Vocatives as a source category for pragmatic markers: From deixis to discourse marking via affectivity PDF

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Chapter 9 Vocatives as a source category for pragmatic markers From deixis to discourse marking via affectivity Friederike Kleinknecht and Miguel Souza Ludwig Maximilian University Munich / University of Mainz This paper considers familiarizers, a special class of vocatives denoting solidarity and i...

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Vocatives as a source category for pragmatic markers: From deixis to discourse marking via affectivity Friederike Kleinknecht Chiara Fedriani/Andrea Sansò (eds): Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers, and Modal Particles. New perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins

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Chapter 9

Vocatives as a source category for pragmatic markers From deixis to discourse marking via afectivity Friederike Kleinknecht and Miguel Souza Ludwig Maximilian University Munich / University of Mainz

his paper considers familiarizers, a special class of vocatives denoting solidarity and intimacy, as possible sources for pragmatic markers and discourse markers. We argue that afectivity plays a crucial role in the use of vocatives in general and especially in this functional development. More precisely, terms of address have the potential to intensify the afectivity displayed by the speaker. In this quality, they may be employed as linguistic strategies to enhance the expressive and illocutionary force of utterances. hese expressive uses may be the source of several more peculiar functions related to turn and information management. While this holds for familiarizers as well as for vocatives in general, not interferring with the deictic force of addressing contained in the vocative form, in several languages there are familiarizers which undergo an inlationary use and end up as mere elements of discourse marking, emphasizing and delimiting sequential units such as turns, utterances, and intonation units. he deictic reference to the collocutor is virtually lost, which is shown by the typical fossilization of the masculine singular form in the newly derived functions. We illustrate this development with vocative-based markers in diferent languages with special focus on the familiarizers güey in Mexican Spanish and alter in German. Although their sociopragmatic indexicalities are far from identical, this comparative approach reveals some interesting similarities. In our view, a deinition as ‘pragmatic markers’ is justiied for vocative-based markers at any point of their evolution, while the term ‘discourse marker’ should be restricted to functions that are no longer directly inferable from the vocative’s deictic and expressive qualities. Keywords: vocatives, development of discourse markers, afectivity, expressivity, solidarity

doi 10.1075/slcs.186.10kle © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

258 Friederike Kleinknecht and Miguel Souza

1.

Introduction

Linguistic interaction always takes place in a temporarily established relationship between interactants, which is inluenced by social conventions as well as by linguistic norms. At the interface between both areas there is the phenomenon of address in its pronominal as well as in its nominal manifestation, namely the use of vocatives. Only marginally treated by grammarians and researchers, vocatives play an important role in linguistic interaction. In the words of Heyd (2014: 273), they “provide a natural outlet for speakers to encode stances, as a sociopragmatic tool of self-positioning, toward their addressees.” While the prototypical vocative consists of a proper name, oten combined with a title, there are many other lexical items that can be used in this function: they range from occupational to kinship terms, from nicknames to honoriics, from invectives to terms of endearment (for an exhaustive list of categories see Braun 1988: 9f). Another frequent resource is the use of personal pronouns referring to the 2nd person. Most of these elements are employed, to a bigger or lesser extent, in the majority of languages. In many languages, however, there are some conventionalized vocative forms that have lost or are losing their addressing function – “little words” (Alba-Juez 2009) which stick out of the variety of possible vocatives in that they have a strongly bleached semantic content and cover a wide range of pragmatic functions. heir reduced semantics usually does not allow them to uniquely identify a single addressee, which is what diferentiates them from semantically unambiguous “proper vocatives”. Instead, they can be used towards a multitude of possible hearers, oten in a very extensive way which facilitates their routinization and the development of other, discourse-related functions this paper is concerned with. Importantly, these words are usually drawn from the class Leech called “familiarizers”, i.e. vocatives that “mark the relationship between speaker and addressee as a familiar one” (1999: 112). he items used for this purpose are characterized by a quite general meaning, denoting simply a ‘person’ – sometimes metaphorically, sometimes with a friendly association, sometimes with a group-speciic or pejorative connotation. Cases in point are the English words man, dude, mate, in German the words alter1 ‘old man’ and mann ‘man’, and in diferent varieties of Spanish the words hombre ‘man’, mujer ‘woman’, tío/tía ‘uncle/aunt’, huevón ‘sluggard’, güey ‘ox’ or the address particle che. he subject of this paper is the origin and development of this kind of familiarizing vocative markers, with special focus on two speciic cases in two only 1. he lowercase, non-standard for German nouns, is due to the fact that in the afect-marking usage that interests us we do not consider these items to be instances of nouns anymore.

Chapter 9. Vocatives as a source category for pragmatic markers 259

remotely related languages: Mexican Spanish güey and German alter. Our hypothesis is that familiarizers, while involving an inherent deictic component as a basic semantic value, have a fundamental feature of signaling afective intensity that usually outweighs their deictic meaning. his expressive quality triggers the emergence and development of several discourse-related functions concerning turn management and, especially, information management. When these functions are conventionalized, in some cases the words become subject to a kind of linguistic “fashion” which causes speakers to use them in an inlationary way. In the case of güey and alter, this inlationary usage entails a process of semantic bleaching and phonetic reduction, at the same time as their pragmatic force is bleached and worn out. he outcomes of this process are elements that mainly operate on the local or micro level of discourse organization, e.g. utterance segmentation or emphasizing of speciic sequential units. Simultaneously, they express a notion of intimacy that is preserved at any stage of their evolution and determines their general conditions of use. he interplay of both functions constitutes the basis for a classiication as discourse markers or pragmatic markers. he irst part of our investigation is dedicated to the properties of the source category, i.e. vocatives in general and as opposed to the subcategory of familiarizers. Our analysis reveals a deictic reference to the addressee as their core notion, which in actual communication is usually employed to express the speaker’s involvement in a speech activity, thereby serving as an invitation to the hearer(s) to engage in the feelings displayed by the speaker. In Section 3, we describe the sociolinguistic notions of afectivity, stance and indexicality; the broad range of expressive functions is illustrated with speciic occurrences of the words güey and alter as well as other familiarizers. Section 4 gives examples of familiarizers serving functions clearly related to the construction of discourse, where expressivity is transferred into discourse-marking functions. he sociopragmatic aspects implied in the diachronic development of the words güey and alter are described in detail in Section 5. Both markers have sufered a far-going functional shit and are used in diferent phonetic variants that mirror diferent stages of their functional development – from güey to wey, from alter to alla. In the more advanced stages, their original deictic character is practically inexistent. Rather, their usage is restricted to discourse-related functions with a very reduced scope, while still relecting a generally enhanced afective stance of the speaker.

2. Vocatives and familiarizers While the term ‘vocative’ was originally used to describe the morphological form used for addressing in Latin (‘calling case’), its use for the same function in

260 Friederike Kleinknecht and Miguel Souza

languages without a morphological case marking is controversial. In our opinion, extending the term to a functional conception is justiied by a long tradition in the linguistic description of languages like English (cf. Zwicky 1974; Leech 1999), Spanish (cf. Haverkate 1978), Italian (cf. Conte 1972) or German (cf. Harweg 1967). For the purpose of this paper, we deine vocatives as (a) free (b) nominal (c) forms of address (Braun 1988: 7–12): they are nouns, adjectives or pronouns that are not syntactically integrated and directly refer to the collocutor (a property that may be partly lost during the diachronic developments we will discuss in this paper). he ainity of vocatives with the 2nd person and their deictic reference to the collocutor have oten been recognized and mentioned since the beginnings of linguistic theory (see Donati 2009). One approach that fairly consistently takes this aspect as a basis for an alternative characterization of the vocative is that of Donati (2013: 277). She identiies the vocative as a “personal deictic” which is used as a “referentiality shiter”, allowing “to insert a second person deictic variable into the referentiality of nouns, shiting it to […] deictic referentiality.” his is certainly true, but only in the sense of a basic semantic value, whereof the wide spectrum of pragmatic vocative functions is only partly inferable. In order to explain all the diferent uses of vocatives in everyday interaction, we must take account of other aspects of their usage. Besides their 2nd-person reference, vocatives are usually said to be used for calling or attention-getting. In this sense, they can be said to represent Bühler’s (1934) ‘conative function’ of language in that they not only refer to the addressee but also aim at achieving a certain impact on him.2 However, as McCarthy & O’Keefe (2003) show, only a minor part of the empirical incidences of vocatives serve exclusively or mainly this purpose (cf. also Formentelli 2007: 193). Rather, vocatives fulill many diferent kinds of pragmatic functions. We recall Zwicky’s (1974: 787) famous distinction between calls “designed to catch the addressee’s attention” and addresses used “to maintain or emphasize the contact between speaker and addressee” as well as Leech’s (1999: 108) threefold categorization of functions into (a) summoning attention, (b) addressee identiication, and (c) establishing or maintaining a social relationship. Both classiications have been widely cited, commented on, or modiied in the literature about the vocative. However, they do not cover the whole range of vocative functions as found in corpora of spontaneous oral speech. For instance, McCarthy and O’Keefe (2003) divide the vocative functions found in their data into (1) relational, (2) topic, (3) badinage, (4) mitigators, (5) turn management, and (6) summons. A similar categorization is the one proposed by Shiina (2007a, 2007b), who classiies the vocatives 2. For simplicity’s sake, we abstain from specifying that speakers can be male or female and use the masculine forms throughout.

Chapter 9. Vocatives as a source category for pragmatic markers 261

in her written corpus as serving functions of (1) interpersonal management, (2) conversational management, (3) information management, and (4) illocutionary force management. Importantly, many authors observe that there is a correlation between the function and the position in the utterance: initial vocatives oten serve fundamentally other functions than vocatives in medial or inal position. As far as familiarizers as opposed to ‘proper’ vocative forms are concerned, there are a few aspects that must be taken note of, all of them basically founded in their semantic peculiarities. First of all, familiarizers are usually nouns or adjectives with quite general semantics, denoting a male (sometimes female) person (like Span. hombre ‘man’, mujer ‘woman’, Germ. mann ‘man’, Engl. man), oten associated with a notion of intimacy or solidarity (as in Engl. mate). In other cases, their original semantic content is clearly pejorative (cf. Span. huevón ‘asshole’, güey ‘ox’ or Greek maláka ‘wanker’), and their usage as familiarizers is necessarily accompanied by a process of semantic reduction (the analysis of güey in Section 5.2 will exemplify this). In a further step, the bleaching process extends to their basic features as nouns or adjectives, routinizing the masculine singular for virtually all of the newly derived functions. Like other vocative forms, familiarizers can fulill deictic functions of referring to the addressee and thereby claiming his attention. his is particularly obvious in greetings and other politeness formulae or in speciically directed questions. However, since familiarizers lack the semantic speciicity of proper names, they are hardly suitable as long-distance calls or to uniquely identify a hearer out of several potential addressees without further means of calling his attention.3 Instead, they are typically used in situations where the hearer is already established (cf. Haverkate 1978: 47; Shiina 2007a: 19). In this sense, their use is redundant and therefore “represents a marked choice” (Rendle-Short 2010: 1202). In many languages, speakers make large use of speciic forms of familiarizers, employing them to fulill speciic functions in discourse (see 4) and to index particular stances and social ailiation (see 5.1). As these functions are conventionalized, we use the term ‘vocative-based marker’ to denote familiarizers in all those pragmatically motivated kinds of usage that cannot be covered by the quality of ‘addressing’ anymore. his involves a fossilization of the masculine singular form that comes to be employed towards female collocutors or groups of addressees as well. he corresponding elements cannot be considered vocatives anymore, but pragmatic or discourse markers (see 5.4).

3. Zwicky (1974: 790–791) claims that while some vocative forms can be used as calls but not as addresses, all possible address forms seem to be usable as calls as well. Our observations regarding familiarizing vocative forms appear to contradict this hypothesis.

262 Friederike Kleinknecht and Miguel Souza

Unfortunately, there are very few publications that explicitly discuss speciic items of this category. However, vocative-based markers are oten mentioned in publications concerning discourse and pragmatic markers on the one hand (e.g. Fraser 1990, 1999) and vocatives, speciically, on the other (e.g. Leech 1999). Some authors focus on the diachronic development of speciic familiarizers (Hill 1994), some on their synchronic range of functions (Kiesling 2004; Rendle-Short 2010). Yet, the diferent functional descriptions are highly heterogeneous. One reason for this is the fact that classiications concern diferent levels of language use (e.g. locution, illocution, turn structure); another reason is the varying number of functions identiied by the authors, which range from two (Zwicky 1974) to iteen (Dishman 1982) and, accordingly, go into more or less detail. We argue that the deictic value of vocatives, when actualized in the context of linguistic interaction, mainly displays an enhanced afective involvement of the speaker in a speech activity – an efect that may expand to other functional spheres. Insofar, all instances of discourse-related functions of familiarizers, be they conventionalized or not, can be traced back to their expressive potential as afect intensiiers.

3. Afectivity and expressivity 3.1

Afective stance: A sociolinguistic notion

Afectivity, as we understand it, is an aspect of stance. Many contemporary linguists – especially those working in the ields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics – have pointed to the fundamental role played by stance-taking in communication (Ochs 1996; Du Bois 2007; Jafe 2009). According to this perspective, every communicative act implies a speaker taking up a position in relation to the content and form of his words as well as towards the audience and the actual context of speech. Importantly, stance-taking is fundamentally an outward performance which does not necessarily correspond to any inner-psychological state of a speaker at the time of formulating a particular utterance. Traditionally, a division is made between epistemic and afective stance. Epistemic stance mainly refers to the degree of certainty the speaker displays about his assertion. Afective stance, on the other hand, as deined by Ochs (1996: 410), is the linguistic expression of “mood, attitude, feeling, and disposition, as well as degrees of emotional intensity vis-à-vis some focus of concern”. Both aspects of stance-taking may simultaneously have manifold efects on diferent levels of communication, but it is the afective side of stance we will be concerned with in this paper.

Chapter 9. Vocatives as a source category for pragmatic markers 263

Following Ochs and Schiefelin (1989), linguistic displays of afect – which are found on diferent levels of linguistic structure – may function as ‘speciiers’ or ‘intensiiers’. Afect speciiers are structures that deine a certain afective orientation of the utterance, e.g. sadness, pleasant surprise, pity, or irritation. Afect intensiiers, on the other hand, have the capacity of modulating the afective intensity of an utterance by expressing a heightened emotional involvement of the speaker. As we are going to show, a core characteristic of familiarizers is their inherent function as afect intensiiers. Note that the sign mode responsible for the interpretation of afective meaning is essentially indexical. In other words, any expression of afect acquires its affective meaning through the use and interpretation of indexical cues. While many researchers see indexes mainly as represented by context-dependent referential structures like deictics, sociolinguists follow a broader deinition of indexicality that also embraces non-referential linguistic means such as intonation and voice quality (Silverstein 1976). In this sense, typical indexes of afective intensity are interjections (e.g. “ah!”), phonological lengthening (e.g. “it’s so co::ld!”), emphatic structures (e.g. focus accents, repetitions) and certain intonation contours (e.g. exclamative intonation) (see Ochs & Schiefelin 1989, among others). As these structures are essentially multifunctional, they may respectively index several afective experiences ambiguously (Besnier 1990: 429). On the other hand, the display of afective stance usually does not rest upon any single cue alone. Rather, its assessment in a given context depends on the relation of single markers to other structures in discourse, as well as on subjective interpretations of the propositional content of the utterances and the speech activities those utterances are indexing (cf. Ochs 1996: 414). 3.2

Expressive functions of vocative-based markers

Afective intensity, as deined above, is closely related to concepts like expressivity and emphasis. he notion of expressivity in linguistics is embedded in a long tradition of research on language change (starting with Gabelentz [1891] 1901) and, especially, grammaticalization (e.g. Hopper & Traugott...