ground. The crucial step is the
adoption of the fi ne-grained distinction of Prince (1981) and Walker
(1993) between evoked, inferable and brand-new. Eckhardt in a
contributed squib presents a first look at particles like „dann“,
„noch“, „sonst“ and „vielleicht“ (then, yet, in addition, maybe, but
with particular meanings in the question environment) as they appear in
questions. The question environment of particles is relatively unknown
and a preliminary analysis is offered in terms of communication
strategies (Büring 2003) and presupposition. Schmitz and Schröder
provide a new theory of “eigentlich” (really) in which it blocks default
inferences from the clause which contains “eigentlich”. The analysis is
able to deal with an extensive number of examples (counterexamples seem
to be entirely absent) and is formalized using Veltman’s (1996) default
logic.
References
Büring, D.(2003) On D-trees, Beans and B-accents. In Linguistics and Philosophy 26(5),
511-545.
Prince, E. (1981) Towards a taxonomy of given-new information. In P. Cole (ed) Radical
Pragmatics. New York.
Walker, M. (1993) Inofrmational Redundancy and resource bounds in dialogue. PhD thesis.
University of Pennsylvania.
Veltman, F. (1996) Defaults in Update Semantics. In: Journal of Philosophical Logic (26),
221-261.