Facets of subjectification

Language Sciences xxx (2012) xxx–xxx

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Facets of subjectification Jacqueline Visconti D.I.R.A.S., University of Genoa, Via Balbi 6, 16126 Genova, Italy

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Available online xxxx Keywords: Subjectification Speaker’s attitude

a b s t r a c t Subjectification, as the diachronic facet of subjectivity, has raised in the last two decades a number of interesting questions in grammaticalization and semantic change theory. In this paper I shall reflect on the nature and construal of subjectification, focusing on the question, formulated by Traugott (2010a, p. 58), ‘‘whether it is possible to identify factors of subjectification that are replicable across languages and construction-types, independently of those that might be particular to a construction’’. Taking as my point of departure a Traugottian definition of subjectification as a pragmatic–semantic process whereby ‘‘meanings become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective belief state/attitude toward the proposition’’ (Traugott, 1989, p. 31). I shall consider in more detail the two components of such a definition: ‘‘speaker’s subjective belief state/attitude’’ vs ‘‘proposition’’. I propose to define instances of subjectification on the basis of a systematic link between the shift to subjective to the shift to the attitudinal, non-propositional component of the semantic structure of an utterance. This results in a narrowing of the definition to ‘‘attitudinal’’ subjectification, vs ‘‘lexical’’ subjectification, as in pejoration or amelioration, and ‘‘textual’’ subjectification, concerning the development of devices coding cohesion, which are both conferred a distinct status, as in Traugott’s (1989) original insights. This narrowing is aimed at limiting the heterogeneity of the phenomena currently brought under the umbrella of subjectification, which makes it hard to identify precise criteria for distinguishing subjective (subjectified) vs non or less subjective (subjectified) expressions. Ó 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

‘‘Le langage propose en quelque sorte des formes ‘vides’ que chaque locuteur en exercice de discours s’approprie et qu’il rapporte à sa personne, définissant en même temps lui-même comme je et un partenaire comme tu’’ (Benveniste, 1966 [1958], p. 263).

1. Introduction Few phenomena in the realm of historical linguistics are at the same time as captivating and as elusive: subjectification, intended – non-uncontroversially – as an ‘‘increase in coding of speaker attitude [toward the proposition]’’ (Traugott, 1989, p. 49), has raised in the past 30 years a number of interesting questions for grammaticalization and semantic change theory, concerning e.g. the unidirectionality of this tendency in semantic change and its relationship to grammaticalization (cf., among others, the collections of papers in Athanasiadou et al. (2006), and Davidse et al. (2010). Yet, as noted by López-Couso in her chapter on ‘‘Subjectification and intersubjectification’’ in the 2010 Handbook of Pragmatics: ‘‘in spite of the growing popularity of these topics and of the pervasiveness of (inter)subjectification phenomena within and across languages, such notions remain relatively vague and elusive, still lacking air-tight definitions’’ (López-Couso, 2010, p. 127). E-mail address: [email protected] 0388-0001/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2012.03.016

Please cite this article in press as: Visconti, J. Facets of subjectification. Lang. Sci. (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2012.03.016

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Similar concern with the ‘‘vagueness’’ of the concept has been voiced by a number of authors. Just to quote a few, De Smet and Verstraete (2006, p. 366) remark how ‘‘both concepts [subjectivity and subjectification] remain surprisingly ill-defined’’. Traugott (2010a, p. 56) speaks of the ‘‘admittedly rather vague notion of ambient subjectivity and interlocutor interaction as a motivating force in subjectification’’. Others, such as Aaron and Torres Cacoullos (2005) and Torres Cacoullos and Schwenter (2005), have sought to identify quantitative and operational measures of subjectification. Nevertheless, as pointed out by Traugott (2010a, p. 58): ‘‘These are important studies that seek to find structural groundings for the admittedly rather imprecise notion of subjectification. However, because the relevant factors are so different, these variation- and multivariate analysis-based studies raise the question whether it is possible to identify factors of subjectification that are replicable across languages and construction-types, independently of those that might be particular to a construction’’. This is the question that I shall address in this paper. Taking as my point of departure a Traugottian definition of subjectification as a pragmatic–semantic process whereby ‘‘meanings become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective belief state/attitude toward the proposition’’ (Traugott, 1989, p. 31), I shall consider in more detail the two components of such a definition: ‘‘speaker’s subjective belief state/attitude’’ vs ‘‘proposition’’. I propose to define instances of subjectification on the basis of a systematic link between the shift to subjective to the shift to the attitudinal, non-propositional component of the semantic structure of an utterance. In my view, this represents a general property that allows us to identify subjectification across languages and construction-types: an item undergoing subjectification will shift from being an element participating compositionally to the building of the proposition, thus operandum, to an operator, binding an individual to an evaluation. Cases of ‘‘lexical’’ subjectification, concerning shifts from concrete to internal evaluative but still propositional meanings, e.g. when an expression acquires a speaker-related – appreciative or pejorative – component in its lexical semantics (e.g. English silly ‘blessed, innocent’ > ‘stupid’; nice ‘foolish, silly’ > ‘pleasant’; German billig ‘appropriate’ > ‘cheap’ > ‘sleazy’, etc.), and cases of ‘‘textual’’ subjectification, concerning the development of devices coding cohesion, are both conferred a different status, as done in Traugott’s (1989) original insights. 2. The foundations Not as old as the reflection on the subjective element of language (for a review see e.g. López-Couso, 2010, pp. 127–129; Davidse et al., 2010, pp. 1–4), the study of the diachronic facets of subjectivity dates, to my knowledge, to Elizabeth Traugott’s work in the early eighties. In her 1982 article she first expressed the insight that historically in many cases items that originated in what Halliday and Hasan (1976) call the ‘‘ideational’’ component of the linguistic system later developed polysemies in the ‘‘textual’’ and ‘‘interpersonal’’ domains. She used the terms ‘‘propositional’’, ‘‘textual’’ and ‘‘expressive’’ (cf. Traugott, 2010a, p. 31) to describe this tendency towards an increase in ‘‘expressiveness’’, as represented in the following cline: 1.

Propositional > (textual >)expressive (Traugott, 1982, p. 257).

Such a view was later developed in Traugott’s (1989) seminal paper in Language, where subjectification is viewed as one of three general tendencies in semantic change, namely as ‘‘Tendency III’’, whereby ‘‘meanings tend to become increasingly situated in the speaker’s subjective belief state or attitude toward the proposition’’ (Traugott, 1989, p. 31). The other two ‘‘predictive hypotheses’’, or ‘‘paths of semantic change’’, are: ‘‘Tendency I’’, whereby ‘‘meanings based in the external described situation > meanings based in the internal (evaluative/perceptual/cognitive) described situation’’ (Traugott, 1989, p. 34) and ‘‘Tendency II’’, whereby ‘‘meanings based in the external or internal described situation > meanings based in the textual and metalinguistic situation’’ (Traugott, 1989, p. 35). These are said to be ‘‘feeding’’ the third Tendency, which is already conferred a special status, for instance with respect to metaphor and pragmatic strengthening. Tendency I subsumes pejoration, amelioration and a number of metaphorical extensions from concrete to abstract and from the external (sociophysical) to the internal (emotional and psychological) domains. Tendency II refers to the development of connectives coding cohesion, such as while (‘textual situation’), or the shift from a mental-state into a speech-act verb meaning (‘metalinguistic situation’). Tendency III subsumes cases such as the shift from temporal to concessive while, the development of scalar particles such as very, the development of the action verb go into a marker of immediate, planned future, or the development of epistemic meanings. Shifts illustrating this tendency are argued to be best accounted for in terms of the conventionalization of conversational implicatures or pragmatic inferences, ‘‘used in the speaker’s attempt to regulate communication with others’’ (Traugott, 1989, p. 51), as later outlined in Traugott (1995, p. 36, 49). Here subjectification is said to be evidenced both in lexical and grammatical change. The former includes the development of illocutionary speech-act verb meanings from locutionary and non-locutionary meanings, such as: agree (‘be pleasing, suitable’), insist (‘to sit on’), promise (‘to send forward’). The latter is defined as: ‘‘the development of a grammatically identifiable expression of speaker belief or speaker attitude to what is said [. . .] a gradient phenomenon, whereby forms and constructions that at first express primarily concrete, lexical, and objective meanings come through repeated use in local syntactic contexts to serve increasingly abstract, pragmatic, interpersonal, and speaker-based functions’’ (Traugott, 1995, p. 32). Examples include cases of subjectification correlating with a shift of grammatical status from verb constructions like be going to, let us, let alone, I think, which lose their verbal properties and acquire a discourse particle function, with a shift from Benveniste’s (1966 [1958]) ‘‘sujet d’énoncé’’ (subject of the clause/proposition) to ‘‘sujet d’énonciation’’ (subject of the

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utterance) (Benveniste, 1966, p. 39), as well as the development of focus scalar particles like even or merely, ‘stance’ adverbs such as actually, generally, loosely, really, strictly, degree modifiers like very, pretty, awfully, virtually, adversative connectives like while or but, modal particles such as German ja, doch, nun. Tendencies I to III are revised in Traugott and Dasher’s (2002) monograph, where the Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change is defined. Such a theory arose in the context of reflection on replicated cross-linguistic regularities in semantic change, which the theory explained by assuming that they are the outcome of similar cognitive and communicative processes across languages. This has a number of consequences, salient among which is the idea that meanings can be predicted to become increasingly pragmatic, procedural and metatextual. More specifically, the argument is that a significant number of observed meaning changes appear to instantiate the following clines, referred to as ‘‘semantic–pragmatic tendencies’’ (see e.g. Fanego, 2010, p. 202; Hansen, 2008, pp. 67–68): (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

truth-conditional > non-truth-conditional; content > content/procedural > procedural; scope-within-proposition > scope-over-proposition > scope-over-discourse; non-subjective > subjective > intersubjective (Traugott and Dasher, 2002, p. 40).

According to Traugott and Dasher (2002, p. 97), subjectification can be considered as ‘‘the major type of semantic change’’. In their definition as ‘‘the semasiological process whereby SP[eakers]/W[riter]s come over time to develop meanings for L[exeme]s that encode or externalize their perspectives and attitudes as constrained by the communicative world of the speech event, rather than by the so-called ‘‘real-world’’ characteristics of the event or situation referred to’’ (Traugott and Dasher, 2002, p. 30), they explicitly anchor subjectification to the ‘‘communicative world of the speech event’’ as done before by Benveniste (1966 [1958], p. 262), when he claimed that: ‘‘C’est dans l’instance de discours où je désigne le locuteur que celui-ci s’énonce comme ‘sujet’’’. One of the crucial questions, as noted by the authors themselves, concerns ‘‘the extent to which the separate tendencies identified [as (i–iv)] are independent of (inter)subjectification and of each other, and under precisely what circumstances they may be correlated’’ (Traugott and Dasher, 2002, p. 284) (see also Hansen and Visconti, 2009, pp. 8–10). I shall return to this issue in Sections 3 and 4. 2.1. Narrowing the definition? Breban (2006, p. 259 ff.) maintains that there has been a shift in Traugott’s position from a ‘‘broad interpretation of subjectification’’ as defined in her 1989 and 1995 articles, to a ‘‘more restricted interpretation’’ in her later work (Traugott, 1999, 2003; Traugott and Dasher, 2002). The former conception would cover both ‘‘the development of meanings expressing speaker attitude’’ and ‘‘the development of meanings with which the speaker ‘creates text’’’; it would thus include ‘‘a number of phenomena which are excluded from her later, more narrowly defined, concept of subjectification’’, while the later conception ‘‘only covers the development of meanings expressing speaker attitude’’ (cf. also Breban, 2010, pp. 111 ff.). On the contrary, in my view, and as pointed out in Traugott, 2010b, Traugott’s attempt has been to ‘‘find the commonalities among traditional types of semantic change’’, thus a ‘‘lumping approach’’: this is evidenced both in Traugott and Dasher’s (2002) definition above and in her latest work, as shown by the range of phenomena subsumed in Traugott (2010a, p. 32): ‘‘Subjectified polysemies may index evaluation of others (silly ‘blessed, innocent’ > ‘stupid’), of relative position on a scale (adverbs like pretty ‘cleverly’ > ‘attractively’ > ‘rather’), of attitude toward the truth of a proposition (epistemics like probably ‘provably’ > ‘in all likelihood’); they may index information structure (e.g. the topicalizer as far as), connectivity of clauses to each other (anyway), the speech act being undertaken (promise in its illocutionary uses), or the relationship of chunks/episodes of speech to each other (then in its discourse marker use)’’. In fact, I would say, the heterogeneity of the phenomena thus brought under the umbrella of subjectification risks ‘diluting’ the definition, making it hard to identify precise criteria for distinguishing subjective vs non- (or less) subjective expressions. This view seems to be shared by a few recent papers, such as De Smet and Verstraete (2006) and Smirnova (2009). As pointed out, for instance, by Smirnova: ‘‘Why should the semantic content of an attitudinal adjective (like e.g. silly) be essentially the same as that of a grammatical construction (like e.g. be going to), as far as their subjective meaning component is concerned?’’ ‘‘Intuitively’’, she continues, ‘‘I did grasp that both expressions are in some way related to the speaker, because the perspective of the speaker, be it his/her mental one or his/her situational one, is needed to understand them. But it has been difficult for me to put these meaning components under one common denominator (and this confusion had nothing to do with the different status, i.e. lexical vs grammatical, of the expressions)’’. To add to the complexity of the question, both concepts of (inter)subjectivity and (inter)subjectification are used in different ways by other authors.1 1 For a synthesis of other views, such as the views of Langacker, Nuyts or Verhagen, cf. e.g. Cornillie (2007, pp. 79ff, 234ff) and López-Couso (2010, pp. 143– 148) and references herein.

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2.2. Counteracting the ‘‘bleaching’’: De Smet and Verstraete (2006) and Smirnova (2009) Aimed at counteracting the ‘‘bleaching’’, in De Smet and Verstraete’s (2006, p. 338) words, that has ‘‘affected the concepts of subjectivity and subjectification in their increasingly frequent use in the literature’’, both De Smet and Verstraete (2006) and Smirnova (2009) argue for the existence of distinct subtypes of subjectivity. Both works focus on subjectivity, rather than on its diachronic counterpart. In De Smet and Verstaete’s case, in particular, no claim is made about the diachronic relatedness between the subtypes of subjectivity proposed. Yet, I believe, a closer examination of these works highlights possible ways forwards in the quest of a set of criteria that may distinguish between subjective and non-subjective expressions, and that may thus play a role in diachrony in identifying subjectification across languages and constructiontypes. 2.2.1. De Smet and Verstraete (2006) De Smet and Verstraete (2006) propose to distinguish between ‘‘ideational’’ and ‘‘interpersonal’’ types of subjectivity. In their view, a meaning situated in the speaker’s beliefs and attitudes may figure either in the content of the utterance, i.e., what is described, or in the way the speaker takes an interactive position with respect to that content. This semantic contrast is reflected syntactically in a distinct behavior with respect to focusability, wh-interrogation and negative scope, which are seen as indirect reflections of the same functional difference: if an adjective, such as Dutch dom, serves to enact the speaker’s stance rather than singling out a subcategory, it cannot be a target of operations, such as focus, interrogation and negation, that function on the ideational level (De Smet and Verstraete, 2006, p. 386). The categories of ideational and interpersonal subjectivity are used as a heuristic tool to classify instances of subjectivity and subjectification discussed in the literature. For example, the syntactic features that distinguish discourse markers from their diachronic precursors (VP adverbs) (e.g. Traugott and Dasher, 2002, pp. 152–189) are argued to be similar to the syntactic features that characterize interpersonally subjective elements: as a discourse marker, an expression like in the end (e.g., ‘In the end, who is using who?’) cannot be focused, negated, or undergo any of the operations available for ideationally subjective items. By contrast, several types of complex prepositions that have been shown to involve subjectification (e.g. Schwenter and Traugott, 1995) retain the features that are characteristic of ideational subjectivity, such as the ability to be negated or focused, like in spite of, which semantically establishes a rhetorical relation, but can still be negated and focused (as in ‘Philip Roth manages to be erotic and funny not in spite of the domestic settings in which his characters’ sexual experiences take place, but often because of them’). This shows, they argue, that the syntactic criteria proposed have ‘‘more general relevance as reflexes of finer semantic distinctions within the domain of subjectivity’’ (De Smet and Verstraete, 2006, p. 388). Specifically: ‘‘the criteria indicate that discourse markers like in the end function in the build-up of speaker–interlocutor interaction, by guiding the interlocutor in his or her processing of the unfolding discourse, while the function of complex prepositions like in spite of lies not in managing speaker–interlocutor interaction, but in depicting a rhetorical, speaker-imposed perspective on reality that is part and parcel of the content of the message’’ (De Smet and Verstraete, 2006, p. 388). Their proposal can thus be seen as separating out contentful, lexical subjectification from abstract/schematic, grammatical subjectification; this would be largely a return to Traugott’s (1989) tendencies described above. 2.2.2. Smirnova (2009) In Smirnova’s (2009) view, De Smet and Verstraete’s application of mostly syntactic criteria for distinguishing between ideational and interpersonal subjective meaning is problematic for both defining and sub-classifying the conceptual notion of subjectivity. Namely, she argues: ‘‘they seem to conflate subjectification with grammaticalization, as the degree of subjectification is measured against formal parameters which are usually applied to identify the degree of grammaticalization of a particular linguistic expression or construction’’ (I shall come back to this criticism at the end of this section and in Section 3). Smirnova’s proposal is that that the conceptual domain of subjectivity may be realized linguistically in two different ways, which ‘‘may be connected to the roles the speaker may serve when s/he is communicating’’. Smirnova calls these roles ‘‘the evaluating subject’’ and ‘‘the communicating subject’’. ‘‘Evaluative subjectivity’’ is argued to be realized by linguistic signs which ‘‘denote an (emotional or epistemic) evaluation (attitude, judgment, belief, knowledge, etc.) of the speaker’’, such as attitudinal adjectives like good, bad, nice, silly, degree modifiers like very, pretty, awfully, epistemic modal adjectives and adverbs like probable/probably, certain/certainly, sure/surely, possible/possibly, nouns with positive and negative meanings like boor, vagrant, and verbs of emotion, cognition like like, love, dislike, believe, think, doubt, etc. ‘‘Communicative subjectivity’’ is realized by linguistic signs which ‘‘denote something taking the position of the speaker as a point of departure’’, such as deictic (lexical) expressions like I, here, now, tenses, verbal moods, evidential markers, social deictics, modal particles, discourse markers and tag questions, where the speaker serves as the ‘‘communicating subject’’, and it is irrelevant whether an evaluation or a mere statement of a fact is concerned. Smirnova’s proposal for diachrony is that the two types of subjective meanings are not directly correlated. For instance, while the English modal verb must had acquired the evaluative subjective meaning before its communicative subjective meanings, be going to first developed communicative subjective meaning, followed by the evaluative subjective

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meaning.2 Cases of semantic change known as ameliorations and pejorations of linguistic expressions, which can be understood as conventionalizations of positive and negative connotations through time (e.g. English silly ‘blessed, innocent’ > ‘stupid’; nice ‘foolish, silly’ > ‘pleasant’; German billig ‘appropriate’ > ‘cheap’ > ‘sleazy’, etc.), illustrate the increase in evaluative subjective meaning without increase in communicative subjective meaning. On the other hand, she claims, ‘‘the communicative subjective meaning may develop without being correlated to the increase in evaluative subjective meaning. Such cases include e.g. the development of tense markers out of movement verbs and out of aspectual expressions, the development of indefinite articles out of numeral one, of raising constructions like be going to, etc.’’ 2.2.3. Preliminary discussion Whilst agreeing on both the need of a more fine-grained typology of subjective meanings and the duality of anchoring and evaluation in subjectivity and subjectification, I do not think that subjectivity can be dissociated from the expression of beliefs and attitudes, as postulated by Smirnova, when she states that ‘‘the communicative subjective meanings do not need to be concerned with beliefs and attitudes, as those pertain to the evaluative dimension of subjectivity’’. For modal particles, for instance, which she includes in the category of communicative subjectivity, it can hardly be said, in my view, that: ‘‘It is irrelevant whether an evaluation or a mere statement of a fact is concerned. The main point is that (knowledge about) the speaker’s position in the communicative event is needed for the interpretation of the linguistic sign in question’’. It was indeed for the semantic analysis of the German particles doch, ja, etwa, wohl, denn that Doherty (1987, p. 3) felt the need to reach a ‘‘deeper understanding of the elements and relations involved in evaluative meaning’’ (cf. Section 3.1). When shifting to the diachronic dimension, moreover, both the anchoring to the speaker’s position in the communicative event and the evaluative component seem to me essential parts of the definition of subjectification, as I shall propose in Section 4. Let me now turn to Smirnova’s criticism of De Smet and Verstraete (2006) that their use of syntactic tests, such as whinterrogation, negative scope and focusability, for distinguishing between ideational and interpersonal subjectivity indicates that they conflate subjectification with grammaticalization. In my view, those tests have a different function, on which I shall reflect in the following section, namely that of distinguishing propositional vs non-propositional expressions of evaluation. 3. Attitude and proposition Taking as my point of departure a definition of subjectification as an increase in coding of speaker attitude [toward the proposition]’’ (Traugott, 1989, p. 49), I shall be considering in more detail the two components of such a definition: ‘‘speaker’s subjective belief state/attitude’’ vs ‘‘proposition’’. Firstly, I shall consider the distinction between a propositional and a non-propositional, evaluative, component of sentence meaning,3 and underscore the structural basis of such a distinction; secondly, I shall consider different models of layered utterance representations that aim to go beyond the traditionally more studied propositional level. The relevance of these distinctions to subjectification will be discussed in Section 4. 3.1. Modus vs dictum The distinction between a propositional and an evaluative component is illustrated by the contrast between (2) (a proposition) and (3) (an evaluated proposition): 2. 3.

John is at home. John is probably at home.

Although such a distinction has been explicitly made at least since Bally (1932) modus vs dictus, a fine-grained analysis of the modus component dates later. As noted by Lyons in 1982: ‘‘Modern Anglo-American linguistics, logic, and philosophy of language has been dominated by the intellectualist prejudice that language is, essentially, if not solely, an instrument for the expression of propositional thought’’ (Lyons, 1982, p. 103). Thus, when Doherty (1987) set off to undertake the semantic analysis of the German particles doch, ja, etwa, wohl, denn, she found ‘‘none of the existent theoretical approaches . . . capable of providing an adequate framework’’ for such an investigation (Doherty (1987), p. 3), unless a ‘‘deeper understanding of the elements and relations involved in evaluative meaning’’ was achieved (Doherty (1987), p. vi).4 2 Cf. on German epistemic modal verbs Diewald (1999), who does not use the terms ‘deontic’ and ‘epistemic’ but differentiates between ‘non-deictic’ vs ‘deictic’ readings: development towards ‘deictic’ meaning (which directly corresponds to what Smirnova calls communicative subjective meaning) via the stage of the development of the so called ‘dispositional’ modal meaning, i.e. ‘non-deictic reading with wide scope’. In other words, the German modal verbs would first acquire an epistemic reading without displaying any deictic anchoring of what is said to the perspective of the speaker, i.e. develop evaluative subjective meaning. Next, they would gain an inherent relation to the deictic Origo, i.e. to the speaker, thus becoming communicatively subjective in the sense described by Smirnova (2009). 3 The term ‘propositional’ is here used to mean ‘‘within the proposition’’, unlike in the functional grammar tradition discussed below (Section 3.2), where it is used to refer to meanings applying ‘‘on the proposition’’. 4 The existence of a non propositional subjective evaluation had been defended a few years earlier by Bierwisch (1980), inspired by Frege’s distinction between ‘thought’ Gedanke, ‘judgment’ Urteil and ‘assertion’ Behauptung, as expressed in the quote: ‘‘Denken ist Gedankenfassen. Nachdem man einen Gedanken gefaßt hat, kann man ihn als wahr anerkennen (urteilen) und dieses Anerkennen äußern (behaupten)’’ (Frege, 1973, p. 76). Bierwisch proposes that ‘‘it is a kind of attitude or evaluation that turns a proposition (‘thought’) into a ‘judgment’’’. The attitude determining a judgement should be taken as an element of a ‘‘well defined system of alternative cognitive attitudes’’, which he considers as ‘‘pre-reflexive ways of appreciating actual or possible states of affairs’’, such as ‘‘hypothesizing that it obtains (assigning subjective modality)’’ (Bierwisch, 1980, p. 20).

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The linguistic semantic nature of the notion of evaluative meaning is highlighted by the contrast between (4) and (5) (from Finegan, 1995, p. 5): 4. 5.

It’s obvious to me that at sea level water boils at 100 °C. Obviously, at sea level water boils at 100 °C.

As Finegan notes, utterance (4) expresses two propositions: (i) something is obvious to the speaker; and (ii) what is obvious is that at sea level water boils at 100 °C. Utterance (5) makes no reference to a speaker, but expresses the same proposition about the temperature at which water boils. In addition, though, in utterance (5) the modal adverb obviously expresses the speaker’s judgment as to the epistemic status of the proposition. The difference shown above can be elicited via tests concerning the ‘‘commentability’’ (Posner, 1980) of propositional content: negation, resumptive pronouns, focus, interrogability highlight differences in contextual behavior indicative of their semantic differences: 6. 7.

It’s obvious to me that at sea level water boils at 100 °C. I know that (I know that it is obvious to you/you know). Obviously, at sea level water boils at 100 °C. I know that (I know that water boils at 100°).

This is the starting point for Doherty’s (1987) reflection on the notion of evaluative meaning. In her view, epistemic adverbs, certain modal verbs, epistemic particles and sentence mood all differ from epistemic verbs in one decisive aspect: they cannot be considered proposition-forming functions. Propositional meaning is that part of sentence meaning which is evaluable, i.e. which can, or rather must, be evaluated; non-propositional meaning is the ‘‘evaluating part’’ and may be of an epistemic, intentional, or emotional nature. For instance, the meaning of sentence adverbs like probably and certainly contributes to the epistemic evaluation of the propositional meaning of a sentence; the meaning of sentence adverbs like unfortunately and luckily contributes to the emotional evaluation of the propositional meaning of a sentence. Intentional evaluations are realized by other linguistic means, as for example the imperative or optative forms of verbs. If an attitude is realized by the verb of an attitudinal sentence, it is part of a propositional meaning and therefore evaluable. If it is realized by a sentence adverb, it is not part of propositional meaning and therefore not evaluable. This would define ‘‘the very nature of evaluating meaning’’ (Doherty, 1987, p. 27). Doherty’s (1987, p. 9) proposal is that ‘‘there are basically two classes of meanings which cannot be subsumed under propositional meaning. Both are connected with the expression of attitudes, although attitudes can also be expressed propositionally. The two classes of meaning are syntagmatically related to each other and to propositional meaning, one directly and the other one, via the former, indirectly’’. The first type of non-propositional meaning concerns the evaluation, by the speaker, of the proposition; the second type is related to the illocutionary function that the sentence will assume in context. Doherty calls the latter ‘‘attitudinal mood’’, while others, in the German tradition, call it SATZMODUS (cf. e.g. Ferrari, 2005, p. 98 ff. for extensive discussion). Both attitude and attitudinal mood are seen as operators in Doherty’s model (Doherty, 1987, p. 3), the latter being of a higher degree than the former. In particular, ‘‘the category of attitude takes a propositional meaning and maps it onto a semievaluated propositional meaning, while the category of attitudinal mood takes a semievaluated propositional meaning and maps it onto a completely evaluated propositional meaning’’, so that the structure of a fully evaluated propositional meaning can be represented as follows: 8.

AM (Ak(p)) (Doherty, 1987, p. 22).

where AM = Attitudinal Mood; A = Attitude; k = the variable for the subject of an attitude or an attitudinal mood; p = propositional meaning. Sentence adverbials are thus seen as operators mapping propositional meaning onto evaluated propositions (cf. also Pasch et al., 2003, pp. 164 ff). A similar model is proposed by Ferrari (1993, 1995), where sentential meaning is distributed into the three components of: propositional (p), attitudinal (ATT), SATZMODUS, as represented in (9): 9.

[SATZMODUS (ATT (p’))] (Ferrari, 1993, p. 192).

Different choices at the structural level, e.g. the choice of expressing an evaluation through an adverb rather than via a verb, or the choice to use an imperative rather than a performative verb to convey an order, have consequences at the semantic level; such consequences pertain the non-propositional vs propositional nature of, respectively, the evaluation and the illocution conveyed.5 5 Notice how the representations in (8) and (9) concern utterances built on syntactically ‘‘simple’’ sentences, yet the distinctions proposed have bearing at the level of complex clauses. Both Ferrari (1995) and Pasch et al. (2003) show how connectives impose precise constraints on the semantic nature of their arguments, i.e. whether they have scope on entities of the type SATZMODUS (ATT (p)), as in: ‘He has left school. Anyway he was not very bright’, or on entities of the type ATT (p) within one SATMODUS, as in ‘He has dropped school because he was not very bright’. Pursuing this line with explicit reference to Ferrari’s model, Jayez and Rossari (1998) also show that pragmatic connectives bear on intensional entities of various types, such as propositions or modal formulae. Thus, French donc and alors are shown to have scope on attitudes or forces, while du coup and de ce fait have scope on propositional content. Such scoping is argued to be hierarchical: ‘‘a pragmatic connective with scope on attitude bears also on propositional content, a pragmatic connective with scope on illocutionary force bears also on attitude, and, therefore, on propositional content. E.g. one may not issue an order (illocutionary force) without communicating at the same time that the speaker desires (attitude) that some state of affairs (propositional content) hold’’ (Jayez and Rossari, 1998, p. 319).

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3.2. Other models of layered utterance representations Models of layered structures that aim to go beyond the traditionally more studied propositional level have been elaborated in various linguistic traditions (cf. e.g. Shinzato, 2007, pp. 177 ff for discussion of various layered sentence structure models in the Japanese tradition). In Functional (Discourse) Grammar, Hengeveld proposes to represent utterances by means of a multi-layered hierarchical clause model that includes a fine-grained distinction between various kinds of propositional modifiers (cf. e.g. Hengeveld, 1990). The highest level of this structure is the ‘‘interpersonal’’ level, which is structured on the basis of an illocutionary frame that takes the speaker, the addressee and the propositional content as its arguments. The lowest level is called the ‘‘representational’’ level, which is structured on the basis of a predicate frame having one or more individuals as its arguments. Within this hierarchical structure, four layers can be distinguished: the clause, the proposition, the predication, and the term. For each layer, various categories of ‘‘operators’’ and ‘‘satellites’’ provide additional grammatical and lexical information. For instance, in the following examples, the modal must (operator) and the modal adverb surely (satellite) operate on the same layer, the proposition, both indicating the speaker’s commitment to the truth of the propositional content ‘John is ill’ (Hengeveld, 1990, pp. 8–9): 10. 11.

John must be ill. Surely John is ill.

In the following example, the r1 Manner satellite beautifully specifies an additional property of the state of affairs: the r2 Time satellite yesterday specifies the setting of the state of affairs; through the r3 Attitudinal satellite certainly the speaker expresses his commitment with respect to the propositional content; through the r4 Manner satellite honestly the speaker reinforces the basic illocution of the utterance; through the r5 Condition satellite if I may say so the speaker contemplates the felicity of the speech act within the actual communicative setting (Hengeveld, 1990, p. 13): 12.

Honestly, you certainly danced beautifully yesterday, if I may say so.

In studies on the diachrony of adverbs, the view is shared that ‘‘the semantic development usually goes from the world being talked about to the views on that world uttered by the speaker in her/his act of speaking’’ (Ramat and Ricca, 1998, pp. 243–244). The general trend for sentence adverbs is thus to step up along the hierarchical scale starting from r1-layer (predicate adverbs) toward higher layers and to occupy ‘‘high slots’’ of the scale. Yet, to my knowledge, the consequences of applying such a criterion to other areas in which subjectification is invoked, as I shall propose to do in the next section, have not yet been explored. 4. Subjectification Recall that my original aim was to address the question whether it is possible to identify factors of subjectification that are replicable across languages and construction-types. In this section I shall propose that the distinctions discussed in Section 3 between propositionally and non-propositionally expressed evaluations/attitudes make a useful contribution to the discussion of subjectification as outlined in Section 2. The structural underpinning of such a distinction is in line with De Smet and Verstraete’s (2006) division between ‘‘ideational’’ and ‘‘interpersonal’’ subjectivity, with one specification, concerning their ‘‘interpersonal’’ component, which I further subdivide into attitude (ATT), concerning the speaker’s evaluation of the proposition, and Satzmodus (or AM, Attitudinal Mood), related to the illocutionary function that the sentence will assume in context. A further, substantial, difference from their approach, which, as said, focuses on subjectivity, is that they refrain from making claims about the diachronic relatedness between the subtypes of subjectivity and from portraying subjectification as moving along a cline (i.e. from less to more subjective). The proposal made in this paper represents a step back from Traugott’s ‘‘lumping approach’’ to her original insights, where Tendencies I and II were considered to be separate tendencies, ‘‘feeding’’ Tendency III. I believe that this step is necessary to provide a ‘tighter’ definition of subjectification, where the tests used to establish propositionality provide an empirical way of establishing the degree of subjectification of a construction. I shall start from the following premises: (i) subjectification is pervasive, as it is motivated by the very subjectivity of the speech event; (ii) it happens through Speakers’ preemption of material to enact their attitudes in the ‘‘présente instance de discourse’’ (Benveniste, 1966, p. 263); (iii) it is a semasiological process, concerning the development of a newly coded subjective meaning (vs pragmatic subjective meaning in relevant contexts). Through repeated use of the expression with the function of enacting speakers’ attitudes, this process culminates in the semanticization–conventionalization of such attitude. To this essentially Traugottian view, I will add the following prediction, applying to diachrony the implicational relationships discussed in Section 2: Through its use by speakers to enact attitudes/beliefs, the item or construction

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undergoing subjectification will tend to change its nature – semantically – and shift from the propositional to the attitudinal component of the representations discussed in Section 3: from an element (typically) denoting acts/events to an element enacting speaker’s judgement, thus from operandum to operator status, binding an individual variable (the speaker) to an evaluation. This hypothesis would explain both the structural correlate of subjectification as a shift towards peripheral positions in the clause, identified in the literature6; and the co-directionality of subjectification with grammaticalization, as subjectified elements would move out of the propositional core, into the slots reserved to the ‘‘positional’’ components, which may differ from language to language. The shift is to the periphery in most cases, but not always, as shown by clause medial modal particles as in German. In my view, this represents a general property that allows us to identify subjectification across languages and construction-types: an item undergoing subjectification will shift from being an element participating compositionally to the building of the proposition, thus operandum (or component thereof), to an operator, binding an individual to an evaluation. The sensitivity of an item/construction undergoing subjectification to tests used to establish propositionality would thus be indicative of its degree of subjectification. Take as an illustration the evolution of suppose from Middle English onwards.7 Compare the first and the last stages of the transition. In the first stage supposing is a 3rd person control related free-adjunct. The source of the evaluation is the subject of the matrix clause (Verhagen, 1995 ‘‘character-subjectivity’’), as in: 13.

Vlixes. . . Made his sone. . . to be . . .shette vp in presoun. . . supposyng . . . Fro alle meschef þer-by to go quyte (a1420 Lydg. TB 5.3063 [MED]).

‘Ulixes. . . made his son. . . to be. . . shut up in prison. . . believing. . . from all mischief thereby to go quit’. From Early Modern English onwards supposing gradually comes to be used almost exclusively to express the Speaker’s attitude towards the proposition, i.e. its evaluation as hypothetical. In the Present Day English data supposing merely indexes the hypothetical status of the proposition, with the Speaker as default source of the evaluation, as shown by the following examples: 14.

15.

‘‘I am still not sure this is a good idea. The computer report on Newman records he is shrewd. Supposing that he does find out his wife was executed here? I do not see how he could - but just supposing that did happen?’’ (C. Forbes, Cover Story, HarperCollins, 2000 [Bank of English: British Books]). Supposing on that occasion he had done the identical things he had done this time. Supposing he had even been stung by a scorpion before. Supposing he had even met Murray-Roberts and Dr. Haydar before (B. Alsiss, Somewhere East of Life, HarperCollins (Flamingo) 1994 [Bank of English: British Books]).

Notice the divergent behavior with respect to focusability of examples (14) and (15) above: 16. 17.

It is supposyng . . . Fro alle meschef þer-by to go quyte that Vlixes. . . Made his sone. . . to be . . .shette vp in presoun. . . (a1420 Lydg. TB 5.3063 [MED]). It is supposing on that occasion he had done the identical things he had done this time that...

Such structural differences, in my view, have their grounding in the semantic scope increase (in the sense outlined above) that characterizes constructions undergoing subjectification. As well as for other well-known cases of subjectification that show a shift to clausal periphery (cf. López-Couso, 2010, pp. 148–149 for a review), this proposal is meant to work when applied to cases that do not move toward peripheral positions in the clause, such as epistemic vs deontic modals, promise in the raising construction or the be going construction. Consider the epistemic use of such constructions, as in: 18. 19. 20.

They must be married: they’re hardly talking to each other. Jean-Marc promises to become a great pianist. That is going to be south of London.

In such cases, the ‘coming out of the proposition’ feature vs their less subjective uses is not manifested as movement or a positional shift, yet in all cases the verbs lose some of their capacity to contribute compositionally to the building of the proposition, so that their use becomes subject to restrictions on, e.g. present reference, or third person, etc.; while violating such constraint results in a shift back to a meaning of propositional nature, as in: 21. 22. 23.

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They must get married. Jean-Marc promised to become a great pianist. I’m going to finish this paper.

Cf. e.g. Traugott (2010a, pp. 59–60) for discussion. Cf. Visconti (2004) for a more detailed account.

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The difference is indeed highlighted by tests used to establish propositionality, which elicit different parts of the content as being propositional in the subjectified vs the non-subjectified constructions: 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

They must be married. I know that (they are married or behave like married people). They must get married. I know that (they must get married). Jean-Marc promises to become a great pianist. I know that (he may become a good pianist). Jean-Marc promised to become a great pianist. I know that (he promised to). That is going to be south of London. I know that (where that is). I’m going to finish this paper. I know that (you will finish this paper).

4.1. Discussion If we accept the correlation between the subjectification of an expression and its tendency to change its semantic nature, shifting from the propositional to the attitudinal component, then cases of ‘‘lexical’’ subjectification, concerning shifts from concrete to internal evaluative meanings or phenomena of pejoration/amelioration, i.e. cases of conventionalizations of positive and negative connotations through time (e.g. English silly ‘blessed, innocent’ > ‘stupid’; nice ‘foolish, silly’ > ‘pleasant’; boor ‘farmer’ to ‘crude person’; German billig ‘appropriate’ > ‘cheap’ > ‘sleazy’, etc.), are still at the propositional level. In some cases ‘‘lexical’’ (propositional) subjectification is a precursor to further development on the subjectification cline, like English supposing from its origins in Latin subpono ‘place under’, with a shift from concrete to abstract, to the later reanalysis of the verb as a conjunction having the function of conveying the Speaker’s epistemic attitude towards the proposition (as outlined above), while in other cases, as always in semantic change, items may stop at this stage. Another consequence of the present proposal is that it does not include in its definition of subjectification ‘‘the development of meanings with which the speaker ‘creates text’’’ (Breban, 2006, p. 259), or ‘‘(meta-)textual’’ subjectification. In my view, this distinction is largely a matter of the scope on which the subjectified element acts and of how advanced in the cline of subjectification it is: whether the expression is used to operate on a proposition, as in subjectification to ATT, or on higher textual units, indexing speakers’ attitudes in relation to chunks of text or to extralinguistic context, as in further (inter)subjectification at the level of SATZMODUS. ‘‘Textual’’ subjectification, where the speaker ‘‘takes control of the organization of discourse in order to reduce the processing effort of the hearer’’ (Breban, 2006, p. 260) would thus belong to an area in the subjectification cline that shades towards intersubjectification. However, further reflection would be required here (cf. e.g. Breban, 2010, p. 111; Ghesquière, 2010, p. 309 for different views). Another point that I would like to raise is the use of ‘‘commentability’’ tests to identify propositionality. In a recent proposal by Boye and Harder (2007), non-focalizability and non-commentability are associated with grammaticalized status; grammaticalization would occur in all and only those cases where an element becomes coded as secondary in relation to another, thereby creating both a new, less prominent element, and a dependency relation with the associated primary element. A central criterion for distinguishing between primary and secondary information would be addressability, whereby primary information can be addressed in discourse – unproblematically, while secondary information cannot. This raises the question whether non-focalizability and non-commentability can be associated with non-propositional status, as e.g. the meanings of markers of tense, aspect, definiteness, number all arguably belong within the proposition, but often they cannot be focalized or commented on. This question would be in line with Smirnova’s criticism of De Smet and Verstraete’s proposal discussed in Section 2.2.1. While agreeing that the association of non-commentability with non-propositional status could be fruitfully further investigated, the fact that markers of tense, aspect, definiteness, number cannot be focalized or commented on even though their meaning belong within the proposition does not pose a problem to my proposal, because the proposition to which they belong can be commented on. My claim is indeed that an item undergoing subjectification will shift to operator status from being an element participating compositionally to the building of the proposition, including non-denotative components of the proposition, such as markers of tense, aspect, definiteness and number. Take as an illustration the example (from Hengeveld, 1990, p. 20): 30.

A. Watch out, because there is a bull in the field! B. That’s not true!

Here the proposition elicited by the negation in B is the one expressed in the adverbial in A, which is clearly also composed of markers of tense, aspect, definiteness, number, etc. 5. Conclusion In this paper I have tried to identify factors of subjectification that may be replicable across languages and constructiontypes, independently of those that might be particular to a construction. Starting from a definition of subjectification as an ‘‘increase in coding of speaker attitude [toward the proposition]’’ (Traugott, 1989, p. 49), I have focused on the speaker attitude component. In particular, I have looked at a series of studies on the nature of evaluating meaning, which make a

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distinction between propositional meaning, i.e. that part of sentence meaning which is evaluable, and the evaluating, nonpropositional, component, which may be of an epistemic, intentional, or emotional nature. Subjectification is seen as a semantic–pragmatic phenomenon, defined by increased encoding of speaker attitude towards the proposition. This corresponds to a change in properties, such as the ability to be focused or negated, indicating the shift from proposition to the attitudinal component of the semantic structure.8 This is argued to represent a general property of subjectification across languages and construction-types: an item undergoing subjectification will tend to shift from being an element participating compositionally to the building of the proposition, thus operandum (or part thereof), to an operator, binding an individual to an evaluation. Cases of ‘‘lexical’’ subjectification, concerning shifts from concrete to internal evaluative but still propositional meanings, e.g. when an expression acquires a speaker-related pejorative or appreciative component, and cases of ‘‘textual’’ subjectification, concerning the development of devices coding cohesion, are both conferred a different status, as previously done in Traugott’s (1989) original insights, and, for the former, by De Smet and Verstraete (2006). The narrow definition of subjectification proposed in this paper is more in line, in my opinion, with the starting point of Traugott’s reflections in Lyons (1982, p. 103) characterization of subjectivity as focusing on ‘‘beliefs and attitudes’’, vs a ‘‘broad interpretation’’ (as defined in Davidse et al., 2010, pp. 10–12), including ‘‘linguistic expressions of spatial, temporal and person deixis’’. This narrowing is intended to limit the heterogeneity of the phenomena currently brought under the umbrella of subjectification, which makes it hard to identify precise criteria for distinguishing subjective (subjectified) vs non or less subjective (subjectified) expressions. Acknowledgments Thanks to Kasper Boye, Hendrik De Smet, Angela Ferrari, Davide Ricca, Elena Smirnova, Elizabeth Traugott, Jean-Cristophe Verstraete, the editors and two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Needless to say, all remaining shortcomings are my responsibility. References Aaron, J.E., Torres Cacoullos, R., 2005. Quantitative measures of subjectification: a variationist study of Spanish salir(se). Cognitive Linguistics 16, 607–633. Athanasiadou, A., Canakis, C., Cornillie, B. (Eds.), 2006. Subjectification: Various Paths to Subjectivity. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York. Bally, C., 1932. Linguistique générale et linguistique française. Leroux, Paris. Benveniste, E., 1966. De la subjectivité dans le langage. Problèmes de la linguistique générale 1. Gallimard, Paris. Bierwisch, M., 1980. Semantic structure and illocutionary force. In: Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F., Bierwisch, M. (Eds.), Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 1–35. Boye, K., Harder, P., 2007. Complement-taking predicates: usage and linguistic structure. Studies in Language 31 (3), 569–606. Breban, T., 2006. Grammaticalization and subjectification of the English adjectives of general comparison. In: Athanasiadou, A., Canakis, C., Cornillie, B. (Eds.), Subjectification: Various Paths to Subjectivity. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, pp. 241–278. Breban, T., 2010. English Adjectives of Comparison: Lexical and Grammaticalized Uses. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York. Company Company, C., 2006. Subjectification of verbs into discourse markers: semantic–pragmatic change only? In: Cornillie, B., Delbecque, N. (Eds.), Topics in Subjectification and Modalization. Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 97–121. Cornillie, B., 2007. Epistemic Modality and Evidentiality in Spanish (Semi-)auxiliaries. A Cognitive-functional Approach. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York. Davidse, K., Cuyckens, H., Vandelanotte, L. (Eds.), 2010. Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York. De Smet, H., Verstraete, J.-C., 2006. Coming to terms with subjectivity. Cognitive Linguistics 17, 365–392. Diewald, G., 1999. Die Modalverben im Deutschen: Grammatikalisierung und Polyfunktionalität. Niemeyer, Tübingen. Doherty, M., 1987. Epistemic Meaning. Springer Verlag, Berlin. Fanego, T., 2010. Paths in the development of elaborative discourse markers. Evidence from Spanish. In: Davidse et al. (Eds.), pp. 197–239. Ferrari, A., 1993. Encore à propos de parce que, à la lumière des structures linguistiques de la séquence causale. Cahiers de Linguistique Française 13 (1993), 183–214. Ferrari, A., 1995. Connessioni. Uno studio integrato della subordinazione avverbiale. Slatkine, Genève. Finegan, E., 1995. Subjectivity and subjectivisation in language: an introduction. In: Wright, S., Stein, D. (Eds.), Subjectivity and Subjectivisation in Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 1–15. Frege, G., 1973. Einleitung in die Logik. In: Schriften zur Logik. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 75–92. Ghesquière, L., 2010. On the subjectification and intersubjectification paths followed by the adjectives of completeness. In: Davidse et al. (Eds.), pp. 277– 314. Halliday, M.A.K., Hasan, T., 1976. Cohesion in English. (English Language Series 9.) Longman, London. Hansen, M.-B.M., 2008. Particles at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues: A Study with Special Reference to the French Phasal Adverbs. Elsevier, Oxford. Hansen, M.-B.M., Visconti, J., 2009. Current Trends in Diachronic Semantics and Pragmatics (Studies in Pragmatics Series 7). Bingley, Emerald. Hengeveld, K., 1990. The hierarchical structure of utterances. In: Nuyts, J., Bolkestein, A.M., Vet, C. (Eds.), Layers and Levels of Representation in Language Theory. Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 1–23. Jayez, J., Rossari, C., 1998. Pragmatic connectives as predicates. In: St-Dizier, P. (Ed.), Predicative Forms in Natural Language and Lexical Knowledge Bases. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 285–319. López-Couso, M.J., 2010. Subjectification and intersubjectification. In: Jucker, Andreas H., Taavitsainen, Irma (Eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics: Historical Pragmatics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 127–163. 8 An inverse correlation between the quantity of syntax a form needs and the degree of subjective meaning conveyed is posited by Company in several papers (see e.g. Company, 2006), where ‘‘quantity of syntax’’ is defined in terms of the ‘‘syntactic capacity the form has, i.e. the capacity to relate to other forms, to subcategorize, to take modification and complementation, to be expanded, to be paraphrased by other forms, etc.’’ (Company, 2006, p. 99). In her view, however, subjectification, ‘‘besides being a semantic-pragmatic change displaying a regular pattern, also constitutes a specific syntactic change of its own’’ (Company, 2006, p. 98).

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