Lecture: The result of incoordination? The cases of sentence-initial 'but' in English and sentence-final '-nde' in Korean

This talk is based on the contents of my BA thesis and concerned with Discourse Grammar, cooptation (following Heine et al. 2013, 2021) and phenomena of clause-loss. I analysed spoken English and Korean for cases of incoordination, which is a process by which a coordinated sentence loses at least one of its clauses and creates a new, more discourse-relevant meaning. The specific forms that were analysed are English sentence-initial 'but' and Korean sentence-final '-nde,' which both exhibit a strong potential for incoordination that is visible in comparison with their sentence-medial origins. The analysis is qualitative, based on a small number of dialogues, and goes along a list of criteria, among which are clause retrievability (Is there a candidate for the lost clause from the surrounding discourse?), semantic-pragmatic scope (Does the meaning of the connective unit expand itself to the discourse situation at hand?), and the relatedness to sentence-medial connective meaning (Is there merely contrast or does the expression evolve to convey, for instance, surprise?). I found that the two forms intersect in their functions but due to their semantic and typological differences do not overlap entirely. Further, the meaning relations along which this this type of incoordination moves, especially expressions of mirativity, also seem to apply to related phenomena like insubordination (i.e. loss of main clauses), headless to-infinitives, and some nominalizations.

Selected references:
Heine, Bernd, Gunther Kaltenböck, Tania Kuteva & Haiping Long. 2021. The Rise of Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press.
Heine, Bernd, Gunther Kaltenböck, Tania Kuteva & Haiping Long. 2013. An Outline of Discourse Grammar. In Reflections on Functionalism in Linguistics, 155–206. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Day: 2021-11-18
Start time: 14:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: 🧉
Track: Diverse
Language: en

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