On the rhetorical use of attitude markers

by Gerrit J. Dimmendaal

Generations of linguists have argued for a distinction between social-expressive versus referential of descriptive terms in grammatical systems, or between interpersonal versus ideational functions of language use in social interactions. In my presentation, I intend to have a closer look at modal particles or attitude markers, a category of words which play an important role in social interaction in a wide variety of languages; compare, for example, German halt, mal, wohl. First, we will have a closer look at attitude markers from a more general, typological perspective, and investigate the question to what extent languages may use alternative strategies in order to accomplish the same illocutionary or perlocutionary effect (e.g. verbal modality marking or evidentiality marking). Next, some of the distributional properties of attitude markers will be discussed, based on a comparison of a number of genetically and typologically different languages (e.g. German, Hausa, Turkana); interestingly, attitude markers tend to be relative free syntactically (i.e. have narrow or wide scope) even in languages with rather strict constituent order otherwise. One reason for this exceptional behaviour may be due to a process known as "paradigmatization" (in grammaticalization theories), a process sometimes accompanying metonymic extension. In terms of interpersonal dimensions, attitude markers indicate the direction in which the relevance of an utterance is to be sought according to the speaker, as I will argue. Apart from interpersonal enactments of conversational moves, their use may also involve culture-specific social meanings; knowledge about their conversational implicatures therefore also implies tacit knowledge of social order and systems of belief within a speech community where such markers are used.