40 Jahre Partikelforschung/40 Years of Particle Research Bern, 11.-13. Februar 2009 Abstract |
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Thorstein Fretheim (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim)
THE NORWEGIAN INFERENCE PARTICLE DA REVISITED:
A BID FOR A UNITARY ANALYSIS In my paper ‘The two faces of the Norwegian inference particle da’ which appeared in the collection of articles entitled Sprechen mit Partikeln edited by Harald Weydt (Fretheim 1989), I was concerned with the fact that the Norwegian particle da (literally ‘then’) could be associated with one propositional attitude in one context and a contrary propositional attitude in a different context, but I did not at the time take into consideration the full range of linguistic environments in which the non-truth-conditional pragmatic particle da can occur, and I did not have at my disposal the results of certain proposals made within the theoretical framework of Relevance Theory, which have influenced much of my research for almost two decades. In the present paper I am going to argue that the inference particle da, which appears equally with declaratives and interrogatives, represents a set of contextual assumptions that would make the proposition of the host sentence true (and the speech act relevant). This set of assumptions could (a) constitute the speaker’s own context of utterance, a set consisting entirely of contextual premises which are consistent with the speaker’s own epistemic stance at the time of utterance, but which may be at odds with the hearer’s set of contextual premises, as interpreted by the speaker; it could (b) be a set of contextual assumptions which the speaker interpretively attributes to the hearer and which would therefore serve as premises that make the proposition of the host sentence true for the hearer (if the hearer accepts the speaker’s interpretation); or it could (c) constitute a set of assumptions which the speaker believes to be manifest to speaker and hearer alike at the time of utterance, but which the speaker feels the hearer needs to be reminded of, because the hearer’s most recent behaviour (verbal and/or non-verbal) seems to presuppose adherence to certain contextual assumptions that are not consistent with the proposition expressed by the speaker. It will be argued that the particle da is itself neutral in regard to whether it is case (a), or case (b), or case (c), or a combination of these three, which applies on a given occasion. A speech act modified by da will sometimes be a request for confirmation of the truth of the proposition/thought represented by the speaker’s utterance, a proposition which the speaker has inferred on the basis of contextual input from the interlocutor. At other times a speech act modified by da will serve as a request to the hearer to reconsider the truth value of the proposition of the utterance and to acknowledge its probable falsity. Finally, a speech act modified by da may be an assertion of a proposition/thought that seems to contradict a contextual assumption that the speaker attributes to the hearer on the basis of their most recent conversational exchanges. The contribution of the particle da to a Norwegian hearer’s computation of the relevance of a given utterance containing this particle will be argued to depend on four interacting syntagmatic contrasts. (i) Is da used as a right-detached particle (‘tag’ particle) added to a host sentence, or is it used as a middle-field particle? (In my earlier work the particle da in the middle field was classified as a separate lexical item, a solution which I now believe to be wrong.) (ii) Is the sentence polarity affirmative or negative? (iii) Is the sentence declarative or interrogative? (iv) Is the global intonation pattern characterized by a single peak of prominence falling on the final sentence constituent, or is there an earlier peak of prominence on the finite verb (possibly co-occurring with one later in the utterance)? The interdependence of some of these variables and the functional autonomy of certain others will be demonstrated. |
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