Discourse Functions At The Left And Right Periphery: Crosslinguistic Investigations Of Language Use And Language Change (studies In Pragmatics)

A basic property of human language is that it unfolds in time; the left and right margin of discourse units do not behave in a symmetrical fashion. The working hypothesis of this volume is that discourse elements at the left periphery have mainly subjective and discourse-structuring functions, whereas at the right periphery, such elements play an intersubjective or modalising role. However, the picture that emerges from the different contributions to this volume is far more complex. While it seems clear that the working hypothesis cannot be upheld in a “strong” way, most of the chapters – especially those based on corpus data – show that an asymmetry between left and right periphery does exist and that it is a matter of frequency. Contents......Page 5 List of Contributors......Page 7 Chapter 1 Introduction......Page 9 Chapter 2 Moi je ne sais pas vs. Je ne sais pas moi: French Disjoint Pronouns in the Left vs. Right Periphery......Page 32 Chapter 3 Motivations for Meaning Shift at the Left and Right Periphery: well, bon and hao......Page 55 Chapter 4 On the Function of the Epistemic Adverbs Surely and No Doubt at the Left and Right Peripheries of the Clause......Page 80 Chapter 5 Setting Up a Mental Space: A Function of Discourse Markers at the Left Periphery (LP) and Some Observations about LP and RP in Japanese......Page 100 Chapter 6 Italian guarda, prego, dai. Pragmatic Markers and the Left and Right Periphery......Page 125 Chapter 7 ‘So very fast then’ Discourse Markers at Left and Right Periphery in Spoken French......Page 159 Chapter 8 On the Development of Sentence Final Particles (and Utterance Tags) in Chinese......Page 187 Chapter 9 The Interplay of Discourse and Prosody at the Left and Right Periphery in Korean: An Analysis of kuntey ‘but’......Page 229 Author Index......Page 259 Subject Index......Page 263 This volume tests the hypothesis that elements at the left periphery of discourse units have mainly subjective and discourse-structuring functions, whereas at the right periphery, such elements play an intersubjective or modalising role