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Hunh-tags and evidentiality in conversation
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Journal of Pragmatics 23 (1995) 687~92
Squib
Hunh-tags and evidentiality in conversation Neal R. Norrick Department of English, Northern lllinois University; DeKalb. IL 60115. USA
Received February 1994; revised version March 1994
1. Introduction In this squib I investigate sequences containing hunh-tags with reference to evidentiality in conversation. I argue, based on a large corpus of naturally occurring data, that these tags play a special role in the expression of evidentiality, because they relate to knowledge the hearer has as well as to what the speaker knows: We must recognize multiple evidential functions for tags beyond the marking of uncertainty traditionally associated with them.
2. Evidentiality Conversationalists maintain involvement by signaling their understanding of and attitudes toward their jointly constructed discourse. To maintain involvement, according to Gumperz (1982), interlocutors send and interpret 'contextualization cues' about how they perceive the ongoing activity, how each move relates to the foregoing and following ones, and how their utterances are to be taken. Among the most crucial contextualization cues are those linguistic features participants use to signal their attitudes toward the truth, certainty, or probability of individual utterances. A person may simply make a statement without marking evidentiality, as in (1): (1) My students hold down jobs. But we often give some indication of how we acquired the information reported or how certain we feel about it, as in (2): (2) As far as I know (hear/imagine/guess) my students may (must/certainly/probably/definitely) hold down jobs.
0378-2166/95/$09.50 © 1995 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2166(94)00045-G
688
N. R. Norrick /Journal qt'Pra~matics 23 (1995) 687-092
These added cues help make up the system of so-called 'evidentials' for any given language. Since tags signal perceptions of knowledge, they too belong to the system of evidentials.
3. Tags Holmes (1982) distinguishes canonical tags (with an auxiliary verb, negative polarity reversal, and an anaphoric pronoun) like that in (3), from invariant tags formed with right, okay, and hunh in constructions like (4). (3) Jason: Derek : Jason: Derek: (4) Frank: Sue:
But your morn doesn't even limp, does she? Oh yeah. Really? I never noticed. Well, she walks real slow. You spun all the way around, three hundred and sixty, hunh? Yup.
Most, if not all, languages have invariant tags; inflected tags like the canonical forms of English are rarer, though, for instance, both Danish and Finnish use inflected tags. In both examples above, tags signal uncertainty, but, more importantly, they also imply that the hearer has more immediate or surer access to the knowledge in question, and hence they appeal to the hearer for confirmation. In the first excerpt, since Jason is talking about Derek's mother, he naturally appeals to Derek to support his claim; and in passage (4), Frank looks to Sue to confirm his statement about a car accident she was in. It is this focus on the knowledge of the hearer vis-a-vis the speaker which differentiates tags from other markers of evidentiality. As we shall see, hunh-tags typically signal a perception of concurrence or difference in knowledge or attitude between the speaker and another participant in the conversation. In particular, they tend to mark an assumption: (1) that the speaker and hearer share a belief or attitude, (2) that the hearer knows better than the speaker does, or (3) that the speaker knows better than the hearer, and hence challenges the hearer's incorrect belief. Previous treatments of evidentiality have by and large overlooked tags, since they have focused on how speakers express their attitudes toward statements they make, rather than on how participants in a conversation view their relative knowledge of the topic or statement at issue. And of course the evidential functions of tags show up clearly only in dyadic or multiparty discourse, where differential knowledge between participants plays a role. Invariant tags particularly have received little attention from linguists, and hunh-tags have been given especially short shrift, for two main reasons. First, hunh fulfills a range of functions which may initially be difficult to distinguish. Free-standing hunh may signal surprise; and it may constitute a request for repetition, as in the next example:
N. R. Norrick / Journal of Pragmatics 23 (1995) 687-692 (5) Randy: Sharon: Randy: Sharon:
689
How are you feeling after- right now. Hunh? How are you feeling right now? Okay.
Hunh also functions to pressure someone for a reply to a foregoing question, as in the passage below. (6) Lynn: Channel five and two are news. It's ten o'clock. Rob: Yeah. What do you want, two? Five? Seven? Thirteen? Seventeen? Hunh? Lynn: Five. Five. Always five. Second, hunh seems pretheoreticaily more like a universal, uncoded grunt than a proper lexical item of English. In fact, hunh is common only in the United States and parts of Canada; eh is the counterpart of hunh in England, Australia and much of Canada. And even in America we are not sure how to spell it: Both spellings huh and hunh occur. I prefer the variant with n because the vowel generally seems to be nasalized, and huh without n regularly appears as one element in the affirmative uh-huh and the negative huh-uh. At the same time, hunh as a tag-forming particle deserves special attention, because hunh-tags cannot be analyzed as reduced versions of complete sentences, as can canonical tags and other invariant tags (except for those with eh). This forces us to concentrate on discourse functions, and to avoid the distractions of logically possible, but psychologically unrealistic analyses via underlying syntactic properties and their semantic correlates of the kind Hudson (1975) proposes. Thus, Hudson shows that canonical tags can be treated as syntactically reduced sentences which retain their literal meaning. Even the tags right, y'know and okay could be seen as reductions of sentences like lsn't that right?, Do you know that? and Is that okay? respectively. But there are no complete sentences like lsn't that hunh ? or Does it hunh ? corresponding to hunh-tags. In fact, hunh seems to occur only as a particle with no phrasal syntax of its own as such - except for its occurrence in the formulaic So .... hunh ? construction. Now I do not think we hear right, okay and y'know as reduced versions of complete sentences; and I do not think canonical tags work that way either, though Hudson shows that such an analysis is possible. But since the syntax and semantics of hunh-tags are impossible to analyze on this basis, a pragmatic description of them has heuristic value.
4. Hunh-tags
as evidentials
Hunh-tags, like tags in general, sometimes serve to signal uncertainty on the part of the current speaker, and hence to elicit corroboration from other participants, as we saw in examples (3) and (4) above. Their appeal force derives from an assumption that the hearer possesses relevant information beyond what the
N. R. Norrick / Journal of Pragmatics 23 (1995) 6 8 7 ~ 9 2
690
speaker knows, as in the passage below. When Shelley finishes describing the future plans of her fianc6 Paul, Vera uses a hunh-tag to request confirmation of her guess about what lies ahead for him from Shelley, who must be presumed to know.
(7) Shelley: So Paul can get it over with. Vera: Then he- then he's got to go look for a job, hunh? Shelley: Yeah. And he ...
Hunh-tags are also frequently appended to an ironic statement to test for agreement among interlocutors, as we see in the following passage: (8) Patty: Susan: Patty: Susan:
Chris gets his birthday off, paid. Huh heh heh heh. Not a bad job to have. No it's- no animosity there, hunh? (h)Yeah hehe. Pig.
Susan offers a grudgingly positive assessment of Chris' paid birthday off with her understated Not a bad job to have; then Patty comments on Susan's rather bitter assessment with No animosity there, hunh ?, which is ironic in literally denying precisely the animosity Patty wants to point out. Again hunh marks an expectation of shared belief, and appeals for agreement, though here the respondent is asked to agree with an attitude rather than a fact, and certainly not with the idea literally expressed; hence the positive yeah response to the negated statement with hunh, where we would normally expect a no reply. There is a formulaic feel to constructions of this type redolent of stock phrases like Wise ass, hunh? or Tough guy, hunh ? and the ironic It must be tough, hunh ? If hunh helps to bring out the irony here, then it serves to mark evidentiality of a special kind. In the excerpt below, Lina uses a hunh-tag on an ironic statement to enlist her hearer in what turns into an extended comment on the presence of a tape recorder in parody of current advertising language. (9) Lina It's a good tape recorder. It's a nice one, hunh? Nancy: It's a beauty. Lina: Beauty. Yes. Top of the line. State of the art. Nancy responds to the irony of Lina's positive good and nice, applied to the offending tape recorder, with It's a beauty, which prompts Lina to pursue her verbal attack. Hunh-tags put feelers out for shared background knowledge and solicit agreement; they nearly always receive a verbal response, which makes them particularly powerful devices for eliciting active involvement in a conversation from one's hearers. Another more or less formulaic construction pairs hunh with utterance-initial so in exchanges like the following, where hunh adds a challenging note to the expression of doubt.
N. R. Norrick /Journal of Pragmatics 23 (1995) 687-692
(10) Jan: Mary: Jan: Mary:
691
Are you serious? I'm serious. So you're going to work eight to noon, hunh? Monday, eight to eleven.
Here the tag signals the speaker's conviction that the hearer holds an incorrect belief, and this expression of doubt about what the hearer believes constitutes a sort of challenge. A similar note of challenge emanates from constant polarity tags, also frequently with initial so as in So you can swim, can you ? Recurrent formulaic examples of hunh-tags with initial so take the form: So you want to be a linguist/ engineer~novelist, hunh? In these formulaic cases, the speaker voices skepticism about a belief expressed or implied by an interlocutor. For an example quite close to this formulaic construction, consider the following passage: (11) Pat: Suzy: Jack: Suzy:
And they raped and privileged. Privileged? Privileged? Huh huh huh huh. So you went to college, hunh Pat?
Here Pat either momentarily misspeaks herself or suffers from a long-term misconstrual of the stock binomial raped and pillaged. But whatever its source, the substitution of privileged for pillaged elicits sarcastic repeats of the offending word, before Sue uses a so .... hunh ? construction to mock Pat for the error. Finally, hunh frequently accompanies an utterance used to introduce a new topic or to open a new conversation entirely, as in the passage below from a party:
(12) Bob: Great veggie dip, hunh? Brad: Yeah. Awesome. Since both participants in this exchange were clearly enjoying the dip in question before talk began. Bob presupposes agreement and seeks verbal confirmation with the hunh-tag. Hunh here invites interaction and signals solidarity, functioning as a discourse marker h la Schiffrin (1987) for opening topics or conversations. Tags frequently accompany an utterance used to introduce a new topic or a new conversation entirely, and thus serve as discourse markers in the sense of Schiffrin, while soliciting corroboration and conveying presumed solidarity or a similar stance.
5. Conclusion We have seen that hunh-tags mark evidentiality with respect to (presuppositions about) knowledge and attitudes of both the speaker and the hearer. First, hunh-tags mark uncertainty on the part of the speaker, usually because the speaker presupposes the hearer has superior knowledge of the matter addressed. Second, hunh-tags often accompany ironic statements, and appeal to the hearer to confirm the attitude
692
N. R. Norrick /,lournal of Pragmatics 23 (1995) 687~92
expressed. Third, hunh-tags occur in more or less formulaic utterances, often introduced with so, where they express doubt about a claim by an interlocutor. Fourth, hunh-tags signal solidarity and agreement in utterances designed as conversational openers. Thus hunh-tags are bound up with the expression of uncertainty, shared knowledge, and doubt in conversation, which makes them evidentials of especially broad significance.
References Gumperz, John J., 1982. Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmes, Janet, 1982. The functions of question tags. English Language Research Journal 3: 40-65. Hudson, Richard A., 1975. The meaning of questions. Language 51 : 1-31. Schiffrin, Deborah, 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Journal of Pragmatics 23 (1995) 687~92
Squib
Hunh-tags and evidentiality in conversation Neal R. Norrick Department of English, Northern lllinois University; DeKalb. IL 60115. USA
Received February 1994; revised version March 1994
1. Introduction In this squib I investigate sequences containing hunh-tags with reference to evidentiality in conversation. I argue, based on a large corpus of naturally occurring data, that these tags play a special role in the expression of evidentiality, because they relate to knowledge the hearer has as well as to what the speaker knows: We must recognize multiple evidential functions for tags beyond the marking of uncertainty traditionally associated with them.
2. Evidentiality Conversationalists maintain involvement by signaling their understanding of and attitudes toward their jointly constructed discourse. To maintain involvement, according to Gumperz (1982), interlocutors send and interpret 'contextualization cues' about how they perceive the ongoing activity, how each move relates to the foregoing and following ones, and how their utterances are to be taken. Among the most crucial contextualization cues are those linguistic features participants use to signal their attitudes toward the truth, certainty, or probability of individual utterances. A person may simply make a statement without marking evidentiality, as in (1): (1) My students hold down jobs. But we often give some indication of how we acquired the information reported or how certain we feel about it, as in (2): (2) As far as I know (hear/imagine/guess) my students may (must/certainly/probably/definitely) hold down jobs.
0378-2166/95/$09.50 © 1995 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2166(94)00045-G
688
N. R. Norrick /Journal qt'Pra~matics 23 (1995) 687-092
These added cues help make up the system of so-called 'evidentials' for any given language. Since tags signal perceptions of knowledge, they too belong to the system of evidentials.
3. Tags Holmes (1982) distinguishes canonical tags (with an auxiliary verb, negative polarity reversal, and an anaphoric pronoun) like that in (3), from invariant tags formed with right, okay, and hunh in constructions like (4). (3) Jason: Derek : Jason: Derek: (4) Frank: Sue:
But your morn doesn't even limp, does she? Oh yeah. Really? I never noticed. Well, she walks real slow. You spun all the way around, three hundred and sixty, hunh? Yup.
Most, if not all, languages have invariant tags; inflected tags like the canonical forms of English are rarer, though, for instance, both Danish and Finnish use inflected tags. In both examples above, tags signal uncertainty, but, more importantly, they also imply that the hearer has more immediate or surer access to the knowledge in question, and hence they appeal to the hearer for confirmation. In the first excerpt, since Jason is talking about Derek's mother, he naturally appeals to Derek to support his claim; and in passage (4), Frank looks to Sue to confirm his statement about a car accident she was in. It is this focus on the knowledge of the hearer vis-a-vis the speaker which differentiates tags from other markers of evidentiality. As we shall see, hunh-tags typically signal a perception of concurrence or difference in knowledge or attitude between the speaker and another participant in the conversation. In particular, they tend to mark an assumption: (1) that the speaker and hearer share a belief or attitude, (2) that the hearer knows better than the speaker does, or (3) that the speaker knows better than the hearer, and hence challenges the hearer's incorrect belief. Previous treatments of evidentiality have by and large overlooked tags, since they have focused on how speakers express their attitudes toward statements they make, rather than on how participants in a conversation view their relative knowledge of the topic or statement at issue. And of course the evidential functions of tags show up clearly only in dyadic or multiparty discourse, where differential knowledge between participants plays a role. Invariant tags particularly have received little attention from linguists, and hunh-tags have been given especially short shrift, for two main reasons. First, hunh fulfills a range of functions which may initially be difficult to distinguish. Free-standing hunh may signal surprise; and it may constitute a request for repetition, as in the next example:
N. R. Norrick / Journal of Pragmatics 23 (1995) 687-692 (5) Randy: Sharon: Randy: Sharon:
689
How are you feeling after- right now. Hunh? How are you feeling right now? Okay.
Hunh also functions to pressure someone for a reply to a foregoing question, as in the passage below. (6) Lynn: Channel five and two are news. It's ten o'clock. Rob: Yeah. What do you want, two? Five? Seven? Thirteen? Seventeen? Hunh? Lynn: Five. Five. Always five. Second, hunh seems pretheoreticaily more like a universal, uncoded grunt than a proper lexical item of English. In fact, hunh is common only in the United States and parts of Canada; eh is the counterpart of hunh in England, Australia and much of Canada. And even in America we are not sure how to spell it: Both spellings huh and hunh occur. I prefer the variant with n because the vowel generally seems to be nasalized, and huh without n regularly appears as one element in the affirmative uh-huh and the negative huh-uh. At the same time, hunh as a tag-forming particle deserves special attention, because hunh-tags cannot be analyzed as reduced versions of complete sentences, as can canonical tags and other invariant tags (except for those with eh). This forces us to concentrate on discourse functions, and to avoid the distractions of logically possible, but psychologically unrealistic analyses via underlying syntactic properties and their semantic correlates of the kind Hudson (1975) proposes. Thus, Hudson shows that canonical tags can be treated as syntactically reduced sentences which retain their literal meaning. Even the tags right, y'know and okay could be seen as reductions of sentences like lsn't that right?, Do you know that? and Is that okay? respectively. But there are no complete sentences like lsn't that hunh ? or Does it hunh ? corresponding to hunh-tags. In fact, hunh seems to occur only as a particle with no phrasal syntax of its own as such - except for its occurrence in the formulaic So .... hunh ? construction. Now I do not think we hear right, okay and y'know as reduced versions of complete sentences; and I do not think canonical tags work that way either, though Hudson shows that such an analysis is possible. But since the syntax and semantics of hunh-tags are impossible to analyze on this basis, a pragmatic description of them has heuristic value.
4. Hunh-tags
as evidentials
Hunh-tags, like tags in general, sometimes serve to signal uncertainty on the part of the current speaker, and hence to elicit corroboration from other participants, as we saw in examples (3) and (4) above. Their appeal force derives from an assumption that the hearer possesses relevant information beyond what the
N. R. Norrick / Journal of Pragmatics 23 (1995) 6 8 7 ~ 9 2
690
speaker knows, as in the passage below. When Shelley finishes describing the future plans of her fianc6 Paul, Vera uses a hunh-tag to request confirmation of her guess about what lies ahead for him from Shelley, who must be presumed to know.
(7) Shelley: So Paul can get it over with. Vera: Then he- then he's got to go look for a job, hunh? Shelley: Yeah. And he ...
Hunh-tags are also frequently appended to an ironic statement to test for agreement among interlocutors, as we see in the following passage: (8) Patty: Susan: Patty: Susan:
Chris gets his birthday off, paid. Huh heh heh heh. Not a bad job to have. No it's- no animosity there, hunh? (h)Yeah hehe. Pig.
Susan offers a grudgingly positive assessment of Chris' paid birthday off with her understated Not a bad job to have; then Patty comments on Susan's rather bitter assessment with No animosity there, hunh ?, which is ironic in literally denying precisely the animosity Patty wants to point out. Again hunh marks an expectation of shared belief, and appeals for agreement, though here the respondent is asked to agree with an attitude rather than a fact, and certainly not with the idea literally expressed; hence the positive yeah response to the negated statement with hunh, where we would normally expect a no reply. There is a formulaic feel to constructions of this type redolent of stock phrases like Wise ass, hunh? or Tough guy, hunh ? and the ironic It must be tough, hunh ? If hunh helps to bring out the irony here, then it serves to mark evidentiality of a special kind. In the excerpt below, Lina uses a hunh-tag on an ironic statement to enlist her hearer in what turns into an extended comment on the presence of a tape recorder in parody of current advertising language. (9) Lina It's a good tape recorder. It's a nice one, hunh? Nancy: It's a beauty. Lina: Beauty. Yes. Top of the line. State of the art. Nancy responds to the irony of Lina's positive good and nice, applied to the offending tape recorder, with It's a beauty, which prompts Lina to pursue her verbal attack. Hunh-tags put feelers out for shared background knowledge and solicit agreement; they nearly always receive a verbal response, which makes them particularly powerful devices for eliciting active involvement in a conversation from one's hearers. Another more or less formulaic construction pairs hunh with utterance-initial so in exchanges like the following, where hunh adds a challenging note to the expression of doubt.
N. R. Norrick /Journal of Pragmatics 23 (1995) 687-692
(10) Jan: Mary: Jan: Mary:
691
Are you serious? I'm serious. So you're going to work eight to noon, hunh? Monday, eight to eleven.
Here the tag signals the speaker's conviction that the hearer holds an incorrect belief, and this expression of doubt about what the hearer believes constitutes a sort of challenge. A similar note of challenge emanates from constant polarity tags, also frequently with initial so as in So you can swim, can you ? Recurrent formulaic examples of hunh-tags with initial so take the form: So you want to be a linguist/ engineer~novelist, hunh? In these formulaic cases, the speaker voices skepticism about a belief expressed or implied by an interlocutor. For an example quite close to this formulaic construction, consider the following passage: (11) Pat: Suzy: Jack: Suzy:
And they raped and privileged. Privileged? Privileged? Huh huh huh huh. So you went to college, hunh Pat?
Here Pat either momentarily misspeaks herself or suffers from a long-term misconstrual of the stock binomial raped and pillaged. But whatever its source, the substitution of privileged for pillaged elicits sarcastic repeats of the offending word, before Sue uses a so .... hunh ? construction to mock Pat for the error. Finally, hunh frequently accompanies an utterance used to introduce a new topic or to open a new conversation entirely, as in the passage below from a party:
(12) Bob: Great veggie dip, hunh? Brad: Yeah. Awesome. Since both participants in this exchange were clearly enjoying the dip in question before talk began. Bob presupposes agreement and seeks verbal confirmation with the hunh-tag. Hunh here invites interaction and signals solidarity, functioning as a discourse marker h la Schiffrin (1987) for opening topics or conversations. Tags frequently accompany an utterance used to introduce a new topic or a new conversation entirely, and thus serve as discourse markers in the sense of Schiffrin, while soliciting corroboration and conveying presumed solidarity or a similar stance.
5. Conclusion We have seen that hunh-tags mark evidentiality with respect to (presuppositions about) knowledge and attitudes of both the speaker and the hearer. First, hunh-tags mark uncertainty on the part of the speaker, usually because the speaker presupposes the hearer has superior knowledge of the matter addressed. Second, hunh-tags often accompany ironic statements, and appeal to the hearer to confirm the attitude
692
N. R. Norrick /,lournal of Pragmatics 23 (1995) 687~92
expressed. Third, hunh-tags occur in more or less formulaic utterances, often introduced with so, where they express doubt about a claim by an interlocutor. Fourth, hunh-tags signal solidarity and agreement in utterances designed as conversational openers. Thus hunh-tags are bound up with the expression of uncertainty, shared knowledge, and doubt in conversation, which makes them evidentials of especially broad significance.
References Gumperz, John J., 1982. Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmes, Janet, 1982. The functions of question tags. English Language Research Journal 3: 40-65. Hudson, Richard A., 1975. The meaning of questions. Language 51 : 1-31. Schiffrin, Deborah, 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.