The grammar of conversation: How much of it is syntax?

THE GRAMMAR OF CONVERSATION: HOW MUCH OF IT IS SYNTAX? Virginia Hill * Abstract: This paper examines the interaction between conversational pragmatics and syntax with a view to identifying to what extent pragmatic interpretation can be read off syntactic structure. Building on empirical data from Romanian, it argues, from a generative grammar perspective, for a speech acts component of clausal derivations. The speech act maps the pragmatic roles of speaker, hearer and the topic of their conversation (the sentience dimension) to syntactic positions. Keywords: speech act, pragmatic roles, syntax, E-adverbs, Romanian 1. Introduction This paper focuses on the interaction between pragmatics and syntax, and tackles the following question: is the pragmatic interpretation (all or part of it) read off the syntactic configuration? And if it is, how would a syntax of conversation look like? This discussion is a déjà vu, because similar debates have taken place in the 80s and 90s with regard to discourse pragmatics, when the questions surrounded the mapping of topic and focus to syntax. In this respect, strong points of view were expressed on whether the discourse effects arise post-syntactically, only by semantic rules of interpretation, or whether the topic and the focus interpretation is read off the syntactic configuration (as in e.g. Lambrecht 1994, É. Kiss 1995). And if syntax is involved, is it the case that all types of topics and foci are mapped to syntax? In fact, this latter part of the debate is still ongoing (see the papers in Neelman and Vermeulen 2012). For discourse pragmatics, a strongly supported outcome acknowledged that narrow syntax is involved in generating discourse effects, at least at a basic level. For example, a generalization would be that all languages have means to syntactically map the aboutness feature and the contrast feature, and when that happens, aboutness is higher than contrast in the clause hierarchy. The details of the formal execution have been the subject of an uncountable number of studies, trying to capture the syntactization of the discourse in various frameworks and based on a variety of cross-linguistic data, and it continues as we speak (see e.g. Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl 2007). This exercise is now repeated with respect to the interaction between conversational pragmatics and syntax. In this paper, I summarize the main issues and bring empirical support, from Romanian, to the approach that allows for the syntactic mapping of the basic speech act features such as the speaker’s point of view. 2. Terminology In this section, I provide definitions for the key concepts, for the reader’s convenience. The term “conversational pragmatics” covers the area of pragmatic theory * University of New Brunswick – Saint John, . 6 Virginia Hill that deals with the “interactivity” between speaker and addressee. The main ingredient of the interactivity is the “speaker’s meaning” (Saeed 1997). This is what Austin (1962) rephrases as “how to do things with words”, when he identifies the speech acts as the speaker’s modus operandi. The “speech act” is an utterance with pragmatic illocutionary Force, in the sense that it is propositional and force-bearing (Stainton 2006), and aims at convincing the addressee to comply with the speaker’s point of view or expectation. Crucially, speech acts are orthogonal to the truth conditional meaning, and belong to what Potts (2003) calls “expressive meaning”, and Horne (2011) – “non-at-issue meaning”. We can group the pragmatic meanings that come out of the conversational set-up according to the way they convey the speaker’s point of view. A possible classification is presented in (1): (1) Types of expressive meaning (the speaker’s point of view) a. inter-personal relation with addressee: → authority, respect, disdain… b. utterance performativity typing: → utterance intended as question, request, assertion, plea.... c. assessment typing: → different kinds of evaluations, epistemic stands, sources of evidence Beside the distinction between types of speech acts, the conversation also encodes information about the pragmatic roles: that is, the speaker, the addressee and the topic of their conversation (the sentience dimension; see Barðdal & Chelliah 2009). 3. Theoretical question The definitions provided in section 1 are a matter of routine in semantic and pragmatic theory. The question is how many of these meanings are read off the syntactic structure? There are three possible answers: none, some or all of them. While no linguist believes that every interpretive nuance arises from syntactic computation, there are some linguists who believe that all interpretation relevant to conversational pragmatics should be accounted for outside the syntactic component (e.g. DeCat 2013). Most linguists take the moderate stand by considering that some basic pragmatic features became functional features visible to syntactic computation. This view is not restricted to generative grammar, but is shared by linguists using various theoretical frameworks (e.g. Barðdal & Chelliah 2009). In fact, there is a general concern with respect to a clear-cut separation between a purely pragmatic and a purely syntactic treatment of speech acts, such as expressed, for example, by Haselow, in descriptive linguistics: “I argue against a grammar-pragmatics divide and for a broad conception of grammar, as proposed, for instance, by Traugott (2003: 626), for whom grammar encompasses not only phonology, morpho-syntax, and truth-functional semantics, The grammar of conversation: How much of it is syntax? 7 but also elements that are involved in speaker-addressee interaction and that promote discourse management and coherence, information processing, and the regulation of interpersonal relations between participants of a conversation” (Haselow 2013: 376). In the remaining of this paper, I adopt Haselow’s standpoint, and argue, from a generative grammar perspective, for a speech acts component of clausal derivations. 4. Evidence for the syntactic mapping of speech act features The crucial piece of evidence for a syntactic computation of speech acts comes from derivational restrictions: if the presence or the absence of a certain conversational component can be systematically correlated with the presence or the absence of a certain syntactic operation (i.e. the predictability factor), then we have to admit to the visibility of the respective pragmatic feature for the computation of clause/phrasal derivation. There are many cross-linguistic examples of such correlations, for which I only provide a small sample below. For further examples and discussions, see, among others: Ross (1970), Oyharçabal (1993), Speas and Tenny (2003), Munaro and Poletto (2004), Speas (2004, 2010), Tenny (2006), Sigurdsson (2004, 2008, 2011), Giorgi (2010), Kidwai (2010), Zu (2011), Miyagawa (2012). The basic idea is that the derivation computes what we consider pragmatic fe (...truncated)