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Discourse Markers in Colombian Spanish: A Study in Polysemy
Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 469–472 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Discourse Markers in Colombian Spanish: A Study in Polysemy Catherine E. Travis, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2005, 327 pp., US$ 128.00 Many scholars position pragmatics as an autonomous branch of linguistics that has little or nothing to do with semantics. However, it seems to me that, to understand language use, one would first need to understand language meaning. As one who sees an inextricable link between semantics and pragmatics, I welcome Catherine Travis’ publication, which attempts to show how pragmatics can be fruitfully pursued through semantics. The aim of this book is ‘‘to identify the ‘‘conversational conditions’’ under which a set of discourse markers is used in Colombian Spanish, and, on the basis of those ‘‘conversational conditions’’, to determine and explicate the meanings of these markers’’ (p. 2). I find this book particularly important because it makes a conscious effort to ‘‘demonstrate that the pragmatics of use of the discourse markers under consideration is semantically driven: the use of discourse markers is determined by their inherent meanings, which interacts with context-driven features to give rise to different pragmatic functions’’ (p. 2). The discourse markers which Travis selects for study are bueno (roughly, ‘well’, ‘alright’, ‘OK’, ‘anyway’), o sea (roughly, ‘I mean’, ‘rather’, ‘that is to say’), entonces (roughly, ‘so’, ‘then’), and pues (roughly, ‘well’, ‘so’, ‘then’). As outlined in Chapter 2, the data are primarily collected from 12 h of audio recordings of informal Colombian Spanish conversations. In Chapter 3, Travis reviews ‘‘some of the most influential literature on discourse markers from a range of different theoretical approaches’’ (p. 7) and critically notes that most of these studies ‘‘adopt a pragmatic, rather than semantic, approach’’ (p. 2). In other words, these studies mainly look at the functions performed by discourse markers without describing meaning, or describing it only ‘‘in very loose and technical terms’’ (p. 2). Chapter 3 also gives a brief outline of the metalanguage that Travis uses to state the meaning of the discourse particles under study, natural semantic metalanguage (NSM). NSM comprises a set of semantic primes and a relatively simple grammar of combinability that is available in all languages. Because of this, if we use NSM to state meaning in the form of a paraphrase, what we get is an expression of meaning that is easy to understand and can, in theory, be directly translated into any language without any change in meaning, which serves to minimize ethnocentrism. Additionally, as Travis shows us in this book, NSM allows meaning to be formulated from the first person’s perspective. This is something that most other approaches to semantics and pragmatics are not predisposed to do. Interestingly, in this chapter, Travis claims that researchers ‘‘have been unable to identify any linguistic features (phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic or pragmatic) that exhaustively delimit the range of items that are used as discourse markers’’ (p. 27, my italics). Surely, if they can be referred to as discourse markers, they must exhibit some common pragmatic features that 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.08.003
470
Book review
allow them to be identified as such. The fact is that in section 3 of Chapter 3, entitled ‘‘Characteristic features of discourse markers’’ (p. 47), Travis outlines at least three common pragmatic features of discourse markers. According to the author, discourse markers are ‘‘words or expressions which (a) indicate how an upcoming or prior utterance is to be understood in the context of the surrounding discourse; and (b) in so doing, can indicate the speaker’s attitude to the message content as well as to the addressee; and (c) thereby can also be used by the speaker to appeal to the addressee to play the participatory role the speaker desires’’ (p. 48). Chapters 4–7 comprise the main body of the book. Each chapter focuses on one discourse marker: bueno (p. 77ff), o sea (p. 125ff), entonces (p. 171ff), and pues (p. 227ff). In each of these chapters, Travis traces the development of the discourse marker, looks at the range of the functions it performs, works out the number of related meanings the word represents, and proposes a paraphrase to describe each of these meanings. For example, in Chapter 4, the author begins by looking at the relationship between the discourse marker bueno and the adjective of the same form, which means ‘good’ (p. 78), and tries to argue that the discourse marker derives from the adjective. She then performs discourse analysis on her data, identifies six functions associated with beuno, and proposes four related meanings with the common semantic component ‘‘I say: this is good’’ (p. 122). In the subsequent three chapters, Travis proposes ‘‘three related meanings’’ for o sea (p. 133), ‘‘three core meanings’’ for entonces (p. 172), and ‘‘two-way’’ polysemy for pues (p. 240). I find Travis’ book highly recommendable for two main reasons. First, it shows us that, contrary to what some linguists might think, discourse markers are not void of semantic content. Many linguists, presumably because they are unable to capture the meaning of discourse markers, conclude that these words lack semantic meaning. Examples are not difficult to find. After giving a rather comprehensive overview of the word’s functions, Schiffrin concludes, ‘‘Well can be used for so general a discourse function because it has no inherent semantic meaning’’ (1987:127). Brinton, while conceding that ‘‘[pragmatic markers] serve a variety of pragmatic functions’’, holds that these words are ‘‘semantically empty’’ (1996:35). However, Travis’ study not only tells us that discourse markers have meanings but also shows how such meanings can be clearly and precisely stated from the first person perspective. Second, Travis’ book showcases stages of semantic change and the development of pragmatic meaning, which gives the study a historical linguistic perspective. Travis uses NSM as a tool to construct the paths of semantic developments for the discourse markers under study. For example, she hypothesizes that bueno4 is a development of bueno2, which itself is a development of bueno1 (p. 123). By using NSM to state the new and old meanings of each discourse marker in the line of development, Travis is able to show precisely how semantic change takes place; in each new phase of development, one or more core components remain, some old components may be discarded, and some new components may be acquired. For theoretical semanticists, Travis’ book additionally raises the question of what goes into word meaning. Presumably, many linguists would draw a distinction between lexical meaning and intonation meaning. After all, it seems to be commonly accepted that intonation is associated with the sentence and is certainly not an inherent part of the word. However, it seems that Travis blurs the distinction between word meaning and intonation meaning. As a result, it seems to me that she has identified a larger number of distinct, though related, meanings than is necessary. For example, Travis proposes four different, if related, meanings for the discourse marker bueno (bueno1–4). However, it seems to me that bueno2, which is used to ‘‘preface a dispreferred response’’ (p. 96), can be unproblematically analyzed as bueno1, which is used to ‘‘accept’’ a speech act (p. 87). Consider now the following proposed paraphrases or explications of bueno1
Book review
471
and bueno2 (pp. 92, 101): bueno1 = you said something to me now I think that you want me to say something now I say: ‘‘this is good’’ bueno2 = you said something to me now I know that you want me to say something now I say: ‘‘this is good I want to say something more about this’’ The main difference in the meaning of the two words lies in the additional last component of bueno2 (‘‘I want to say something more about this’’). While Travis provides examples to show that the use of bueno2 ‘‘indicates that the speaker has something further to say about the matter’’ (p. 102), it is not entirely clear to me that we need to analyze the discourse marker including such a component. It seems entirely possible that the word could just as well be analyzed in terms of bueno1, with the additional component being carried by the intonation. After all, as Travis herself says, ‘‘The difference is reflected prosodically: bueno used to preface a response always occurs with continuing intonation, suggesting that something more is coming, while bueno used to express acceptance tends to occur with final intonation’’ (p. 96). The fact is that, as Travis points out, ‘‘the four meanings [of bueno] all correspond to prosodic differences’’ (p. 5). It therefore seems clear to me that the additional component in bueno2 comes from the intonation. To give another example, it seems very likely that pues1 and pues2 are in fact the same discourse marker and that pues2 is pues1 marked ‘‘with final intonation’’ (p. 278). I must say, I am rather suspicious of the claim that the ‘‘notion of finality’’ has ‘‘come to be conventionalized in the semantics of the marker [pues2]’’ (p. 286). In my opinion, it is given by the intonation and intonation alone. I therefore do not share Travis’ view that ‘‘this aspect of meaning is specifically encoded in [pues2], and not in the intonation alone’’ (p. 279). There are also two minor points that I would like to bring up for discussion. Travis’ proposed explication for bueno4 implies that this discourse marker is used in response to something the speaker himself/herself has said. This is why the first component of the explication reads ‘‘I said something now’’ (p. 116). Since this marker can presumably also be used to respond to something which either the addressee or someone else has said, we might need something more inclusive for the first component, like ‘‘someone here said something now’’. In fact, this is what Travis does for pues1; she modifies the first component of pues1 from ‘‘I said something’’ (p. 244) to ‘‘someone here said something’’ (p. 267) so that the explication can describe more examples. Second, Travis discusses ‘‘the use of bueno prefacing direct speech’’ (p. 117). Interestingly, she does not propose a meaning for this use because, according to her, it represents ‘‘a pragmatic extension that has not yet been conventionalized in the meaning of the marker’’ (p. 120) and thus appears to imply that the word as used in the given examples does not have any describable meaning, a notion which I would find hard to accept. In fact, as the examples show, the word bueno is actually part of the quoted speech and so it is not clear why Travis talks about the use of bueno in ‘‘introducing a quote’’ (p. 117). As Travis readily admits later, ‘‘Indeed, rather than introducing the quote, bueno appears to form part of it’’ (p. 119).
472
Book review
Despite my reservations about some parts of Travis’ analyses, I find this book an invaluable addition to current literature on discourse particles as it is an excellent reference book which opens up a number of important issues for discussion (e.g. intonational meaning versus lexical meaning; how to identify polysemy in relation to discourse markers, the construction of the path of semantic change, etc.). It also benefits from a clear writing style. Last but not least, this study relates to a range of linguistic sub-disciplines and should have a wide appeal to students and scholars in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, language education, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, historical linguistics and, of course, Romance languages. References Brinton, Laurel J., 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Schiffrin, Deborah, 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Jock Wong has recently completed his PhD program at the Australian National University. His PhD research concerns the study of keywords and speech preferences in Singapore English and the values they reflect. His research is undertaken within the natural semantic metalanguage framework. He has published a number of papers on Singapore English, which include studies on several particles, the reduplication of Chinese names, the reduplication of nominal modifiers, and the use of question tags.
Jock Wong* Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, School of Language Studies, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia *Tel.: +61 2 6125 2590; fax: +61 2 6125 8214 E-mail address: [email protected]
Book review Discourse Markers in Colombian Spanish: A Study in Polysemy Catherine E. Travis, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2005, 327 pp., US$ 128.00 Many scholars position pragmatics as an autonomous branch of linguistics that has little or nothing to do with semantics. However, it seems to me that, to understand language use, one would first need to understand language meaning. As one who sees an inextricable link between semantics and pragmatics, I welcome Catherine Travis’ publication, which attempts to show how pragmatics can be fruitfully pursued through semantics. The aim of this book is ‘‘to identify the ‘‘conversational conditions’’ under which a set of discourse markers is used in Colombian Spanish, and, on the basis of those ‘‘conversational conditions’’, to determine and explicate the meanings of these markers’’ (p. 2). I find this book particularly important because it makes a conscious effort to ‘‘demonstrate that the pragmatics of use of the discourse markers under consideration is semantically driven: the use of discourse markers is determined by their inherent meanings, which interacts with context-driven features to give rise to different pragmatic functions’’ (p. 2). The discourse markers which Travis selects for study are bueno (roughly, ‘well’, ‘alright’, ‘OK’, ‘anyway’), o sea (roughly, ‘I mean’, ‘rather’, ‘that is to say’), entonces (roughly, ‘so’, ‘then’), and pues (roughly, ‘well’, ‘so’, ‘then’). As outlined in Chapter 2, the data are primarily collected from 12 h of audio recordings of informal Colombian Spanish conversations. In Chapter 3, Travis reviews ‘‘some of the most influential literature on discourse markers from a range of different theoretical approaches’’ (p. 7) and critically notes that most of these studies ‘‘adopt a pragmatic, rather than semantic, approach’’ (p. 2). In other words, these studies mainly look at the functions performed by discourse markers without describing meaning, or describing it only ‘‘in very loose and technical terms’’ (p. 2). Chapter 3 also gives a brief outline of the metalanguage that Travis uses to state the meaning of the discourse particles under study, natural semantic metalanguage (NSM). NSM comprises a set of semantic primes and a relatively simple grammar of combinability that is available in all languages. Because of this, if we use NSM to state meaning in the form of a paraphrase, what we get is an expression of meaning that is easy to understand and can, in theory, be directly translated into any language without any change in meaning, which serves to minimize ethnocentrism. Additionally, as Travis shows us in this book, NSM allows meaning to be formulated from the first person’s perspective. This is something that most other approaches to semantics and pragmatics are not predisposed to do. Interestingly, in this chapter, Travis claims that researchers ‘‘have been unable to identify any linguistic features (phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic or pragmatic) that exhaustively delimit the range of items that are used as discourse markers’’ (p. 27, my italics). Surely, if they can be referred to as discourse markers, they must exhibit some common pragmatic features that 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.08.003
470
Book review
allow them to be identified as such. The fact is that in section 3 of Chapter 3, entitled ‘‘Characteristic features of discourse markers’’ (p. 47), Travis outlines at least three common pragmatic features of discourse markers. According to the author, discourse markers are ‘‘words or expressions which (a) indicate how an upcoming or prior utterance is to be understood in the context of the surrounding discourse; and (b) in so doing, can indicate the speaker’s attitude to the message content as well as to the addressee; and (c) thereby can also be used by the speaker to appeal to the addressee to play the participatory role the speaker desires’’ (p. 48). Chapters 4–7 comprise the main body of the book. Each chapter focuses on one discourse marker: bueno (p. 77ff), o sea (p. 125ff), entonces (p. 171ff), and pues (p. 227ff). In each of these chapters, Travis traces the development of the discourse marker, looks at the range of the functions it performs, works out the number of related meanings the word represents, and proposes a paraphrase to describe each of these meanings. For example, in Chapter 4, the author begins by looking at the relationship between the discourse marker bueno and the adjective of the same form, which means ‘good’ (p. 78), and tries to argue that the discourse marker derives from the adjective. She then performs discourse analysis on her data, identifies six functions associated with beuno, and proposes four related meanings with the common semantic component ‘‘I say: this is good’’ (p. 122). In the subsequent three chapters, Travis proposes ‘‘three related meanings’’ for o sea (p. 133), ‘‘three core meanings’’ for entonces (p. 172), and ‘‘two-way’’ polysemy for pues (p. 240). I find Travis’ book highly recommendable for two main reasons. First, it shows us that, contrary to what some linguists might think, discourse markers are not void of semantic content. Many linguists, presumably because they are unable to capture the meaning of discourse markers, conclude that these words lack semantic meaning. Examples are not difficult to find. After giving a rather comprehensive overview of the word’s functions, Schiffrin concludes, ‘‘Well can be used for so general a discourse function because it has no inherent semantic meaning’’ (1987:127). Brinton, while conceding that ‘‘[pragmatic markers] serve a variety of pragmatic functions’’, holds that these words are ‘‘semantically empty’’ (1996:35). However, Travis’ study not only tells us that discourse markers have meanings but also shows how such meanings can be clearly and precisely stated from the first person perspective. Second, Travis’ book showcases stages of semantic change and the development of pragmatic meaning, which gives the study a historical linguistic perspective. Travis uses NSM as a tool to construct the paths of semantic developments for the discourse markers under study. For example, she hypothesizes that bueno4 is a development of bueno2, which itself is a development of bueno1 (p. 123). By using NSM to state the new and old meanings of each discourse marker in the line of development, Travis is able to show precisely how semantic change takes place; in each new phase of development, one or more core components remain, some old components may be discarded, and some new components may be acquired. For theoretical semanticists, Travis’ book additionally raises the question of what goes into word meaning. Presumably, many linguists would draw a distinction between lexical meaning and intonation meaning. After all, it seems to be commonly accepted that intonation is associated with the sentence and is certainly not an inherent part of the word. However, it seems that Travis blurs the distinction between word meaning and intonation meaning. As a result, it seems to me that she has identified a larger number of distinct, though related, meanings than is necessary. For example, Travis proposes four different, if related, meanings for the discourse marker bueno (bueno1–4). However, it seems to me that bueno2, which is used to ‘‘preface a dispreferred response’’ (p. 96), can be unproblematically analyzed as bueno1, which is used to ‘‘accept’’ a speech act (p. 87). Consider now the following proposed paraphrases or explications of bueno1
Book review
471
and bueno2 (pp. 92, 101): bueno1 = you said something to me now I think that you want me to say something now I say: ‘‘this is good’’ bueno2 = you said something to me now I know that you want me to say something now I say: ‘‘this is good I want to say something more about this’’ The main difference in the meaning of the two words lies in the additional last component of bueno2 (‘‘I want to say something more about this’’). While Travis provides examples to show that the use of bueno2 ‘‘indicates that the speaker has something further to say about the matter’’ (p. 102), it is not entirely clear to me that we need to analyze the discourse marker including such a component. It seems entirely possible that the word could just as well be analyzed in terms of bueno1, with the additional component being carried by the intonation. After all, as Travis herself says, ‘‘The difference is reflected prosodically: bueno used to preface a response always occurs with continuing intonation, suggesting that something more is coming, while bueno used to express acceptance tends to occur with final intonation’’ (p. 96). The fact is that, as Travis points out, ‘‘the four meanings [of bueno] all correspond to prosodic differences’’ (p. 5). It therefore seems clear to me that the additional component in bueno2 comes from the intonation. To give another example, it seems very likely that pues1 and pues2 are in fact the same discourse marker and that pues2 is pues1 marked ‘‘with final intonation’’ (p. 278). I must say, I am rather suspicious of the claim that the ‘‘notion of finality’’ has ‘‘come to be conventionalized in the semantics of the marker [pues2]’’ (p. 286). In my opinion, it is given by the intonation and intonation alone. I therefore do not share Travis’ view that ‘‘this aspect of meaning is specifically encoded in [pues2], and not in the intonation alone’’ (p. 279). There are also two minor points that I would like to bring up for discussion. Travis’ proposed explication for bueno4 implies that this discourse marker is used in response to something the speaker himself/herself has said. This is why the first component of the explication reads ‘‘I said something now’’ (p. 116). Since this marker can presumably also be used to respond to something which either the addressee or someone else has said, we might need something more inclusive for the first component, like ‘‘someone here said something now’’. In fact, this is what Travis does for pues1; she modifies the first component of pues1 from ‘‘I said something’’ (p. 244) to ‘‘someone here said something’’ (p. 267) so that the explication can describe more examples. Second, Travis discusses ‘‘the use of bueno prefacing direct speech’’ (p. 117). Interestingly, she does not propose a meaning for this use because, according to her, it represents ‘‘a pragmatic extension that has not yet been conventionalized in the meaning of the marker’’ (p. 120) and thus appears to imply that the word as used in the given examples does not have any describable meaning, a notion which I would find hard to accept. In fact, as the examples show, the word bueno is actually part of the quoted speech and so it is not clear why Travis talks about the use of bueno in ‘‘introducing a quote’’ (p. 117). As Travis readily admits later, ‘‘Indeed, rather than introducing the quote, bueno appears to form part of it’’ (p. 119).
472
Book review
Despite my reservations about some parts of Travis’ analyses, I find this book an invaluable addition to current literature on discourse particles as it is an excellent reference book which opens up a number of important issues for discussion (e.g. intonational meaning versus lexical meaning; how to identify polysemy in relation to discourse markers, the construction of the path of semantic change, etc.). It also benefits from a clear writing style. Last but not least, this study relates to a range of linguistic sub-disciplines and should have a wide appeal to students and scholars in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, language education, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, historical linguistics and, of course, Romance languages. References Brinton, Laurel J., 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Schiffrin, Deborah, 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Jock Wong has recently completed his PhD program at the Australian National University. His PhD research concerns the study of keywords and speech preferences in Singapore English and the values they reflect. His research is undertaken within the natural semantic metalanguage framework. He has published a number of papers on Singapore English, which include studies on several particles, the reduplication of Chinese names, the reduplication of nominal modifiers, and the use of question tags.
Jock Wong* Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, School of Language Studies, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia *Tel.: +61 2 6125 2590; fax: +61 2 6125 8214 E-mail address: [email protected]