Major components of the noun-head phrase 15 page

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 415.

8.2.Condensed questions. Situational ellipsis is the best explanation for condensed questions. More sauce? (BrE) <i.e. 'Would you like more sauce?'> Any luck? (AmE) <i.e. 'Did you have any luck?' Any more questions for me? (AmE) <i.e. 'Do you have any more questions for me?'> Two conventionalized types of condensed questions are ones which begin How about and What about, and normally lack a main verb structure: How about your wife? (BrE) Now what about a concert this Friday? (BrE) In all these cases there is no sure way of adding to an ellipted structure to complete a regular clausal question, yet the interpretation of the question depends heavily on context.

8..3. Elliptic question-and answer sequences.We have noted the tendency of speakers to answer their own questions, or rather to proffer an answer to their own questions, in the form of another interrogative. In some cases the initial question is elliptic; e.g. Why and Why not in the following examples:A: Did you talk to <unclear>?B: No. Why,did she call? (AmE) A: Oh, I don't want to go on tour trip I mean uh a boat.B: Why not,do you get sea sick? (AmE)In other cases, the second interrogative, the proffered answer, is elliptic:Where can I get parchment paper? An art store?(AmE)Where was that now? In California?(AmE)

8.4. Condensed directives. Condensed or elliptical directives are a fairly rare but diverse group. The following have the force of commands (addressed to children or pets) or else, in the case of the last example, a piece of advice:No crying. (AmE)Head down! Come on, head down.(BrE) <talking to a dog>Up the stairs, now. (BrE) <to a child>

Careful when you pick that up, it's ever so slippery. (BrE) In the following examples, the directive force of the utterance is marked, and somewhat softened, by the use of the politeness insert please: Down! Down the stairs please! (BrE) <to a child> Hands off the jug please. (BrE) Thirty pence please. (BrE) <asking for payment>

8.5.Condensed assertions. Non-clausal units with assertive force often consist of a noun phrase or an adjective phrase: A: Why does he just hang it - you know - put in the tumble dryer or hang it in the garage? B: Too lazy! - Easier to do it thatway! (BrE) Very special. Prawns in it and all sort (BrE) <in a restaurant> No wonder this house is full of dirt! (AmE)

8.6. Elliptic exclamatives. Reduced exclamative clauses typically have ellipsis of a pronoun subject and a form of the verb be: e.g. What a sweet child can be analysed as an elliptical form of What a sweet child he/she is, the actual choice of subject being determined only by context. Further examples: How cool! (AmE) How wonderful. Good for you. (AmE) What an unfortunate first experience. (AmE) What a joker, eh? (BrE) Oh this is lovely isn't it? What a nice wide street. (BrE) There are other exclamations (including insults): The bloody key! - The key to the bloody boiler! (BrE) Ah! That boy! This is the one who said - I think we should be allowed to hit girls. (BrE) Timmy! Sit down! Good boy! (BrE) <addressing a pet> Particularly characteristic are disparaging or abusive exclamations, often containing expletives and used with varying degrees of playfulness. One type (referring to the addressee) contains you either at the beginning or the end or both: How did you get two of those phones, you little devil? (AmE) Come on you silly cow (BrE) Oh come on, lazy lot of buggers you, come on - (BrE). These exclamatory noun phrases superficially resemble vocatives, and can combine, like vocatives, with an imperative or other clausal unit, as the examples show. Another type is directed to third persons, and can be introduced by the definite article: e.g. the dirty bugger (BrE). Yet another group shows how expletives can be extended in the direction of becoming free expressions: damn you, bugger me (BrE), sod the choir (BrE). These have the appearance of imperatives, but are clearly not - in the first example, an imperative would contain yourself, not you. Historically, they are subjunctive clauses, but in the present context we treat them simply as formulae with phrasal elaborations.A small group of genteel exclamatory words and phrases function like expletives, except that they have no taboo associations: Boy, there's a lot of rocks, huh? (AmE) <laughing> My word! I've never heard of anybody starting to jimmy a car without the people standing there and saying which car. (AmE) A: No, I have, I'll try pie next time. I had all the cake last night. B: Oh, my. C: My, my,my. (AmE) Oh dearthe phone is ringing. (AmE) Have you been swearing! Oh dear me!That's naughty! (BrE) Dear and dear me express sad emotions such as regret or disapproval.

3.7.Various polite speech acts.Polite formulaic expressions are used in conventional speech acts, such as thanking, apologizing, requesting, and congratulating. Such formulae also frequently elicit a polite reply. For example, in the case of thanks, an appropriately polite reply is a minimizer such as No problem or You're welcome. For example, non-clausal elementsmay performa speech-act function of a request propitiator, indicating requesting and thanking: A: Would you like another drink Adam? B: Yes please(BrE) Can I another two Diet Cokes please? Thank you.(BrE) Non-clausal element may be used to indicate acknowledging thanks and good wishes: A: Thanks Carl, I appreciate it. B:You're welcomeand good luckhuh. (AmE) Non-clausal element may be used to indicate acknowledging thanks and 'minimizing' the debt: A: That helps, that helps. Thank you. B:No problem,I just had to brown-nose with Greg for a little while. (AmE) Non-clausal element may be used to indicate apologizing and acknowledging the apology for a minor social transgression, e.g. coughing, sneezing. A: Sorry, didn't mean to scare you. B: That's okay.(AmE) A: Get off. B: Shut up! A:Ah! Beg your pardon!

These formulae behave as invariable items, in effect as inserts, but they can also combine with grammatical constructions such as prepositional phrases and complement clauses: Thank you both for having us. ( BrE) Thank you very, very, very, very much.(BrE) Sorry to keep bothering you. (AmE) The boundary between formulae and free expressions is a gradual one, and there is need to acknowledge the range of non-clausal variations on the basic formulae which are possible, for good wishes, thanks, apologies, and other polite speech acts. As the following examples show, these may be elaborated according to need. For instance: birthday or holidays congratulations: Happy birthday to you. (AmE, BrE) Okay one more here. Okay happybirthday from Maria. Happy birthday to aperson with style, grace and dignity. (AmE) Oh, Happy Saint Patrick's Day, everyone. (AmE) Congratulationsto you my dear brother on all your fine accomplishments in school. (AmE) Reading from a letter: Gladyou could make it. (AmE) Thanks a lot, sorryabout that. (BrE) Referring to a photograph: Sorryabout cutting the top of your head off '— but never mind, you know! (BrE)

8.8. Vocatives. Vocatives are the names of persons and non-persons (emotionally charged or neutral) to whom the rest of the sentence is addressed. Vocatives can constitute a 'lone' non-clausal unit, with or without accompanying inserts: Darling! Hey Martin. On the other hand, they more frequently act as prefaces or tags to a larger construction, such as an imperative or a declarative clause: Yes I'm coming in a moment darling.(BrE) Vocatives are used alone for a variety of purposes: for example, to summon, to rebuke, to question whether the person addressed is present, or to remind of an order or a request.

Names or noun phrases referring to persons are used in verbless introductions, generally with a vocative: Ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States of America! ['I present the next president...!'] My mother and Father, Susan. ['These are my ...'] dad - John Robin, a good friend of mine. ['Dad, let me introduce ...'] Two or more persons may be introduced to each other, gestures perhaps indicating the different persons: joan, my sister - john, a good friend of mine.

Vocatives are important in defining and maintaining social relationships between participants in conversation. In general, vocatives maintain and reinforce an existing relationship. The following categories represent an approximate scale from the most familiar or intimate relationship to the most distant and respectful one. Endearments:my darling, my dear, sweety pie: Is that you darling come here sweetie pie. (AmE) Family terms:mommy, grandma, granny, dad, pa, baby: Thanks Mom - okay - talk to you later - see you soon - bye. (BrE) <on the telephone> I said no, no come on Grandpa,I'm not tired. (AmE) Anyway she's shouting away, Dad dad dad.So I says, what? (BrE) Mum, have you ever seen a duck with a bow-tie on? Do you want that, baby? (fict) (BrE) Familiarizers: guys, bud, man, dude, buddy, mate, folks, bro. All these forms are chiefly AmE, except mate, which is BrE: Hey, man.I'll make this real short. What's happening, man? It's time to light the candles, guys. Got a ticket, mate?(BrE) How dy folks! Whatcha doing John? Familiarized first names (shortened and/or with the pet suffix -y/-ie): e.g. Marj, Paulie, Jackie, Tom Hey, Mike, grab your dominoes! (AmE) First names in full: Marjorie, Paul, Jennifer, Thomas Huh, you get to do this next year, Jason.(AmE) Hi, Joyce, how are you? (AmE) Title and surname: Mrs Johns, Mr Graham, Ms Morrissey. In the AmE conversational Corpus data, surnames have often been deleted for reasons of confidentiality, and replaced by the empty tag name: How ya doing Ms.<name>? (AmE) Hello Dr. Denton.How do you do? (AmE) I'll let you know as soon as I know. Alright Mr Jones?Thanks. Bye. (BrE) Honorifics: sir, madam. customer: Madam! Madam! May we have two glasses of water please? Thank you. (BrE) From a restaurant meal: customer: Tell me what you've got here will you? waiter: Okay yes sir. Stuffed mushrooms. (BrE) Oh. Nobody would marry you. You're, you better keep the one you've got <laugh>. You're in the same boat as I am sir.(AmE); Labels for occupations: waiter, nurse, teacher, doctor: Teacher! Teacher! Teacher! (conv) No hard feelings, Doctor. (fict) The personal pronoun you (impolite use): You, there's the phone in here? or an indefinite pronoun: Help me, somebody; Certain kinds of clause (occasionally): Whoever you are, stop shouting. Some vocatives can be extended by modifiers: old man, my dear Mrs Johnson, you boys. The vocative marker O is used only in religious settings: O God, knowest all things...

8..9. Miscellany.A group of varied types of vocative(including nicknames): e.g. boy, red dog, lazy!, everyone, you, Uncle Joe. This group covers a wide range of nominal structures which can act as vocatives, including some quite complex noun phrases: Hello lazy!Oh, make your bloody mind up boy! Hi,my dear Aunt Margaret? (BrE) Addressing a football team during a match: Come on you reds,come on you reds,come on you reds! Those of you who want to bring your pets along, please sit in the back of the space ship. (BrE)

8.10.Verbless clauses appear as the first clause in coordinated constructions that express a conditional relationship. The construction may have the force of a directive: One more step and I'll shoot, [cf. Take one step more and I'll shoot.] Twenty pounds and you can have the radio, [cf: Give me twenty pounds and you can haven the radio.] Another drink or I'll die of thirst, [cf: Give me another drink or I'll die of thirst.]

8.11. Metacommunicative.Conversational formulas serving to establish or to terminate verbal contact, organizing logical arrangement, making commentary to the propositional information:Thanks. Good-bye. Bye-bye. Hello. Good morning. How do you do. Cheers!How are you, Tom?To cut a long story short, the problem is not of vital impotance.

8.12.Yes-no utterances are mostly responses to yes-no questions: Are you coming? - Yes/No;

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9. Pragmatic types of sentences in terms of Speech Act Theory

9.1. Sentence Vs Utterance. Whereas grammar deals with abstract static entities such as sen­tences (in syntax) and propositions (in semantics), pragmatics deals with verbal acts or performances which take place in par­ticular situations, in time. In this respect, pragmatics deals with language at a more concrete level than grammar. There is another sense in which the word 'utterance' can be used in pragmatics: it can refer to the product of a verbal act, rather than to the verbal act itself. For instance, the words Would you please be quiet? spoken with a polite rising intonation, might be described as a sentence, or as a question, or as a request. How­ever, it is convenient to reserve terms like sentence and question for grammatical entities derived from the language system, and to reserve the term utterance for instances of such entities, identified by their use in a particular situation. Hence an utterance may be a sentence-instance, or sentence-token; but strictly speaking, it cannot be a sentence. In this second sense, utterances are the el­ements whose meaning we study in pragmatics. The meaning of utterance as a speech act and the meaning of utterance as a verbal action can be easily confused: there is a difference, but not a particu­larly marked one, between describing Would you please be quiet? as an utterance-product of a verbal act, and describing the act of uttering Would you please be quiet? as an utterance-speech act. Fortu­nately, the confusion can be alleviated, since it is generally con­venient to say that utterance-speech act and utterance-verbal action are illocutionary corresponded, in the sense of that term employed by Austin [Austin, 1962:100]. This means we can use illocutionary act or illocution for the utterance-action and can keep the term utterance for the lin­guistic product of that act.

The distinction between sentence and utterance is of fundamental importance to pragmatics. A sentence is an abstract theoretical entity defined within a theory of grammar, while an utterance is the issuance of a sentence, a sentence-analogue, or sentence-fragment, in actual context. Empirically, the relation between an utterance and a corresponding sentence may be quite obscure, but, as it is stressed by Bar-Hillel, it is customary to think of an utterance as the pairing of a sentence and context, namely the context in which the sentence was uttered [Bar-Hillel, 1971:78]. It is important, but in practice exceedingly difficult, to maintain this distinction at all times in the study of meaning. As an index of the difficulty, one may note that linguists frequently oscillate between assigning notions like presupposition, illocutionary force, truth condition to sentences or utterances, although important theoretical consequences follow from the choice. One may claim that the confusion here results from the need for yet further distinctions: thus J. Lyons advocates distinctions between text-sentences and system-sentences, sentence-types and sentence-tokens, utterance-types and utterance-tokens, and utterance-acts and utterance-products. [Lyons, 1977: 26]. For expositional reasons, the word utterance can be used in various ways, but where it is used to contrast with sentence it should be taken in the sense advocated by Bar-Hillel, as a sentence (or a string of sentences) paired with a context. And this is the sense relevant to the proposal that semantics is concerned with sentence-meaning, and pragmatics with utterance-meaning.

Many linguists, for example, George Lakoff, John Trim, Robin Lakoff, Emanuel Schegloff, and others accept this equation implicitly, but there are a number of problems with it. In the first place, in the (rare) cases where sentence-meaning exhausts utterance-meaning (i.e. where the speaker meant exactly what he said, no more, no less), the same content would be assigned both to semantics and pragmatics. In other words, we would need to restrict the notion of utterance-meaning in such a way that we subtract sentence-meaning, and in that case we are back to a definition of pragmatics by residue. But there are other problems: for there are aspects of sentence-meaning which, at least on truth-conditional or other narrow semantic theories, cannot be accounted for within semantic theory. Such aspects are conventional but non-truth-conditional elements of sentence-meaning [Lakoff,1982:321].

Within the pragmatic paradigm, the system of language should be studied in its functioning. Sentence, as a major concept of syntax, is the hub of the functional features of language and speech. Therefore one of the essential objectives of pragmatic syntax, which studies syntactic phenomena in the process of speech acts of communication, is the study of functional characteristics of a sentence. The study of functional or pragmatic features of sentences is an important domain of linguistics. Because mastering any language includes both language competence (ability of building up sentences correctly) and communicative competence (ability of using sentences correctly in speech acts to achieve necessary communicative results).

While structural description of a sentence, aimed at revealing a generating model, e.i. the order in which the sentence generating must proceed, results in setting up structural types of sentences, communicative description, aimed at the relationships between communicative type of sentence and the goal of communication, includes pragmatically relevant structural and semantic peculiarities of sentences. From the communicative point of view sentences differ by their communicative goal which is a characteristic feature of any sentence as a syntactic unit. For instance, the difference between interrogative and declarative sentences shows the difference between pragmatic types of these sentences. So, communicative goal can be accepted as a linguistically oriented criterion for differenciation of pragmatic types of sentences.

9.2. PRAGMATIC TYPES OF SENTENCES. Sentences are means of implementation of different speech acts which were elaborated by different societies in the course of historic development. In English, according to J. Austin, there is a great deal of verbs to denote various and different speech acts, for instance: to accuse, to bet, to bless, to boast, to vow, to entreat, to express intention, to lament, to pledge, to postulate, to report, to request, to welcome, to declare, to proclaim, to announce, to suggest, to hint, to imply, and many others.

Being used as means of verbalization of different speech acts, sentences correlate with certain communicative goal of a speaker, or a communicative proposition. The meaning of a propositional act is not reduced to the meaning of a propositional content it includes. One and the same proposition may enter into different speech acts. For example, "I shall come tomorrow" may be interpreted as a promise, a threat, a warning, a planned action or information. A speech act understanding, ensuring an adequate reaction, presupposes a correct interpretation of its illocutionary force. The latter somehow or rather interacts with proposition. For instance, motives and obligations may include only propositions relating to the future plan. Their purpose is to create such a state of things that would correspond to the meaning of proposition. They are directed from a propositional content to reality.

So, in terms of linguistic pragmatics, uttering a particular sentence, the speaker may have different communicative goals. To put it another way, the sentence may have different illocutionary forces, and hence - different cognitive meanings. So, semantic structure of a sentence includes a pragmatic component and thus consists of a pragmatic component and a proposition. Pragmatic component reflects communicative goal of a sentence; proposition – its cognitive content. Pragmatic type of a sentence is identified according to the character of its pragmatic component. One and the same proposition may be found in sentences with different communicative goals. The pragmatic component can be presented in the following way: “I (hereby) + verb (identifying the illocutionary force of the utterance) + the addressee”. The verb which characterizes the relationship between addressee and addresser can be called a performative verb. For instance, He is right in fact, with taking into account the illocutionary force of the utterance means that I (hereby) state that he is right. I'll do it. - I (hereby) promise you that I'll do it. And so on, and so forth.

Differences between the pragmatic types of sentences are not relevant to the differences between pragmatic components. Though there is no completed list of speech acts, some differential criteria are determined in modern linguistics. According to J. Searle, for instance, there are more than ten differential criteria, including illocutionary point, determining the variety of speech acts and, consequently, the variety of pragmatic types of sentences ( e.g. the different illocutionary goals of order and lament); relation between speech and reality (e.g. illocutionary goals of statement and promise: what is promised is not existed at the moment of speaking); attitude to the speaker's and addressee's interests (e.g. congratulation and sympathy; promise and threat) and others.

Far from being a completed list of pragmatic types of sentences determined in modern linguistic pragmatics can be presented as following: constatives, promissives, menassives, performatives, directives, commissives, requestives, indicatives, questitives, compliments and others. We consider some of them.

1. Constatives. The communicative proposition of constatives is statement, e.g. Water is a liquid. According to communicative proposition constatives are characterized by the lack of interrogative and inducive forms due to the incompatibility of communicative proposition of interrogative and inducive sentences and the type of illocutionary force of constatives.

2. Promissives. Promissives as well as constatives are declarative sentences. Their communicative proposition constrains their cognitive proposition as the actions described in promissives always belong to the future and the only tense-form used in promissives is the future tense-form. Speaking in terms of semantic syntax, or semantic roles, this constrain determines the following semantic and structural features: the subject always performed the semantic role of Agent; the predicate is always expressed by the verb in indicative mood, e.g. I'll do, make, come, read etc. Such promissives as I shall be ignored or I shall be punished are not possible. So, a sentence can be classified as a promissive in case if the fulfillment of an action described in the sentence depends on the author of an utterance. One more peculiar feature of promissive is that the speaker is interested in the fulfillment of the action described in the sentence.

3. Menassives.The communicative proposition of menassives is threat, for instance, If you don't come in time, you will be punished. If you fret the money away, I'll beat you up. Give me your money, or I'll shoot! Though promissives and menassives belong to different pragmatic types of sentences, they have some common features: future time reference, forecasted analysis of what is stated, the same set of semantic roles. But the addressee of these speech acts is not interested in the fulfillment of the action. The author of this type of speech acts does not guarantee the fulfillment of the action, and can threaten by the event which does not deepens on him, for instance: “He will pay you!” Therefore there is no constrains for menassives as to the set of semantic roles.