Graham Ranger
My research focusses on discourse marking phenomena, and especially on argumentation in natural language, explored with the methods of corpus linguistics and formalised within the framework of enunciative linguistics, specifically, the Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations. Prospective doctoral students with an interest in this approach, or these areas of study are welcome to contact me.
Address: Avignon, France
Address: Avignon, France
less
Interests
Uploads
Papers by Graham Ranger
Etude transcatégorielle de quelques marqueurs et constructions en langue anglaise dans le cadre de la Théorie des Opérations Enonciatives.
Article à paraître dans FORUM.
A significant number of terms typically characterised as discourse markers involve operations of concession. Indeed, concession involves various types of regulation, as a representation is situated relative to some other potentially counter-oriented representation, the relationship between the two being, in turn, situated relative to a subjective instance. In this way, concessive markers may engage questions relative to representation (typicality, hedges, etc.), to relevance (insofar as the relevance of one representation is specified by its localisation relative to another), to subjective positioning (as speakers commit to representations) and to intersubjective positioning (as speakers attribute opposing representations to other subjective instances).
The subordinating conjunction THOUGH is, together with ALTHOUGH, often presented as a core member of the class of concessive discourse markers. The less often cited 'Adverbial THOUGH', is generally presented as a concessive discourse marker, found in clause final position, typically in spontaneous oral discourse, e.g. It always comes to a question of cost though. G4U 325. In fact, a small but significant number of occurrences of adverbial THOUGH figure in medial, or post-initial position, e.g. What I'd like to agree on though is at least a date J9Y 759 (medial), Sometimes though dogs only bark when people are in the house, they protect the person, the owner, rather than the building. (post-initial) GY4 813. More remarkably, a BNC corpus query targeting non-final occurrences of adverbial THOUGH reveals that this configuration, contrary to clause-final adverbial THOUGH, is far more frequent in written material and in fact rather rare in spoken conversation. An example of such an occurrence might be: A word of caution is in order, though, about the names of exhibiting groups. A04 1306.
In this presentation I aim to present several different configurations in which 'adverbial THOUGH' appears, and to show how the marker operates different types of discourse regulation, or discourse marking, depending on a number of regular parameters, including position (post-initial, medial, final) and surrounding context. In final position, adverbial THOUGH performs concessive functions, retroactively reconciling potentially counter-oriented representations, while simultaneously managing intersubjective relations. In medial position, adverbial THOUGH additionally performs sequencing functions, typically flagging key elements and guiding utterance interpretation by highlighting key terms. Our presentation will thus study adverbial THOUGH both in discourse (taking into account factors of position and collocation) and on discourse (sequencing, coherence and accommodation), in line with the central themes of this conference.
The presentation will use the theoretical framework of the Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations. Examples and quantitative data will be taken from the British National Corpus, queried with the BNCweb interface.
The representativeness of a corpus is a function of the relationship between the corpus and a target language or language variety the corpus is intended to sample. It is however impossible to assess this relationship satisfactorily since its second term -- the target language -- can only ever be apprehended via a finite set of language occurrences, i.e. a corpus. Given this difficulty it is perhaps simpler and more relevant to consider representativeness with respect to the specific research goals one sets oneself.
In the enunciative approach to language, markers are described in terms of an invariant schematic form which is configured by the pressure of surrounding operations into contextually-situated shapes. The schematic form is formulated in terms of a limited number of operands and operations. The elaboration of a schematic form is carried out on the evidence of authentic examples studied in context and submitted to manipulations and judgements of acceptability on the basis essentially of the intuition of the linguist. In this presentation I will argue that corpus methodologies can provide invaluable quantitative support for these intuitions and, from there, for the theoretical constructions of enunciative approaches to language. I aim to argue this point with a case study of the marker "along", using the data of the British National Corpus.
More specifically, corpus queries will allow us to isolate a number of typical occurrences of "along". From this starting point, I will examine the role played by surrounding context in parametering the operation marked by "along". The collocational affinities of "along" will allow us progressively to identify four particularly significant contextual configurations. These yield spatial, temporal, subjective and argumentative values for the marker. In each type of occurrence, it is claimed that "along" marks an operation of identification between a locatum and a locator, defined as an unbounded, sequentially ordered space. This model will also be shown to help in characterising the compound form "alongside", the cluster "along with" or the suffixal use of "-along".
Selected bibliography:
Culioli, Antoine. 1990. Pour une linguistique de l’énonciation: opérations et représentations. (Collection L’Homme Dans La Langue). Gap, France: Ophrys.
Hoffmann, Sebastian, Stefan Evert, Nicholas Smith & David Lee. 2008. Corpus linguistics with BNCweb: a practical guide. (English Corpus Linguistics v. 6). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Lakoff, George. 2012. Women, fire, and dangerous things: what categories reveal about the mind. paperback ed., [Nachdr.]. Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2000. Grammar and conceptualization. (Cognitive Linguistics Research 14). Berlin ; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ranger, Graham. 2014. “ Fire away ” Suggestions pour une caractérisation énonciative de la particule adverbiale anglaise AWAY. In Jean-Marie Merle (ed.), Faits de langues. Prépositions et aspectualité. https://hal-univ-avignon.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01340029.
Tyler, Andrea & Vyvyan Evans. 2007. The semantics of English prepositions: spatial scenes, embodied meaning and cognition. Digitally printed version (with corr.). Cambridge [u.a]: Cambridge Univ. Press.
(1) But then, you see, I think to myself sometimes, oh you're being too fussy! KST 1476
Mais aussi en tant que marqueur de discours, auquel cas il peut se placer à différents endroits vis-à-vis de sa proposition hôte :
(2) I think it's very important that we don't neglect er people who live in rural areas
(3) And he'd been on our committee for I think it was about about three years was that right? D90 5
(4) It's very important, I think, that erm you match the age of the child to the age which is written on the box KRH 2796 [All examples taken from the spoken section of the British National Corpus, consulted via BNCweb, unless otherwise indicated.]
En tant que marqueur de discours, on attribue souvent à « I think » plusieurs « fonctions » ou « polysémies », parmi lesquelles des fonctions de « délibération » ou de « renforcement », d’« approximation » (« hedging »), d’« atténuation » (« shielding »), etc. Cette présentation, formulée dans le cadre de la Théorie des Opérations Prédicatives et Enonciatives, vise à proposer une description énonciative du marqueur de discours « I think » permettant de rendre compte de ces différentes valeurs en termes de configurations calculables à partir d’une forme schématique abstraite.
Plus précisément, il sera démontré que « I think » marque dans tous les cas la localisation explicite d’une représentation vis-à-vis du sujet énonciatur. La variation dans des valeurs situées en contexte dépend de la nature de la cible de « I think » et des positions respectives de « I think » et de sa cible. Lorsque la cible de « I think » implique une modalité assertive, « I think » permet typiquement de repérer la représentation subjective de l’énonciateur vis-à-vis de représentations transsubjectives, de toute autre source énonciative, dissociant de fait la répresentation interne à l’énonciateur, de la représentation externe, ce qui aura en général pour effet de générer des valeurs d’« approximation ».
Lorsque la cible de « I think » implique une modalité d’évaluation (épistémique, appréciative, déontique), alors « I think » dissocie la répresentation subjective de l’énonciateur vis-à-vis de la représentation contre-orientée d’un coénonciateur. En position initiale, ceci pourra aboutir à des valeurs potentiellement conflictuelles ou « délibératives », associées aux visées rhétoriques de persuasion. En position non-initiale, la valeur pourra être d’« atténuation », laissant au co-énonciateur son libre arbitre. On considérera également les formes associées, « I do think » initale, généralement « délibérative » et « I don’t think », « délibérative » à l’initiale, mais « atténuative » et exceptionnellement ironique, en position finale.
Dans la perspective de la TOPE, la valeurs en contexte de « I think » peuvent être dérivées par un calcul métalinguistique à partir des propriétés lexico-sémantiques du prédicat, associées à celles du pronom sujet. C’est une approche qui vise ainsi à modéliser la configuration en contexte de formes schématiques abstraites, lesquelles sont par définition sous-déterminées.
Key words : verbe de cognition, énonciation, représentation subjective, modalité assertive, modalité évaluative, Théorie des opérations prédicatives et énonciatives
The present paper, in the domain of theoretical and cognitive linguistics, aims to build on previous work by authors like Aijmer (1997, 2015), Kaltenböck (2009, 2010) or Simon-Vandenbergen (2000) focussing on the sequence "I think" as a discourse marker, used to indicate stance or epistemic modality. It is well known that "I think" is liable to assume a variety of different values, which Kaltenböck (2010), for example, identifies as "shielding", "approximator", "structural" or "booster" functions. We hypothesise that "I think" is not inherently ambiguous, but that the various values reflect specific configurations of "I think", and that these are dependent on identifiable contextual features. The present study aims to explore this hypothesis, firstly, by a corpus-based investigation of collocational affinities of the sequence, which will reveal a number of characteristic environments. This part of the study will use the British National Corpus, accessed via the BNCweb interface and queried for specific collocations. Secondly, we will endeavour to elaborate an enunciative description of "I think" in terms of a basic schematic form, which undergoes certain controlled and calculable deformations to generate local "shapes", i.e. contextually situated values (Culioli 1990).
The theoretical objectives of the present contribution are to show 1) that if a marker is not contextually situated then it can only be described in terms of its potential for meaning; 2) that the value of a marker depends both on the surrounding context (including prosody), and also on its own specific latitudes of deformability; 3) that such hypotheses, which are recognisably associated with enunciative approaches to languages (and qualitative approaches more generally) can be refined and strengthened with the aid of targeted corpus queries and the resulting quantitative analysis.
Selected references:
Aijmer, Karin. 1997. "'I think' — an English modal particle." In Toril Swan & Olaf Jansen Westvik (eds.), Modality in Germanic languages. Historical and comparative perspectives. Berlin: Mouton. 1–47.
Aijmer, Karin. 2015. "Pragmatic Markers". In Karin Aijmer and Christoph Rühlemann (eds.), Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 195-218.
Culioli, Antoine. 1990. Pour une linguistique de l'énonciation, t. 1. Gap: Ophrys.
Kaltenböck, Gunther. 2009. "Initial 'I think': Main or comment clause?" Discourse and Interaction 2(1). 49–70.
Kaltenböck, Gunther. 2010. "Pragmatic Functions of Parenthetical 'I Think'". New Approaches to Hedging. Ed. Wiltrud Mihatsch, Stefan Schneider, and Gunther Kaltenböck. Brill. 237–266.
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie. 2000. "The functions of 'I think' in political discourse". International Journal of Applied Linguistics 10(1). 41–63.
The present paper aims to build on previous work on ANYWAY which is considered in all its uses to mark an operation whereby a located lexis is determined indifferently relative to more than one locating lexis. This necessarily underdetermined profile corresponds to the schematic form of ANYWAY. Different contextually situated interpretations can be shown to derive from positional considerations and from the interaction of the above mentioned schematic form of ANYWAY with those of cooccurring markers. In this way, rather than speak of « concessive » or « resumptive » ANYWAY, we suggest that it would be more relevant to speak of concessive or additive values resulting in the first case, from the association of markers like BUT, in patterns like (but not limited to) but… anyway and, in the second case, from the association of markers like AND, in patterns like and… anyway etc. In this way, characteristic values for a marker are seen as cognitive constructions resulting from typical collocations (or colligations) between markers. These complex interactions can be modelled in terms of differences in the nature of the operands (the lexes) evoked in the schematic form. For example, concessive uses construct a located lexis q indifferently relative to two complementary locating lexes p or non-p. In the case of additive uses, the locating lexes pi and pj are occurrences on the same domain cooriented towards the conclusion q.
The study will be based upon authentic examples drawn from the British National Corpus.
Talk given at EngCorpora 2015 English Linguistics and Corpora. Paris-Est Créteil.
The book is now out of print and the publisher has kindly agreed for me to make the file publicly available.
ISBN: 2-7080-0898-6