South Slavic Discourse Particles (Pragmatics and Beyond. New Series)

South Slavic Discourse Particles

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS) Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences.

Editor

Associate Editor

Anita Fetzer

Andreas H. Jucker

University of Würzburg

University of Zurich

Founding Editors Jacob L. Mey

Herman Parret

University of Southern Denmark

Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Jef Verschueren Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Editorial Board Robyn Carston

Sachiko Ide

Deborah Schiffrin

Thorstein Fretheim

Kuniyoshi Kataoka

University of Trondheim

Aichi University

Paul Osamu Takahara

John C. Heritage

Miriam A. Locher

University College London

Japan Women’s University

University of California at Los Angeles

Universität Basel

Susan C. Herring

Indiana University

Masako K. Hiraga

St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University

Georgetown University Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

Sandra A. Thompson

Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of Athens

University of California at Santa Barbara

Srikant Sarangi

Teun A. van Dijk

Cardiff University

Marina Sbisà

University of Trieste

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

Yunxia Zhu

The University of Queensland

Volume 197 South Slavic Discourse Particles Edited by Mirjana N. Dedaić and Mirjana Mišković-Luković

South Slavic Discourse Particles Edited by

Mirjana N. Dedaić Georgetown University

Mirjana Mišković-Luković University of Kragujevac

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdamâ•›/â•›Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data South Slavic discourse particles / edited by Mirjana N. Dedaic ; Mirjana Miskovic-Lukovic. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 197) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Slavic languages, Southern--Discourse analysis. 2. Slavic languages, Southern--Phonology, Comparative. 3. Slavic languages, Southern--Grammar. I. Dedaic, Mirjana N., 1958- II. Miskovic-Lukovic, Mirjana. PG459.S68 2010 491.8’10141--dc22 2010010769 isbn 978 90 272 5601 0 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8812 7 (Eb)

© 2010 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Preface Acknowledgement and dedication South Slavic ����������������� discourse particles: ���������� Introduction 1. ������ Mirjana Mišković-Luković and Mirjana N. Dedaić

vii ix 1

2. Ama, a Bulgarian adversative connective Grace E. Fielder

23

3. Kamo, an attitudinal pragmatic marker of Macedonian Alexandre Sévigny

45

4. Markers of conceptual adjustment: Serbian baš and kao  Mirjana Mišković-Luković

65

5. The Bosnian discourse particle ono  Aida Premilovac

91

6. Reformulating and concluding: The pragmatics of the Croatian  discourse marker dakle Mirjana N. Dedaić

109

7. Pa, a modifier of connectives: An argumentative analysis Igor Ž. Žagar

133

Note on contributors

163

Index

165

Preface

It is a pleasure to introduce this pioneering collection of studies on discourse particles in South Slavic languages. It should draw the attention of teachers and students of general linguistics and South Slavic alike. Research on discourse particles, and more broadly on discourse markers, has flourished in recent decades, but a large proportion of the contributions have concerned German and Russian, which are, on the one hand, languages with large communities of linguists working on them, and, on the other, languages frequently taught to foreign learners. One might have expected discourse particles to take a prominent part in analyses of English as well, given the great size of its community of linguists and the intensity with which it is taught, but English is remarkably poor in discourse particles and not rich in markers either; much of the work that they do in German and Russian is taken over by intonation contours, a part of the language system that researchers find even more elusive than the markers themselves. The studies in this book have several features in common. They are based on authoritative data. The authors of the six articles are linguists and at the same time native speakers of the standard or variety that they consider, apart from the specialist on Bulgarian who has scrutinized immense quantities of Bulgarian text for many previous projects. But none of them rely only on intuition; all bring in data from interviews or corpora. Each study treats one out of the respective language’s repertory of markers. In doing so, they cite and apply one of two recent approaches to discourse research: the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson, or Ducrot and Anscombre’s theory of argumentation and topoi. Differences between these approaches of course exist, but a reader may well wonder if the articles using Sperber/Wilson could not have reached similar conclusions if they had chosen Ducrot/Anscombre instead, and vice versa. A shared feature in their conclusions is that the various particles have multiple uses and that they function on more than one level in the structure of the language. Discourse is only one of these levels; others are sentence-internal, or stylistic, or even world-view oriented. A reader might wonder whether it is always true that discourse particles are etymologically derived from function words or content words that do not have discourse relevance. The articles are in general not historically oriented, but one might propose such a line of research for the future.

viii South Slavic Discourse Particles

The book will surely spur further work in a variety of other directions. The results gained so far will aid pedagogy of the South Slavic languages and permit inter-Slavic and inter-Balkan comparisons. We may hope for contributions from South Slavic data to the question of how far particles can be considered a welldefined subset within discourse markers. The syntax/discourse marker interface will be a fruitful area for research.   

Wayles Browne Cornell University, Ithaca, New York [email protected]

Acknowledgement and dedication

The editors are grateful to the contributors for their work and patience with the production of this volume, to Ranko Bugarski for his helpful comments, to Ljuba Veselinova for her help in reviewing a number of grammatical glosses, to Carlos Martinez for help with a picture file, and to Zia Morales for the careful proofreading of the whole manuscript. We would also like to thank our families, Dan Nelson, Christina Needham & Nina Nelson, and Vladan, Predrag & Nenad Luković, for their love and support. We dedicate this book to them.

chapter 1

South Slavic discourse particles Introduction Mirjana Mišković-Luković and Mirjana N. Dedaić

This book is a collection of articles on discourse particles in the South Slavic languages: Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Slovenian. These linguistic phenomena, which are typically known as discourse/pragmatic markers and discourse/pragmatic particles, have been a fruitful field of research in many Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages and have proven to be a legitimate testing ground for theories of utterance interpretation. The aim of this volume is twofold: to fill the lacuna in the current scholarship on particles in South Slavic, and to contribute to a better understanding of the semantic meaning and pragmatic roles of these communicative vehicles par excellence. Although this volume is largely descriptive in orientation, the studies nevertheless reflect the underlying assumptions of the theoretical frameworks in which they are couched (argumentation theory, relevance theory and coherence-based approaches). For this reason, we find it necessary to review issues that are relevant to the study of discourse particles in relation to the semantics/ pragmatics interface. The title of the present volume raises important questions in two arenas: namely, linguistic pragmatics and politics, especially language policy. The latter€– an uncomfortable and politically-charged issue which mostly questions which languages actually comprise the South Slavic group – will be expounded on later. Dealing with the former, we ask two questions: first, is there any such class of phenomena that can be properly called discourse particles? Second, is there any rationale for selecting this over other competing terms, namely, pragmatic particles, discourse markers, pragmatic markers, discourse connectives and pragmatic connectives? After all, the contributors themselves refer to the objects of . Mišković-Luković (2006:â•›47) lists a host of terms that are currently on the market, such as conversational markers, phatic connectives, sentence connectives, discourse operators, metalinguistic operators, semantic conjuncts, pragmatic formatives, pragmatic expressions, pragmatic

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Mirjana Mišković-Luković and Mirjana N. Dedaić

their study interchangeably as (discourse and pragmatic) particles, markers and connectives. Moreover, this practice is far from being uncommon in the scholarly literature (see, for instance, Hansen 1998a; Jucker & Ziv 1998; Schourup 1999; Andersen & Fretheim 2000 and Blakemore 2002). The answers to these two questions are interdependent and controversial. Given the diversity of approaches, they also seem to be, at present, quite irreconcilable. Although this book cannot settle these issues, it can bring into focus various proposals that have been put forward in the literature. In order to do this, we will start by explaining the reasons for our title selection.

1.

Discourse particles

One the one hand, there is a relation between the modifiers discourse and pragmatic, which begs the question as to whether or not their denotation is identical, overlapping or different. The relation between the heads particles and markers raises similar questions. Do they refer to the same range of linguistic phenomena? Or does one subsume the other? Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus on either of these issues, nor is it clear whether their study should fall within the domain of semantics or that of pragmatics, given that there is no agreed upon boundary between the two. What seems uncontroversial, though, is the versatile nature of such linguistic phenomena – morphologically, syntactically, distributionally and functionally, they do not form a class. However, they do form a “class” in another important respect – these linguistic encoders facilitate the process of utterance understanding not as syntactically-integrated constituents of the proposition expressed by an utterance, but as pointers to the ways the basic proposition or message should be taken by the addressee. At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that a sociopragmatist starts from an assumption about the conceptuality of semantic meaning and considers discourse markers as part of language-in-use, by investigating their pragmatic meanings or functions as they are exhibited in discourse. In contrast, a cognitive pragmatist starts from the assumption that pragmatic markers have semantic, albeit procedural, meaning and examines the ways they constrain inferential processes that are involved in utterance comprehension. Given that both semantic meaning and pragmatic role figure in the latter approach, it is not altogether clear whether discourse/pragmatic markers should then be studied within semantics or pragmatics. Andersen & Fretheim (2000:â•›2) consider a study of the meaning devices, extrasentential links, cue phrases, discourse signaling devices, indicating devices, utterance indicators and conversational greasers. See also Brinton (1996), and Hansen (1998a).



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

of a contextualized linguistic item to belong to the domain of pragmatics, “because part of the utterance meaning of the item can only be derived as a result of the addressee’s extra-linguistic inferential processing of the stimulus containing it”. They equalize the semantic meaning of a marker with its encoded meaning, but in a way that “its encoded meaning only represents a very useful (and occasionally quite necessary, so it seems) constraint on the kinds of pragmatic, or extralinguistic inferences that the addressee processing an utterance will draw in his effort to comprehend the message communicated” (Andersen & Fretheim 2000:â•›2). Blakemore, on the other hand, finds the explanation for these phenomena in the grammar, since the information is always linguistically encoded. She, however, argues that these expressions simultaneously encode information about pragmatic processes, and therefore the analysis of these phenomena has to make reference to semantics and pragmatics, but within the approach she characterizes as the theory of semantic competence (Blakemore 2002:â•›9). To make it more complex, for those who think that there is such an entity that can be called discourse, this term need not have a unique reference (see, for instance, McHoul 1998; Jaworski & Coupland 2006). For others, its very existence is called into question: This is not an argument for simply replacing the notion of discourse coherence by relevance so that we can speak of the encoding of relevance relations rather than discourse relations. Discourse, whether it is construed in structural or interactional terms, is an artifact with no psychological reality, and coherence is a property of that artifact. Relevance is not a property of discourse, but rather of an interpretation which is mentally represented and derived through cognitive processes.  (Blakemore 2002:â•›5–6)

Regarding the discourse/pragmatic distinction, Andersen and Fretheim (2000:â•›3) tie it to a specific theoretical-methodological provenance: ‘[D]iscourse markers’ is a term which has come to be associated predominantly with discourse analysis and such markers are assumed to play a key role in establishing coherence relations in discourse […]. The emphasis on corpus based data is a salient feature of discourse analysis and is therefore also seen to prevail in studies which are professedly concerned with the function of so-called discourse markers […]. By choosing the term ‘pragmatic marker’ instead of ‘discourse marker’ we believe we do not run the risk of evoking unintended connotations.

Fraser (1996:â•›169), on the other hand, considers the discourse/pragmatic distinction to be an issue of content: the class of pragmatic markers, as linguistically encoded signals of the speaker’s communicative intentions, comprises four distinct

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Mirjana Mišković-Luković and Mirjana N. Dedaić

subtypes (one of which is called discourse markers) which reflect four different ways a message may be conveyed by a sentence: [A] basic marker signals the force of the basic message, a commentary marker signals a message which comments on the basic message, a parallel marker signals a message in addition to the basic message, and a discourse marker signals the relationship of the basic message to the foregoing discourse.

Turning now to the terminological dilemma surrounding marker/particle, the central concern revolves around the issue of whether this is a case of one class/two terms, two distinct classes, or a class and its subclass. Jucker & Ziv (1998:â•›2), for instance, distinguish the class of discourse connectives (e.g. so and therefore) from that of discourse particles (e.g. German, Dutch and Norwegian focus and modal particles) and choose discourse marker as “a convenient cover term […] one that enables us to include a broad variety of elements under a single conceptual umbrella”. A similar sort of explanation is given by Andersen & Fretheim (2000:â•›1) who deem the term marker to be broader than particle, although they acknowledge that the latter term “has been variably used with reference to a morphologically rather disparate set of linguistic expressions, including grammaticalized phrases as well as monomorphemic words”. In contrast, Hansen (1998a) points out that the functionally and distributionally heterogeneous class of particles is often understood to comprise adpositions, interjections, (coordinating and subordinating) conjunctions, focus and modal particles, sentence adverbs and discourse markers, but that discourse markers have a special status as they clearly constitute a functional, and not a morphosyntactic class: To the extent that markers are particles in the morphological sense, they can thus be subsumed under one or more of the other classes (exactly which classes are relevant will depend on one’s definition of markers).  (Hansen 1998a:â•›367)

Hartmann (1998) relates the three uses of the term particle to late twentieth-century particle research: all uninflected forms, that is, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, focus particles and other particle classes; subsets of invariables such as adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions; and all invariable elements such as focus and modal particles. This last, narrow, definition, does not include adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, negative words and interjections. . Jucker & Ziv (1998:â•›2) mention the modifier pragmatic in relation to such complex lexical items as are you know, you see and I mean, which are otherwise regarded as discourse markers and connectives (cf. Blakemore 1987 and Schiffrin 1987).



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

Schourup (1999), similarly, emphasizes the diversity of the term particle: it can refer to invariable forms which are otherwise difficult to classify in terms of traditional syntactic categories; it can denote particular uninflecting forms such as adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions and interjections (sometimes excluding the first three); or, as field scholars have recently agreed, it can specifically refer to scalar and modal particles (see also König 1991). This referential inconsistency, which, according to Schourup, was inherited by the subsequent term discourse particles, is coupled with the fact that its class membership is less restrictive than that of discourse markers. In addition, the latter term appears to be more functional in contrast to a more syntactic label particle and, by extension, discourse particle. All this explains, says Schourup, the preference for the term discourse markers since the mid-1980s: “The term DM has a narrower range of reference and has been subject to more precise attempts at definition” (Schourup 1999:â•›228–230). Finally, everything that has been said about the marker/particle distinction also applies to the marker/connective distinction so that the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Blakemore (2002:â•›1) warns that she calls the expressions, which others might call discourse markers, discourse connectives, because “since there is no agreement on what counts as a discourse marker, it is difficult to know whether these are two labels for the same set of phenomena”. In fact, Blakemore points out that there are other discourse indicators, such as discourse adverbials, interjections and expletives, which are generally not considered to be discourse markers given that they do not mark connections between discourse units. This seems to corroborate Fraser’s (1996) classification – the mentioned indicators are pragmatic but not discourse markers: discourse adverbials are commentary markers, interjections are basic markers while expletives fall within the subclass of parallel markers. We can now return to the first question of whether discourse particles (and the related terms) can constitute a class. There have been many attempts at class characterization but so far none have been universally accepted. In other words, the literature is abundant with marker/particle research and the terms have been

. Luke (1990:â•›10), for instance, prefers the term utterance particle to sentence-final particle or to such “traditional terms” as are “‘helping words’ and ‘mood words’”, and uses this term to refer to a class of words (the Cantonese la, lo and wo) which has no semantic content but is used as sentence-final, bound form to indicate the mood of a sentence or to express attitudes and emotions. The English items you know, well, OK and oh are then utterance particles functioning as discourse markers. . Schourup (1999) gives an overview of the characteristics typically assigned to discourse markers.

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Mirjana Mišković-Luković and Mirjana N. Dedaić

long established but the “unpleasant” question festers. The “last resort” has already been expressed: It appears that “discourse marker” is a fuzzy concept […] [I]n line with Roschean prototype conception, elements demonstrating more of the criterial features may be taken to be more prototypical members of the class of discourse markers and those showing fewer characteristic properties may be considered more peripheral. This scalar conception of the membership in the class of discourse markers appears to be well-equipped to account for the range of items displaying partially overlapping characteristics across a variety of languages.  (Jucker & Ziv 1998:â•›2–3)

On the other hand, Blakemore has dedicated an entire monograph to show “that there is no justification for writing a book about discourse or discourse markers at all” (2002:â•›1). Her arguments are couched in a specific, relevance-driven approach to communication (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95), in which non-truth-conditional meaning does not play a role. In line with the representational-computational view of the mind, the cognitive semantic information, which can be of either conceptual (representational) or procedural (computational) nature, serves as input to pragmatic inferential processes, which are used for deriving the explicit and implicit meaning of an utterance. According to this view, elements that have been classified elsewhere as discourse markers or particles emerge as encoders of procedural information (i.e. they serve as constraints on implicatures – on certain cognitive effects (e.g. but) or on context selection (e.g. anyway) – and explicatures (e.g. sort of) or even as conceptual constituents of representations (e.g. consequently). Nevertheless, Blakemore’s book ends on an optimistic note: Should this be construed as a recommendation that research on discourse markers should cease forthwith? If it means research on discourse markers as a class or category, then yes. However, if this means research on the expressions that have been called discourse markers, then, most emphatically, no.  (Blakemore 2002:â•›185)

Had all the contributors utilized the relevance-theoretic approach to account for the meanings of the phenomena in question, the title of this volume would . Fraser (2006) has recently criticized the relevance-theoretic position that the conceptual and procedural types of meaning are mutually exclusive. A linguistic form (i.e. morphemes, lexical items, syntactic structures, intonation), according to Fraser, may contain three types of semantic information: the conceptual information specifies the representational content of the form, the procedural information specifies the role of the form in the interpretive structure of the sentence while the combinatorial information specifies how the form combines to give more complex semantic structures.



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

have been different: South Slavic semantic constraints on relevance or South Slavic semantic constraints on pragmatic inferences. And the kind of phenomena this book is about would be apparent, at least to those who adhere to or are familiar with the theory. For all linguistic meaning has a specific contribution to pragmatic inferences, but the type of contribution is determined by the type of semantic encoding: some forms are inputs to pragmatic inferences as constituents of conceptual representations, while other forms constrain pragmatic inferences. As it is, we can do no better than juggle in our attempt to explain the title of this volume. This, however, we do not regard as a disadvantage. On the contrary, the controversies surrounding the research on these forms clearly show that discourse/pragmatic particles/markers are not only vibrant, pervasive and vital in human communication, but also that traditional linguistics was all the poorer for neglecting them. The title of this volume, therefore, reflects a variety of approaches as well as an appeal to a wider and, hopefully, more adversative audience. This, we believe, will prompt further studies of this sort in the South Slavic (and other Slavic) languages, which have thus far been noticeably absent.

2.

South Slavic discourse particles

The study of South Slavic discourse particles is barren and mired in terminological conservatism. Traditional approaches to the study of language have dominated Slavic linguistics for decades – both in “domestic arenas” (Slavic-speaking environments) and among Slavists “abroad”. In both, the most productive line of research has been the Jakobsonian model of shifters, which involves “indexical symbols” that posses general meanings in relation to the message to which they belong (Jakobson 1990). While calling it by other names, Jakobson correctly points towards a discursive role in the semantics (and pragmatics) of such words:

. For those who do not support relevance theory, dropping the non-truth-conditionality criterion would place, for instance, indexicals on par with those discourse particles that constrain the explicit content of an utterance, such as sort of and kind of (see Mišković-Luković 2006; cf. Itani 1995). However, as Carston (2002) explains, indexicals are procedural features that disappear from the logical form of an utterance when the intended referents in the form of concepts have been identified. This is not the property of discourse particles. . Our choice of the modifier discourse rather than pragmatic mirrors the argument quoted in Andersen & Fretheim (2000:â•›3) for not selecting it. As to the choice of the head particles, this term predates the term marker and is more typical of the South Slavic linguistic tradition (see, for instance, Stevanović 1986). This term is also used in the relevance-theoretic literature (cf. Blass 1990:â•›129 and Andersen & Fretheim 2000:â•›1).





Mirjana Mišković-Luković and Mirjana N. Dedaić

For example the conjunction but each time expresses an adversative relation between two stated concepts and not the generic idea of contrariety. In fact, shifters are distinguished from all other constituents of the linguistic code solely by their compulsory reference to the given message. (Jakobson 1990:â•›389)

Shifters provided the most widely used conceptual application for looking at such phenomena in early research in the Slavic languages. However, the focus was thrown out of balance as most linguists settled on exploring traditional grammatical categories such as pronouns and verbs. In addition, South Slavic linguistics follows what Hansen (1998b:â•›4) calls the “traditional tendency to consider the less semantically transparent markers as ‘fillers’, i.e. contentless hesitation markers”. This happens partly due to the insistence of Slavic grammarians on non-discursive approaches to language and in concert with the general opinion that only the language used to write books is a good language. The study of spoken discourse is largely neglected as a result of both these tendencies. Discourse particles are words that, in traditional grammars of the concerned area, were sometimes considered to be redundant, and even a sign of poor writing or speaking abilities. This attitude highlights the preoccupation of Slavic linguists with traditional grammar, and a more than just occasional, self-imposed containment within the regional or national grammatical prescriptions. Although particles are often among the most commonly used words in a language, they are typically omitted from dictionaries and given little theoretical attention. The “class” of particles is frequently distinguished negatively: particles are the words left over when all the others have been assigned to syntactic categories (see also Zwicky 1985:â•›292). The main difficulty is that the category of discourse particles and markers is clearly a functional-pragmatic, and not a formal, morphosyntactic one (cf. Lamiroy & Swiggers 1991:â•›123). Items which can be used as particles/markers may originate in quite different distributional classes, where they often have formally identical counterparts that are not used as particles/markers, and which do contribute to propositional content. They might originate “domestically” from the categories of connectives, such as ‘sicer-pa’ (Slovenian); or from adverbs, such as ‘dakle’ (Croatian); interrogative adverbials, such as ‘kamo’ (Macedonian); or from pronominal demonstratives, like the Bosnian ‘ono’, to mention just a few.

. Even the rare recent studies in Slavic that deal with these phenomena use traditional syntactician’s appellations for what clearly should be analyzed as discourse markers or discourse particles; thus Koktova (1986) talks about “sentence adverbials” and Kryk (1992) discusses the Polish no as an interjection.



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

They can also be imports from different points in history, like the Serbian baš and Bulgarian ama. Yet, as the contributions to this book demonstrate, particles are important for producing discourse, not only signaling to hearers how utterances relate to linguistic and non-linguistic contexts, but also allowing for the flow of cognitive processes in structuring and understanding the message.

3.

Relevance theory and verbal communication

Taking into account the extent to which relevance theory has been significant in the current research into pragmatic markers, and given that half of this volume’s contributions are entirely couched in this particular theoretic framework, we have included a brief overview of the main relevance-theoretic postulates in the introduction. In this way, we hope to avoid unnecessary repetitions in the succeeding chapters. According to relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95 and Carston 2002), the human cognitive system, in general, aims at the maximization of relevance (the Cognitive Principle of Relevance). In communication, in particular, every act of ostensive communication (e.g. an utterance) conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance (the Communicative Principle of Relevance). Guided by the presumption of optimal relevance that the speaker’s utterance is relevant enough to be worth the addressee’s attention, and is, in and of itself, the most relevant one according to the speaker’s abilities and preferences, the addressee uses a specific comprehension strategy:10 they follow a path of least effort in considering different interpretations (i.e. depending on the extent of their accessibility) and they terminate the process once they reach an interpretation that satisfies their expectations of relevance (or abandon the process if no such interpretation is available).

. Ostension is confined to communication which exhibits two essential properties€– overtness and intention. In other words, the principle of relevance does not apply to nonostensive forms of communication (e.g. covert communication and accidental information transmission). 10. Verbal communication rests on a single pragmatic principle of relevance, which is reflexive (subconscious) and automatic (i.e. it applies without exception, and therefore cannot be observed, flouted or violated, in contrast to the Gricean conversational maxims). It is not guided by any of the other principles proposed in the literature, such as the presumption of literalness, truthfulness or coherence (Carston 2002).

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Mirjana Mišković-Luković and Mirjana N. Dedaić

Relevance is a property of an utterance which the addressee is interpreting. In ostensive-inferential verbal communication, an utterance makes it mutually manifest to the interlocutors that the speaker intends, using that utterance, to make certain assumptions (more) manifest to the addressee.11 On the one hand, the relevance of an utterance increases with the cognitive effects it brings about (e.g. by confirming and strengthening the addressee’s existing assumptions, by contradicting and eliminating them, or by combining to yield a contextual implication). On the other hand, the relevance of an utterance decreases with the effort spent in processing the utterance. So (in the absence of some other factors), the speaker will want her utterance to be optimally relevant to the addressee and will phrase it in such a way as to achieve this communicative goal.12 An assumption (proposition) communicated by an utterance (as part of the speaker’s communicative intention) will either be explicit or implicit. It will be explicit – explicature – only if it is a development of a logical form encoded by the utterance.13 If not, it will be an implicature – a speaker-meant contextual 11. In fact, there are two layers of intention: the informative intention whereby the speaker’s utterance informs the hearer about something, and the communicative intention whereby the speaker’s utterance informs the addressee of her informative intention. The addressee’s recognition of the communicative intention is vital for his understanding of the relevance of the speaker’s utterance (the addressee might access various assumptions but they will never be equally relevant; precisely because the presumption of relevance is inseparable from comprehension, the addressee will accept the first tested assumption that proves consistent with his expectation of relevance). 12. Communication is deemed successful when the addressee reaches such an interpretation that sufficiently resembles the thought the speaker wishes to get across. 13. The decoding-inferential processes can be roughly described in the following way. Upon identifying a particular (acoustic or visual) stimulus as linguistic, the autonomous linguistic system will execute a series of deterministic grammatical computations, giving as its output a logical form (i.e. a semantic representation of a phrase or sentence used in an utterance). This logical form is a subpropositional, structured string of concepts, which serves as a schema for various putative propositions (it is in the format which the pragmatic processor can “read”). To be developed into the (truth conditional) proposition expressed by an utterance, the logical form requires certain cognitive (pragmatic) processes (e.g. disambiguation, indexical resolution and various types of enrichment). If such a proposition is at the same time communicated by the speaker (i.e. the speaker is committed to the proposition of her utterance), it becomes the (basic) explicature of the utterance (e.g. in ironic utterances the speaker is not committed to the proposition her utterance expresses, and expresses instead a tacit, dissociative attitude wherein the speaker’s main relevance lies). This base-level explicature can further be embedded under certain higher-level descriptions (higher-level explicatures) such as various descriptions of the speaker’s propositional attitudes, speech acts, and the like. Although higher-level explicatures (like implicatures) may be true/false per se, they do not contribute to the truth conditions of the proposition expressed by an utterance.



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

assumption used in utterance interpretation (implicated premise) or its contextual implication (implicated conclusion). Utterance interpretation is a fast, automatic and on-line process which typically involves the mutual parallel adjustment of different factors involved: the explicit content of an utterance, various contextual assumptions that the utterance highlights, and cognitive effects. The goal is, as already mentioned, to satisfy the addressee’s expectations of relevance which have been raised on a particular occasion of utterance.14

4.

The South Slavic languages

The South Slavic linguistic area represents a complexity known as the South Slavic dialectal continuum, which is said to be one of the most complex and most interesting in Europe (Bugarski 2004a:â•›23). “Starting with northwestern Slovenian dialects in the Julian Alps, the continuum works its way gradually down to southern Aegean Macedonian dialects of the Gulf of Thessaloniki, and to eastern Bulgarian dialects along the shores of the Black Sea” (Alexander 2000:â•›4). Our decision to include particles from Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Slovenian reflects the current linguistic view on the socio-political boundaries that define these languages.15 All the languages except Bulgarian gained their national status with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, which began in the early 1990s. At the time of writing, these socio-political issues are still perceptible through a few territorial and many linguistic disputes – most prominently in Kosovo’s newly independent status, which is still beset with problems.16 14. Relevance theory takes a dynamic, psychological approach to the context of an utterance: it is a subset of mentally-represented assumptions that interacts with the speaker’s utterance (or, more broadly, with incoming information obtained by perception or communication) to give rise to cognitive effects. This means that context cannot be given in advance – it is always selected according to the speaker’s utterance and the addressee’s search for relevance. 15. The historical background of these languages is rich with events and beset with disputes, all of which contributed to their present forms, usage, and aptitude for national identification. We will not examine their histories in detail because the studies in this book are not concerned with the diachrony. However, a brief review of historical details can be found, among many other sources, in Bugarski (2004a, 2004b), Greenberg (2004a) and Okey (2005). 16. Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in February 2008, but it has yet to achieve world-wide recognition of its status. As of this writing, sixty countries have recognized Kosovo as a nation state. However, its self-proclaimed independence is contested most adamantly by Serbia which challenges the final status of the Kosovo-Serbia national boundary along Kosovo’s northern border. Thus, “several thousand NATO-led KFOR peacekeepers under

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Figure 1.╇ The South Slavic linguistic area17

During this process, the two South Slavic languages spoken at the opposite edges of the former Yugoslavia – Macedonian and Slovenian – regained their full status as national languages. Because the language called Serbo-Croatian18 was spoken by multiple ethnic groups in the rest of the country, its status and development underwent a more complex path. As a single entity at the level of diasystem (Bugarski 2004b:â•›3), Serbo-Croatian included speakers from different ethnic groups reflecting the socio-political reality of the era and the place – Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin. Some scholars doubt the real existence of Serbo-Croatian as a living language, since it always comprised multiple urban and rural dialects and regional and ethnic varieties (see Greenberg 2004a:â•›13). Macedonian and Slovenian were always distinguished from Serbo-Croatian, but still not free of the tribulations of the languages spoken in the “former Yugoslav lands” (Bugarski & Hawkesworth 2004). Although Macedonian was fully standardized by the end of the 20th century (Tomić 2004:â•›185), its autonomy was UNMIK authority continue to keep the peace within Kosovo between the ethnic Albanian majority and the Serb minority in Kosovo” (CIA 2009). 17. The indicated borders approximately delimit the so-called “standard languages”. There are many areas with mixed populations/languages as well as areas where a language has a significant number of speakers but is not dominant. South Slavic speakers also live in all the bordering non-Slavic areas. A brief discussion on the status of Montenegrin is given in the introduction. 18. This is only one of the several appellations used for this language. The other forms are Croato-Serbian, Serbo-Croat, Serbocroatian and Croatoserbian.



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

constantly questioned by those who claimed that Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian, or a “regional norm” of Bulgarian (see Friedman 2004:â•›201; for more details on this issue see Nihtinen 1999), or that inhabitants of Macedonia are, in fact, “Southern Serbs” (Wachtel 1998:â•›90). The Bulgarian government officially recognized the Macedonian standard as an independent language only in 1999, fifty-five years after the establishment of the Macedonian political entity (i.e. as a sovereign republic within Yugoslavia). Falling under the linguistic laws of a dialectal continuum, Bulgarian and Macedonian share a set of grammatical features which sets them apart from other South Slavic languages. Among them are the loss of noun cases and an acquisition of the definite article; the latter is shared with Romanian, Greek and Albanian€– the languages with which they comprise the Balkan Sprachbund. The standard Macedonian is based on the west-central dialects, for the following reasons: The choice of the dialect base was made at the turn of the century in Misirkov’s (1903) manifesto of Macedonian language policy […]. Misirkov followed the tradition obtaining throughout the Slavonic world to base each new standard language on the dialects that are most distinct from the standards of the other Slavonic languages […].  (Tomić 2004:â•›189)

From the other side of its border, Macedonian has been mired in another political controversy – the challenge to its name. Greece has objected strenuously to non-Greek use of the term “Macedonian”, arguing that it appropriates an exclusively Hellenic name that belongs to Greek historical heritage. Unsurprisingly, this stance involves deeply rooted territorial interests (Giannakos 2001). Athens has averred that Skopje harbors irredentist ambitions towards northern Greece. On the other hand, Human Rights Watch reports that over the years, the use of the Macedonian language has been sharply restricted in Northern Greece where there is a substantial Slavic population (Whitman & Laber 1994). The Greek denial of the Macedonian state, the Macedonian minority in Greece and the Greek attitude towards the Macedonian language is reflected in the most frequent name Greece uses for this language: “linguistic idiom of Skopje” (Danforth 1997:â•›33). Nicholas Martis, a former conservative minister of Northern Greece, echoes this general opinion saying that the “linguistic idiom of Skopje [was] a spoken collection of words, without syntax, without grammatical components, without spelling” (reported in Popov & Radin 1989:â•›46). Despite these not-so-neighborly disputes, the Macedonian language is internationally recognized. It is spoken by about million and a half people in Macedonia, 250,000 people in Aegean Macedonia, 250,000 people in Pirin (Bulgarian) Macedonia and around half million people in other parts of the world, particularly North America and Australia (Shea 1997:â•›193).

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The Slovenian language, on the other end of the South Slavic spectrum, was the earliest to receive its normative grammar written by the linguist Jernej Kopitar in 1808–1809. By the time Serbo-Croatian was modernized, Slovenian already existed as a fully developed literary language (Wachtel 1998:â•›88). Slovenian was said to be a South Slavic language that shares some features with West Slavic (Czech, Polish and Slovak). Despite its long contact with (and influences from) Croatian, Slovenian’s unique features, such as the archaic dual number (dvojina), have been preserved by the tireless work of Slovenian state-sponsored academicians (Carmichael 2002:â•›227; for details on language planning in Slovenia see Nećak-Lük 2004). The division of Serbo-Croatian into separately identified and politically significant languages became a most controversial affair after the fall of Yugoslavia. Since the end of the Second World War, Serbo-Croatian was seen as one language outside of Yugoslavia while, internally, differences among variants were always appreciated and cultivated. There is a basis for the claim that the motivations for a unified language were not purely political, but had a scholarly linguistic merit (Greenberg 2004a:â•›16). Serbo-Croatian represented “a single entity at the level of diasystem” (Bugarski 2004b:â•›3), and “one, albeit in truth, elastic idiom” (Jahić 1990:â•›54, quoted in Greenberg 2004a:â•›17). Still, the centripetal and centrifugal forces created a continuous whirlwind of contradictory influences that began to calm only after political divisions took effect. Political winds continue to blow this linguistic issue to and fro, and all work on this topic will meet with someone’s displeasure.19 We do not offer any theoretical support or denial for political and linguistic claims that current political entities – the states of Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro – put forward. Rather, we present the situation as it is typically described by linguists from the respective cultures, albeit their descriptions might be subject to strenuous contention. Thus, we recognize that there are separate language idioms called Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin.20

19. The reaction in Zagreb to Greenberg’s (2004a) book clearly illustrates this point, as do current polemics in various Croatian scholarly journals between the Croatian linguist Snježana Kordić, who lives outside Croatia, and Croatian “insider” linguists, especially those from the “old school”. These latter wrote very disparaging reviews of Greenberg’s (2004a) generally very well received account of the disintegration of Serbo-Croatian. For more information see PetiStantić (2008). 20. The absence of a Montenegrin chapter stems from the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, no linguist currently studies pragmatic features of discourse particles in Montenegrin. In addition, the linguistic status of Montenegrin is at the present moment “quite tenuous at best” (Bugarski 2004b:â•›8; see also Bugarski 1998 and Greenberg 2004b).



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

Croatian and Serbian were the strongest linguistic and political emanations of Serbo-Croatian, and this is reflected by their respective names. These two were the strongest forces for the collapse of the linguistic unity, as well. The “contrastive self-identification” (Fishman 1972:â•›58) has been exhibited in many ways, especially during the process of political differentiation in the 1990s, which included a publication rush of differential dictionaries of Serbian and Croatian (an incomplete list includes Blažanović 1995; Brodnjak 1992, 1998; Ćirilov 1989; Guberina & Krstić 1940/98; Pavuna 1992; Šamija 1992; Šamija & Lukačić 1991; Vazdar 1993). Croatian linguists maintain a very strong stance regarding language autonomy and distinctiveness, and continue their work to fortify the linguistic description of the purified Croatian standard language. The language in use represents a colorful variety of mutually incomprehensible dialects, and an ample number of sundry urban and rural vernaculars. While the standard is based on the dialect called štokavian (named after the form of the interrogative pronoun što ‘what’), a vernacular spoken in the north-eastern part of the Croatian territory, the other two dialects – kajkavian and čakavian (named for the same pronoun which has forms kaj and ča respectively) – are spoken widely and prominently. Urban kajkavian, for example, the vernacular spoken in the capital Zagreb,21 has been strongly influenced by the standard language, like the urban Split čakavian (see Magner & Jutronić 2006). The existence of these three distinct dialects reinforces an oftrepeated argument about the differentiation between Croatian and Serbian based on the fact that of these three dialects, only štokavian is shared with Serbian. The Serbian language did not undergo any significant post-Yugoslav re-standardization (Bugarski 2004b:â•›8). Still, the emotional, political and cultural distances inherited from the period of war between what is now two countries contributed to the separation of the respective linguistic practices and the fact that the Serbian language experienced less contact with Croatian and more individuation in the post-war period. Figuratively, Serbian did not move anywhere, but the others (specifically Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin) underwent a more or less stringent linguistic engineering in order to move away from Serbian (see Škiljan 2004:â•›75). Bosnian showed tendencies to move away from Serbian, but not as vigorously as Croatian. While Croatia insisted on the regional and archaic lexicon of its  21. There were discussions in the past whether the kajkavian dialect, which represents the transitional dialect on the Croatian-Slovenian continuum, belongs to Croatian or to Slovenian languages. It seems that this question has been settled by its national localization within the borders of Croatia, having the population of the capital city Zagreb as its native speakers and its development influenced by the other two Croatian dialects (štokavian and čakavian).

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language, the Bosnian language’s path was slower and bound to its Oriental heritage (Bugarski 2004b:â•›8, Greenberg 2004a:â•›145–147; Isaković 1993). The Bosnian language movement of the 1990s rode on the coattails of national successes from the late 1960s, when the Yugoslav state recognized the Muslim nation of Bosnia. Despite the new recognition, however, it did not receive the full institutional backing associated with national status in the communist set-up, for example, its own Academy of Sciences, nor did Muslims initially make claims on behalf of a distinctive language. […] Alija Isaković in 1970 argued that ‘Bosnian’ was an actually existing variant of standard Serbo-Croat, implying some sort of parallel with Serbian and Croatian; and the proliferation of terms like intermediary or sub- or infra-variant prepared the way for acceptance that Bosnia had its own ‘standard linguistic idiom’ […].  (Okey 2005:â•›434)

In 1991, before the war in Bosnia erupted, Halilović still called Bosnian a variant of a common language while some Bosnian Muslims prepared the field for the implementation of the “ultimate paradox of Herderian nationalism taken to extremes whereby mere linguistic practice is no argument against the real spirit of the folk” (Okey 2005:â•›436). In the 90s, the Bosniak nation was constituted, but it was not until a 1993 congress that the Bosnian language was established (the name of the language is based on the territory and not on the nation; see Greenberg 2004a:â•›141).22 The underlying assumption was that the language should include all of those who share the pride of the land. Still, “Bosnian is no mixture of Serbian and Croatian” (Greenberg 2004a:â•›146), as contemporary linguists and other Bosnian intellectuals heartily argue. Finally, the Bulgarian situation demonstrates that the state has a powerful control over the language. The Bulgarian state has been fairly stable in the midst of the very unstable Balkans. While Bulgaria called Macedonian “a dialect of Bulgarian” (Fishman 2006:â•›99), this claim is based on geopolitical and historical, rather than linguistic foundations. That the Bulgarian standard was codified in the 1880’s and the Macedonian in 1945 is not a sound argument towards this claim because, at present, both languages are superregional. The claim that one language is a dialect of the other is in this sense illogical from whichever direction it may be stated.23

22. In September 1993, the Second Bosniak Congress officially re-introduced the historical ethnic name Bošnjaci (‘Bosniaks’) instead of the appellation Muslimani (‘Muslims’) used in former Yugoslavia. 23. We are grateful to Grace Fielder and Snježana Kordić for sharing their views on this issue, which in both cases reinforce ours.



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

The current socio-linguistic situation and language policies in the territories of the South Slavic languages dictated the organization of this volume. However, it is not inconceivable that, generations from now, this dissection might no longer be appropriate given the vagaries of a number of factors, such as the strength of the nations using these languages as well as the survival of the nation state as a principal organizing unit of human civilization, something for which scholars have foretold certain death many times before.

5.

The roadmap of the book

Following the dialectal continuum from South to North, and accepting the prevailing practices of distribution and naming, we organize the exploration of the selected South Slavic discourse particles in the following way: Bulgarian ama ‘but’ (Ch. 2), Macedonian kamo ‘so where’ (Ch. 3), Serbian baš ‘exactly’ and kao ‘like’ (Ch. 4), Bosnian ono ‘like’ (Ch. 5), Croatian dakle ‘so/in other words’ (Ch. 6) and Slovenian pa ‘and/but’ (Ch. 7). Grace E. Fielder applies an approach integrating relevance theory and discourse analysis to give a complex account of the Bulgarian adversative connective ama ‘but’. Looking at its use in two temporally distant sets of data, Fielder finds the adversity of ama to be related to a contextually inferred proposition. Ama marks an exchange structure and links it to the ongoing discourse. In doing so, ama may expand its scope, connecting the elements in an adversative relation locally as well as globally. Alexandre Sévigny also employs the relevance-theoretic framework in order to demonstrate that the Macedonian pragmatic marker kamo is an indicator of the speaker’s dissociative attitude towards a belief in the hearer’s ability and willingness to perform a certain action. In this way, kamo encodes procedural information and signals the formation of an interpretive, higher-level explicature. The data for Sévigny’s paper were collected in the Egyptian-Macedonian speech community in Canada, which is composed of immigrants and second and third generation Macedonian-Canadians who retain spoken fluency in the Macedonian variant of their parents. Mirjana Mišković-Luković argues for a unified account of the uses of Serbian baš and kao. She employs the relevance-theoretic pragmatics of on-line concept construction to show that the two particles have an identical communicative role. Baš is analyzed as a marker of non-loose use of a targeted propositional constituent, indicating either the identity of the lexically encoded and speakermeant concepts, or the pragmatic strengthening of a lexical concept. Kao is characterized as a marker of the loose use of a targeted propositional constituent: it

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signals the pragmatic loosening of a lexically encoded concept and, occasionally, an interpretive use. Aida Premilovac uses the relevance-theoretic notion of procedural encoding and the explicit/implicit distinction to account for the meaning of ono in Bosnian informal discourse. The particle, she argues, emerges as a lexical item that is distinct from the demonstrative pronoun ono ‘that’. It encodes non-truth-conditional, procedural information about the loosely used proposition expressed by an utterance. Although similar in meaning and use to the English pragmatic marker like, ono may, nonetheless, co-occur with the particles kao ‘like’ and baš ‘exactly’. Mirjana N. Dedaić considers functional pragmatic ingredients of the Croatian reformulator dakle. In a comparative analysis, aimed at teasing out whether particles from different languages might share some common elements, dakle (‘consequently’, ‘then’, ‘therefore’, ‘so’, ‘in other words’) figures as a discourse marker whose properties are of a primarily non-conceptual and highly multifunctional nature. Dakle contributes to the inferential processes involved in utterance understanding by making the causative-resultative relationship between the preceding and following discourse segments explicit. Furthermore, dakle seems to have developed argumentative/rhetorical and attitudinal discursive functions as well. Igor Ž. Žagar starts from a dictionary definition of the Slovenian connective pa ‘and’, ‘but’. His extensive analysis, couched in the framework of argumentation theory, is centrally concerned with the meaning of pa in the compound connectives ker pa ‘but since’ and sicer pa ‘anyway’. Applying the notions of topoi and polyphony and relying on data from contemporary press, Žagar explores a network of meanings created by the independent and compound uses of the three connectives. A reader who is less familiar with the (South) Slavic languages might wonder about a possible wider distribution of any of the particles analyzed within a single language. We concede that a description of a particle within a given language might be applicable, to a higher or lower degree, to another speech community which associates itself with a different national language. After all, the tight geographic proximity and long history of political and cultural convergence of the South Slavic languages must inevitably result in partially shared vocabulary and speech forms. However, just as no simplistic description is affordable for any linguistic situation “in the field”, so must our explanation revert to the specific particles analyzed in this book, which does not have a comparative aim. Anything beyond that would result in a presumptuous endeavor, given that, to the best of our knowledge, there is no available contrastive study of these particles. While all the six languages included in this volume have baš in their vocabulary, only Slovenian uses sicer pa and ker pa. Ama (but not ami!) is known in Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian, but it does not fully correspond to the description



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

provided for Bulgarian. Slovenian, Bulgarian and Macedonian do not have dakle, while it is in a relatively different distributional use in the Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian vernaculars. Most of the South Slavic languages have kamo or its cognate (e.g. kam in Slovenian), but the description provided by Sévigny seems to be unique for the specific community which is the source of his data. The pronominal demonstrative ono is a lexical item shared by most vernaculars throughout the South Slavic territory, but the procedural description of the particle, given by Premilovac, cannot be freely ascribed to the other languages. Some Croatian and Serbian vernaculars might be using the particle in a comparable fashion, but both languages in general seem to favor kao in comparison to ono.24 We are offering these case studies that follow theoretical and aerial threads running through all six chapters as a crack in the door for new approaches to South Slavic linguistic research. It is our hope that they will not only prompt critical responses, but also inform further research in the pragmatics of South Slavic discourse. The South Slavic languages are, as exemplified here, a very rich arena for pragmatic research. Furthermore, they provide a closer look into cognitive and argumentative processes in language and discourse, especially if these are seen as part of a general quest for the universality of pragmatic principles.

References Alexander, Ronelle. 2000. In Honor of Diversity: The Linguistic Resources of the Balkans. The Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture Series in South Slavic Linguistics, No. 2. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University. Andersen, Gisle and Fretheim, Thorstein. 2000. “Introduction.” In Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude, Gisle Andersen and Thorstein Fretheim (eds.), 1–16. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Blakemore, Diane. 2002. Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blass, Regina. 1990. Relevance relations in discourse: A study with special reference to Sissala. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blažanović, Stjepan. 1995. Hrvatski rječnik najučestalijih 7500 razlikovnih riječi hrvatskoga i srpskoga jezika [The Croatian dictionary of the 7,500 most frequent lexical differences between the Croatian and Serbian languages]. Zagreb/Sarajevo: Napredak.

24. Given that a great number of Croats and Serbs from Bosnia, who use ono according to Premilovac’s description of the particle, have migrated to Croatia and Serbia, and use ono in their everyday interaction, it remains to be seen whether and how this interaction will influence the semantic meaning and/or distribution of ono and kao in Croatian and Serbian naturallyÂ�occurring discourse.

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Okey, Robin. 2005. “Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian? Language and nationality in the lands of Former Yugoslavia.” East European Quarterly 38 (4): 419–441. Pavuna, Stanka. 1992. Govorimo li ispravno hrvatski? Mali razlikovni rječnik [Do we speak Croatian correctly? A small differential dictionary]. Zagreb: Integra. Peti-Stantić, Anita (ed.). 2008. Identitet jezika jezikom izrečen [The language identity expressed in a language]. Zagreb: Srednja Europa. Popov, Chris and Radin, Michael. 1989. Contemporary Greek Government Policy on the Macedonian Issue and Discriminatory Practices in Breach of International Law. Melbourne: Central Organizational Committee for Macedonian Human Rights, Australian Sub-Committee. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schourup, Lawrence. 1999. “Discourse markers.” Lingua 107: 227–265. Shea, John. 1997. Macedonia and Greece: The Struggle to Define a New Balkan Nation. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1986/95. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2nd ed. Stevanović, Mihailo. 1986. Savremeni srpskohrvatski jezik I. [The Contemporary Serbo-Croatian Language I]. Beograd: Naučna knjiga. Šamija, Ivan Branko. 1992. Razlikovnica hrvatskoga i srpskog jezika [A differential notebook of the Croatian and Serbian languages]. Zagreb: Školske novine. Šamija, Ivan Branko and Lukačić, Dražen. 1991. Razlikovni rječnik srpskoga i hrvatskoga nazivlja [A differential dictionary of the Serbian and Croatian terminology]. Zagreb: Školske novine. Škiljan, Dubravko. 2004. “From Croato-Serbian to Croatian: Croatian linguistic identity.” In Language in the Former Yugoslav Lands, Ranko Bugarski and Celia Hawkesworth (eds.), 67–83. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. Tomić, Olga Mišeska. 2004. “Standard Macedonian and its current relationship to the Macedonian dialects.” In Language in the Former Yugoslav Lands, Ranko Bugarski and Celia Hawkesworth (eds.), 185–196. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. Vazdar, Zdenko. 1993. Razlikovni rječnik hrvatskoga i srpskoga graditeljskoga nazivlja [A differential dictionary of the Croatian and Serbian terminology of construction industry]. Zagreb: Anteum. Wachtel, Andrew. 1998. Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Whitman, Lois and Laber, Jeri. 1994. Denying Ethnic Identity: The Macedonians of Greece. Helsinki: Human Rights Watch. Zwicky, Arnold M. 1985. “Clitics and particles.” Language 61 (2): 283–305.

chapter 2

Ama, a Bulgarian adversative connective Grace E. Fielder

This paper represents an account of the Bulgarian adversative connective ama ‘but’ against the relevance-theoretic background and discourse approach. Basing her research on the data from Bulgarian spoken discourse collected in the 1990s and from a late nineteenth-century comic novel which employs various stylistic registers, Fielder finds the adversity of ama to be related not to the preceding asserted proposition, but rather to one that may be inferred from the context. As a discourse connective, ama marks an exchange structure and links it to the ongoing discourse. Fielder speculates that one of its confusing features could be its scope because ama can connect in an adversative relation on a local level or on a larger, more global level.

1.

Introduction

The Bulgarian adversative connective ama ‘but’ provides an excellent opportunity to discuss several problems in the linguistic analysis of discourse markers. On the one hand, in some of its uses ama may be assigned to the syntactic category of conjunctions, and be defined in terms of truth-conditional semantics. On the other hand, there are less transparent uses of ama which have led it being assigned to the more fuzzy category of particles, or of discourse markers, a designation that includes a variety of linguistic items such as connectives, particles and interjections. The more traditional account of ama is that there are two homonymous items. Thus, the Bulgarian Academy Dictionary (RBE) has two separate entries: amá1 the conjunction and ámá2 the particle. In the discussion that follows, I will argue that there is only one albeit multifunctional and polysemous item ama whose prototypical function is best viewed as that of a connective that contributes a core meaning . The particle ámá2 as opposed to the conjunction amá1 may have either initial or final stress, although some dictionaries cite the particle form only with initial stress. Whether initial stress actually distinguishes the particle from the conjunction, or merely reflects dialectal or idiolectal variation is not clear. A further complication is the fact that ama is sometimes reduced to ma.

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of adversativity. It will be demonstrated below that it is possible to account for the multifunctionality of this linguistic item by incorporating the different levels (syntactic, semantic, discourse-pragmatic and interactional) on which it can operate. There are a number of interesting questions that arise in the discussion of ama, not all of which can be completely addressed in this paper. The ultimate and primary goal of this paper is to account for the different functions of ama. Connected to this issue is the question of the correlation between ama’s position and its function. That is, to what extent is position relevant for distinguishing ama as a conjunction versus a discourse marker in terms of its function? Also relevant is just how the adversative connective ama differs from the adversative connective no, which is traditionally considered to be only a conjunction. The assumption is that if we can more precisely define the characteristics of ama versus no, then we will have a better idea of what ama is. Finally, one overarching factor that is relevant for all of these questions is that of the role of register in the choice of ama or no. Indeed, the position of the Bulgarian Academy Grammar Sciences (GSBKE 1983:â•›300) is that ama is used in sentences of a razgovoren xarakter ‘conversational character’ and as such is typical of po-stari ‘older’ writers. Indeed, by Rå Hauge’s account (1999:â•›226), ama the conjunction is the colloquial equivalent of the conjunction no. If this is in fact the only difference between the two items, then one would expect that the same linguistic analysis could be used to account for ama and no, with register factors governing the distribution between them. Two sources have been chosen for the data: Krasimira Aleksova’s corpus of contemporary spoken Bulgarian, which was compiled in the 1990s and is available on the Internet (http://www.hf.uio.no/east /bulg/mat/Aleksova/), and Aleko Konstantinov’s late nineteenth-century comic novel Baj Ganjo. Aleksova’s corpus is most useful for documenting the frequent use of ama in the contemporary spoken language (as opposed to written texts and more formal speech, where it occurs more rarely, if at all). The second source, in contrast, reflects the Bulgarian language of the late 19th century and represents a very specific type of data. Written during a period of intense debate over codification and which features belonged in the standard language and which did not, Baj Ganjo derives much of its humor from the manipulation of stylistic register and deliberate exploitation of

. For other aspects of analysis of ama see Fielder (2005, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, and 2008d). . This type of comment reflects the fact that the language of the late 19th and early 20th century Bulgarian writers often included elements that were not part of the post-WWII standard language, particularly if rural or village speech was being represented. . Thus, for example, there are no instances of ama in the more formal speech of the corpus of Bulgarian parliamentary debates (http://www.hf.uio.no/east/bulg/mat/).

Chapter 2.╇ Bulgarian adversative connective ama



the contrast between the more standard speech of the western-educated students and the non-standard speech of the uneducated Bulgarian peasant, the character Baj Ganjo himself. Baj Ganjo contrasts both written and spoken language (it consists of both narrative and dialogue), as well as standard versus non-standard speech (of the students versus Baj Ganjo character). This second corpus then allows us to consider the role of register in the use of ama versus no.

2.

Semantic analysis of the adversative conjunctions ama and no

The GSBKE distinguishes between several types of adversative constructions, all of which are expressed by the conjunction no and by extension ama. The first is socalled strong contrast-delimitation (protivopostavitelno-ograničitelno, 1983:â•›299), where the proposition expressed in the clause introduced by the adversative conjunction (S2) delimits or even contradicts the proposition expressed in the previous one (S1). In this adversative use, the conjunctions ama and no are amenable to a truth-conditional semantic approach such that ‘S1 ama/no S2’ [S1 but S2] means that S2 negates or contradicts S1. See examples (1) and (2). (1) Baj Ganjo beše v stajata. Toj iskaše da prikrie zanjatieto si, no ne uspja i az zabeležix, če prišivaše edin nov džeb na vâtrešnata strana na anterijata si. ‘Baj Ganjo was in the room. He tried to hide what he was doing from me, no he couldn’t, and I noticed that he was sewing a new pocket onto the inside of his old-fashioned padded jacket.’ (2) O-xo! Da go vodja na banja! Men počnaxa malko da me zimat djavolite, ama se sdâržax i ne samo če se sdâržax, ami me i dosmeša. ‘So that’s it! The gentleman wants to be taken to the baths! I felt like telling him to go to hell, ama I restrained myself, not only did I restrain myself, but was even a bit amused.’

In both examples, the proposition in S2 negates or contradicts the proposition in S1. In example (1), Baj Ganjo does not manage to hide from the narrator what he is doing, and in example (2), the narrator does not tell Baj Ganjo off. Negation of S1, however, is not the only interpretation; the GSBKE also distinguishes the adversative-explanatory (protivopostavitelno-izjasnitelno, 1983:â•›299) use where S2 elaborates on S1. See examples (3) and (4). . Note that ami in example (2) is a different kind of ‘but’. Here it combines with i ‘and, even’ forming a kind of compound conjunction of a comparative nature that occurs in the larger construction ne samo če … ami i ‘not only… but even’. Fielder (2005 and 2008b) discusses the difference between ama and ami as signaling negative versus positive face.

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(3) V tazi sladkarnica az xodex često i mnogo dobre se poznavax s kasierkata, edna xubavička i vesela moma, vesela, no se dâržeše dobre i ne dopuštaše volnosti. ‘I often went to this pastry shop and knew the cashier very well: She was a cute, cheerful girl, quite lively, no proper, and she didn’t allow people to take liberties.’ (4) Ostavi se! Vidiš li tozi pojas? – i Baj Ganjo si povdiga si širokata žiletka,€– vsičkite muskali šte gi natâpča vâtre. Istina, težičko malko, ama sigur. ‘Forget it! Do you see this sash? – And Baj Ganjo raised his vest. – I’ll stuff all the phials in here. True, it’s a little heavy, ama it’s safe.’

In these two examples, what is being contradicted is not the proposition in the S1, but rather the assumptions raised by virtue of asserting S1. Thus, what we are dealing with here is not an explicit proposition, as in examples (1) and (2), but rather, an implied proposition (implicature). This implied proposition could be, for example, an expectation that the speaker fears may have been raised in the mind of the hearer, one that the speaker wishes to contradict, hence the further elaboration. In (3), the narrator wishes to contradict the assumption that the young girl’s lively behavior could be construed as so lively as to encourage improper advances. This use of ama then illustrates the concessive but defined by Quirk et al. (1972:â•›674): “Concessive conjuncts signal the unexpected, surprising nature of what is being said in view of what was said before that.” In example (4), Baj Ganjo rejects the suggestion to leave his valuable rose oil with the hotel staff and instead argues that keeping them on one’s person is a better option. He concedes the physical discomfort of the weight but asserts that this disadvantage is outweighed by the psychological security, which implies that the hotel staff are not trustworthy. Thus, the ama here does not negate S1, but rather elaborates and justifies his actions by countering assumptions that are implicit, rather than explicit, in the context. In both examples the adversative conjunction could be seen as the equivalent of Lakoff ’s (1971) denial of the expectation but. Regardless of what we call it, the salient point is that what is being contrasted here by these conjunctions is not the preceding asserted proposition, but rather one that may be inferred from the context. Thus, ama and no are not canonical conjunctions serving a strictly syntactic function; rather their scope extends beyond the level of the clause. When confronted with examples such as (3) and (4), a semantic, contentbased or conceptual notion of meaning loses its explanatory power. One alternative approach is that of Blakemore who proposes a procedural account of such . See Sweetser (1990:â•›100–111) for a similar analysis of English ‘but’ as a conjunction in the epistemic domain and in the speech-act domain.



Chapter 2.╇ Bulgarian adversative connective ama

items: “expressions such as after all, but or so do not encode a constituent of conceptual representation (or even indicate a concept), but guide the comprehension process so that the hearer ends up with a conceptual representation” (2002:â•›90– 91). This explanation needs to be understood against the background of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory, a cognitive reformulation of Grice’s Principles of Cooperative Conversation: Every utterance, that is, every act of ostensive communication carries the presumption of relevance. That is, the hearer recognizes the utterance as an act of deliberate and overt communication in which the speaker not only intends to convey a particular message, but is also actively helping the hearer recognize this. Optimal relevance is achieved first, through the presumption that the information that the utterance communicates interacts with the context for derivation of adequate contextual effects; and second, the presumption that no gratuitous effort is required for the recovery of contextual effects.  (Blakemore 2002:â•›105)

In this model, the function of but is to guide the hearer to contradict and eliminate an existing assumption. Blakemore illustrates this procedural meaning of but in example (5): (5) There’s a pizza in the fridge, but leave some for tomorrow.

The use of but in (5) leads to the contradiction and elimination of an existing assumption, (6) which is presumed to have been made manifest either by the statement of (5), or by the attendant circumstances, or knowledge that the speaker believes the hearer to hold (i.e. if it is a hungry teenager being addressed, for example, a wise parent will explicitly prohibit the proposition in (6)). (6) You can eat all the pizza in the fridge.

Because the scope of the connective in (5) extends beyond that of the clause level, I will refer to but, ama and no as adversative connectives rather than conjunctions, with the understanding that connectives subsume conjunctions. Thus, while all conjunctions are connectives, not all connectives are conjunctions. The adversative connectives in (3) and (4) then contradict inferred assumptions, rather than asserted propositions. In other words, ama and no procedurally encode the information that the hearer is intended to follow a particular inferential route which ends in the contradiction and elimination of a contextual assumption. The mental operations involved in (1) and (2) versus (3) and (4) are in fact quite similar, but differ with respect to the scope. The use of the term connective, rather than

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conjunction, thus allows us to retain a unitary explanation of ama and no while expanding their scope of operation.

3.

The role of register

Thus far we have been able to account for ama and no as adversative connectives using the same analytical tools. According to Rå Hauge (1999:â•›226), ama is the colloquial equivalent of the adversative conjunction no. This difference in register value is consistent with the etymology of the two connectives: no is an inherited form from Old Church Slavic (although its ultimate phonetic shape is actually due to the influence of Russian on the literary standard), while ama is generally agreed to be a borrowing from Turkish. Regardless of the actual etymology of ama, it is clearly part of razgovorna reč ‘colloquial speech’ (GSBKE 1983; Tiševa and Rå Hauge 2001; Vrina 1999), whereas no is the more neutral adversative connective of the standard language. It is reasonable to assume therefore that ama as colloquial material would be more likely to be found in dialogue than in narrative passages, whereas no would be more frequent in narrative. A comparison of the distribution of ama versus no in Aleko Konstantinov’s Baj Ganjo supports this characterization (see Table 1). Table 1. Relative frequency of no and ama in dialogue vs. narrative in Baj Ganjo no ama

Dialogue

Narrative

10.5% (8 N) 70.5% (31 N)

89.5% (81 N) 29.5% (13 N)

. Note that Vrina, however, takes the position that ama as an expressive particle relates to the utterance that it introduces, rather than linking that utterance to a prior one (1999:â•›60). . The source of ama is actually quite problematic. It could be a grammaticalization of native Slavic material: the connective a ‘and/but’ + ma < vocative mamo ‘mother’, or a borrowing of Turkish ama (which may have originally come from Arabic amma. Alternatively, it could be a borrowing from Greek αµέ. â•›‘surely, but’ (with the final vowel lowered either as a dialectal vowel harmony or by analogy to αλλά. â•›‘but’). B. Joseph (personal communication) suggests that this word could have been borrowed first into Turkish from Greek, and then from Turkish into Bulgarian, a frequently traveled route for borrowings in the Balkans. See Fielder (2008c) for a discussion of the ideology of the etymology of ama and ami. . Counts for Baj Ganjo were done on the first half of the novel, Baj Ganjo trâgna po Evropa (approximately 16,400 words).

Chapter 2.╇ Bulgarian adversative connective ama



Table 2.╇ Relative frequency of no vs. (a)ma in Aleksova corpus10 no (a)ma

13% (17 tokens) 87% (117 tokens)11

Likewise, one would expect ama to be more frequent than no overall in Aleksova’s corpus because it reflects contemporary spoken Bulgarian (see Table€2). This difference in register between no versus ama is further supported by the distribution within the dialogue in the novel Baj Ganjo. The folksy main character Baj Ganjo, who represents the stereotypical Balkan Bulgarian, consistently uses ama, never no. No is found only in the speech of the other, more educated characters, such as the Bulgarian student-narrators as well as the Czech scholar Jiriček and his mother, both of whom are non-native speakers of Bulgarian and therefore less likely to use colloquial forms. The next set of tables reflects the positional distribution of ama and no in both corpora. Recall that there seems to be a correlation (fairly explicitly stated by Rå Hauge 1999, and more obliquely by Tiševa and Rå Hauge 2001), such that conjunctions are more prototypically found in sentence-medial position, while discourse markers are more prototypically found in utterance-initial position. This correlation has to do with the fact that the scope of conjunctions is local, they link clauses or phrases, while the scope of discourse markers extends beyond the sentence-level. Dorgeloh (2004:â•›1766), for examples, discusses the restrictions on sentence-initial use of the connective and in English and the correlation of genre. Sentence-initial and is thus more frequent in conversation (Biber et al. 1999:â•›83–84), where the normative prescription against it is more likely to be violated. Georgakopoulou and Goutsos (1998), who argue that the position is essential for distinguishing between Greek connectives in a conjunction versus discourse marker function, demonstrate that sentence-initial alá ‘but’ is more frequent in spoken narrative and non-narrative, while sentence-medial alá is more frequent in written narrative and non-narrative. If such a correlation were to hold for Bulgarian, then we would expect to find that no, being a conjunction, would typically occur in sentence-medial position. Ama, in contrast, since

10. Counts were done for Sections 1.1–1.7 of Aleksova’s corpus, approximately 17,700 words and 4,200 lines. 11. It should be pointed out, however, that 42 of the total 117 tokens of ama in Aleksova’s corpus are actually uttered by the interviewer herself. She would often use ama to introduce questions aimed at controlling the topic of discourse (Tiševa and Rå Hauge 2001:â•›251). While this fact does skew the numbers somewhat, it does not necessarily invalidate the significance of the results.

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Table 3.╇ Position of ama in narrative vs. dialogue in Baj Ganjo Initial ama Medial ama

Narrative

Dialogue

Total

15% (2 N) 85% (11 N)

52% (16 N) 48% (15 N)

41% (18 N) 59% (26 N)

Table 4.╇ Position of no in narrative vs. dialogue in Baj Ganjo Initial no Medial no

Narrative

Dialogue

Total

22% (18 N) 88% (63 N)

13% (1 N) 87% (7 N)

21.5% (19 N) 78.5% (70 N)

it may function as either a conjunction or a discourse marker, should be more likely than no to occur in sentence-initial position. Moreover, we would expect to find a similar correlation with genre such that sentence-initial tokens of ama would be more frequent in dialogue than in narrative. In other words, while sentential position is not a diagnostic for distinguishing conjunction versus discourse marker, we should be able to observe certain tendencies that support our findings thus far. As we have seen in Table 1 ama is found more frequently in dialogue, which is consistent with its more colloquial character. By extension, one would expect more examples of ama in sentence-initial position (i.e. as a discourse marker) in dialogue than in narrative. And, in fact, text counts in Baj Ganjo show that this is indeed the case (see Table 3). Table 4 shows the position of no in narrative versus dialogue. The results here are somewhat surprising because we find that no is used more frequently in initial position in narrative than in dialogue. However, given that the total number of tokens of no in dialogue is quite small (8) relative to the total number in narrative (81), these figures are perhaps not statistically significant. The fact that no is more frequent medially than initially overall, however, is the result we would expect to find. In Aleksova’s corpus, which reflects the colloquial spoken language in informal settings, we would expect the distribution of ama to correspond more closely to that in dialogue. In fact, sentence-initial ama is even more frequent in Aleksova’s corpus, which is consistent with its more frequent use as a discourse marker and is equally an indication of its colloquial nature. It should be noted that while the numbers in Table 5 are highly suggestive of a link between sentence-medial versus sentence-initial position and ama’s function as conjunction versus discourse marker, they do not actually prove such a

Chapter 2.╇ Bulgarian adversative connective ama



Table 5.╇ Position of (a)ma vs. no in Aleksova corpus Initial ama Medial ama Final ama

65% (76 N) 30% (35 N) â•⁄ 5% (6 N)

Initial no Medial no Final no

29% (5 N) 59% (10 N) 12% (2 N)

correlation.12 In fact, Tiševa and Rå Hauge (2001:â•›242) explicitly state that ama as a pragmatic marker is not limited to sentence-initial position. What I think these figures actually do show is that in sentence-medial position, the scope of ama is more likely to be interpreted as a connective between two clauses or phrases (i.e. its scope is local). In initial position, however, ama’s scope is more global and is thus better situated to serve the purpose of textual cohesion than grammatical coordination (Halliday and Hasan 1976). In other words, position reflects the level on which the connective is operating, or is at least perceived to be operating. In sentence-medial position, then, ama would typically be interpreted as a conjunction connecting two clauses, but in sentence-initial position, it is more likely to be a discourse marker connecting two separate units of discourse. This is not to say that no cannot be used as a discourse marker, but rather that it is less suitable for use as one due to reasons of register. Given that these two connectives have essentially the same semantic meaning, it is more likely that the one used more frequently in conversation would be the one that is pressed into service as a discourse marker.

4.

Ama: From connective to discourse marker

We are now in a position to examine the function of the adversative connective ama as a discourse marker. The fact that ama has more than a conjunction function has already been pointed out by Rå Hauge (1999:â•›185), Tiševa and Rå Hauge (2001), and Vrina (1999). Rå Hauge defines pragmatic particles as “not connected to meaning and reference, but rather to the effect on the actual state of things that utterances have or are expected to have” (1999:â•›184). Tiševa and Rå Hauge (2001:â•›242) define pragmatic markers as realizing the “svârzanost meždu repliki v dialog“ ‘connection between replies in dialogue’, and subscribe to Blakemore’s procedural analysis of but in explaining the use of ama. Vrina (1999), however, maintains the distinction between ama as a conjunction and ama as an ekspresivna častica ‘expressive particle’, an item that conveys subjective emotional rather 12. Fielder (2008b) discusses in depth the significance of position as a diagnostic of function for the adversative conjunctions no, ama, and ami.

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than semantic information, and states that it relates to the preceding part of the utterance. This lack of consensus is typical of the literature about discourse markers, a group of linguistic items that share similar discourse-pragmatic functions, but defy classification as a single part of speech. The more precise the definition, however, the less inclusive the framework becomes. Jucker (1993:â•›436), for example, points out that Hölker’s (1991) four basic features of pragmatic markers, while useful from a typological point of view, turn out to be too restrictive when put into practice: i. they do not affect the truth conditions of an utterance; ii. they do not add anything to the propositional content of an utterance; iii. they are related to the speech situation and not to the situation talked about; and iv. they have an emotive, expressive function rather than a referential, denotative, or cognitive function. Thus, the fact that ama can be analyzed as a conjunction with truth-conditional meaning in example (2), which is repeated below, would rule it out as a discourse marker by virtue of (i). It would, in effect, impose the acceptance of two homonymous items, rather than one polysemous ama.13 (2) O-xo! Da go vodja na banja! Men počnaxa malko da me zimat djavolite, ama se sdâržax i ne samo če se sdâržax, ami me i dosmeša. ‘So that’s it! The gentleman wants to be taken to the baths! I felt like telling him to go to hell, ama I restrained myself, not only did I restrain myself, but was even a bit amused.’

Rå Hauge (1999:â•›185) takes example (7) from the Aleksova corpus, and claims that ama in utterance-initial position indicates that the content of the utterance does not follow from preceding context but rather negates it. (7)

– Ne, njama togava vâobšte da go piem. – Ama toj za tova e kupen! – No, we won’t drink it at all then. – Ama that’s what it was bought for!

This explanation appears to be consistent with the truth-conditional account of the conjunction ama in examples (2) and (4), except that here, ama connects two separate units of discourse uttered by two different speakers. While, strictly

13. Indeed Sweetser (1990) presents a very persuasive argument against homonymy by demonstrating how polysemy patterns in conjunctions can be explained by metaphor.



Chapter 2.╇ Bulgarian adversative connective ama

speaking, ama is not a conjunction here, it is still serving primarily a connective function. While it does not technically fit the description of a conjunction since it connects units larger than a clause, at the same time it has a clear semantic relation or familial resemblance to ama the conjunction. What is different here then is not the adversative relation signaled by ama in examples (2), (4) and (7), but rather what falls under its scope. It would seem that connecting in an adversative relation may be done on a local level or on a larger, more global level. It can thus be said that the conjunction ama conjoins clauses at a more local level whereas the connective ama conjoins implied assumptions. Even less local, then, would be the ama that connects replies between interlocutors. The ama in example (8), however, is presented as rather different still. In this example, also taken from the Aleksova corpus, Rå Hauge (1999:â•›185) states that ama is used to mark a return to a topic that the partner would otherwise consider exhausted. In the more procedural interpretation of Tiševa and Rå Hauge (2001:â•›25), this ama signals that the relevance of a question does not need to be sought in the immediately preceding context, but necessitates a return to an already mentioned theme for clarification or amplification. It is used, therefore, to manage talk at the interactional level. (8) – N  e pipaj ximikala, tova mi e ljubimija ximikal. Vsički go pipat, ne trjabva da go pipat. – Zašto? – Zaštoto ne trjabva. – Ama zašto ne trjabva? – Don’t touch my marker pen, that’s my favorite marker. Everybody uses it, they shouldn’t. – Why? – Because they shouldn’t. – Ama why shouldn’t they?

Since we are now discussing units that are being connected at the discourse-level, it would be useful at this point to review Schiffrin’s (1987) treatment of discourse markers. In Schiffrin’s view, discourse markers, one source of which are conjunctions or connectives, are sequentially dependent elements that bracket units of talk and contribute to the coherence of the discourse. According to this model the discourse can have several planes: a participation framework, an information state, an ideational structure, an action structure, and an exchange structure. What discourse markers do then is they connect utterances or chunks of discourse either on a single plane or across different planes. Schiffrin (2001:â•›57) gives example (9) as an illustration of the multi-functionality of the discourse marker but:

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(9) Jack: [The rabbis preach, [“Don’t intermarry” Freda: [But I did- [But I did say those intermarriages that we have in this country are healthy.

Here Freda’s but prefaces an idea unit (“intermarriages are healthy”), displays a participation framework (nonaligned with Jack), realizes an action (a rebuttal during an argument), and seeks to establish Freda as a current speaker in an exchange (open a turn at talk). Using Schiffrin’s discourse model, we can elaborate on Rå Hauge’s account of examples (7) and (8), which I would argue are not that different. In both examples, ama prefaces an idea unit, initiates a turn exchange and displays nonalignment with the interlocutor. Both act as rebuttals (although in (8) the rebuttal is framed as a question), and both function on the information plane by returning to (or in the case of (7) refusing to abandon) the topic. Ama, as a discourse marker, is then multifunctional and has variable scope across different levels and planes. Key to understanding the range of expression that ama has is that it is used primarily as an interactional marker expressing opposition or contrast. Moreover, this function must be understood in terms of a dialogue between a speaker and a hearer, more specifically as a response that is somehow opposed to what was said before. In a sense, then, we have now come to a conclusion similar to that reached at the end of Section 2, namely, that a meaningful account of ama must be constructed in the context of a speaker and a hearer engaged in negotiating meaning. The following section will analyze, in more detail, examples from Baj Ganjo and from Aleksova’s corpus in order to demonstrate the efficacy of this approach for both types of data.

5.

Ama, adversative response

Example (10), taken from Baj Ganjo, is perhaps emblematic of the use of ama by Konstantinov and illustrates the register distinction between no and ama. In the following passage, Baj Ganjo has shown up at the house of Jiriček, the famous scholar, and is trying to elicit an invitation to spend the night there rather than have to pay for a hotel room while in Prague: (10) – A  z šte navârtam po-često okolo vas, šte si prikazvame za Bâlgarija. Pa ako običate, sâglasen sâm i u vas da ostana, dodeto sâm v Praga. A? – Izvinete, no… – Kazvam, sankim, ako običate – objasnjava spleteno Baj Ganjo, – i men mi po-dobre na xotela, ama xajde, rekox, Ireček – naš čovek…



Chapter 2.╇ Bulgarian adversative connective ama

– B  lagodarja za vnimanieto; az bi zadâržal na drago sârdce u doma, no ne razpolagam s lišni pomeštenija. Dnes obače vie ste naš gost i šte objadvate u nas. – I’ll hang around your place more, we’ll chat about Bulgaria. And if you like, I’ll even stay here at your place while I’m in Prague. What do you say? – I’m sorry, no… – That is to say, I mean, if you would be so kind – Baj Ganjo explained in confusion – as for me, I would prefer a hotel, ama I said to myself, hey, I said, Jiriček, he’s one of us… – Thank you very much for your consideration, I would happily give you a place to stay here, no I do not have any extra room. Today, however, you are our guest and will dine with us.

Jiriček’s responses are fairly transparent. With the first no Jiriček obviously wishes to contradict Baj Ganjo’s assumption that he can spend the night. At the first hint of this contradiction, Baj Ganjo quickly realizes that he has overstepped some social boundary, that is, he has committed a face-threatening act by assuming that he is entitled to the hospitality. He immediately interrupts Jiriček before he can verbalize his objection in order to do some quick repair-work. Baj Ganjo does this by reproducing an internal conversation he had with himself that led him to the apparently reasonable assumption of hospitality in the first place. That is, to Baj Ganjo’s way of thinking, since they are virtually fellow countrymen, Jiriček would most surely, like any good Bulgarian, insist on observing Bulgarian customs regarding hospitality. With the second no Jiriček persists in his opposition by contradicting the more explicit, yet still unstated assumption that he even has a spare room to provide, while at the same time acknowledging Baj Ganjo’s claim of hospitality by offering dinner instead. Thus, both nos seem to be connectives with procedural rather than conceptual meaning in the sense that they introduce a proposition (S2) that contradicts an assumed proposition (S1): Jiriček must provide Baj Ganjo with lodgings because he has extra room and he is obligated to reciprocate the hospitality he received while visiting Bulgaria. Baj Ganjo’s use of ama, however, is less transparent. At first glance, it appears to be simply a colloquial version of no, used by Konstantinov to sharpen the contrast between the highly educated speech of Jiriček and the rural speech of Baj Ganjo. It is, after all, in sentence-medial position, the prototypical position for a conjunction. Upon closer examination, however, it turns out that this ama does not meet the positional criterion for a conjunction, in that it is not, strictly speaking, in medial position. This ama actually introduces a new unit of discourse, specifically a piece of reported speech which Baj Ganjo reproduces in order to justify his face-threatening act. This reported speech needs to be

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integrated into the preceding discourse chunk, and, I would argue, this is part of the function of ama here. This ama, therefore, could even be considered as utterance-initial in that it introduces a parenthetical phrase. Moreover, it does not link two propositions in the same way as the conjunction ama does in examples (2) and (4) above, even if the S1 is assumed. In fact, it is not clear what assumption is being contradicted. Nor is it clear what precisely constitutes the contradiction: ama xajde ‘but come on’, which, as a collocation, is a mitigating interjection (Greenberg 1996:â•›60; Tsizmarova 2005), or ama rekox ‘but I said’, which explicitly links it to the reported speech unit, or even ama Ireček – naš čovek ‘but Jiriček is one of us’, which links it propositionally to the Baj Ganjo’s assumption that Jiriček is under some sort of transferred obligation to reciprocate the hospitality he received while in Bulgaria (and therefore Baj Ganjo is not out of line in making this suggestion). Thus, ama here meets our criteria for a discourse marker, defined as a connective that links units of discourse together as opposed to a conjunction which links two clauses together on the syntactic and semantic level, but it appears to be operating on several levels at the same time. Again, Schiffrin’s discourse approach appears to be the more flexible method of looking at the use of ama as a discourse connective in (10), where it clearly marks an exchange structure, specifically the insertion of reported speech, and links it to the ongoing discourse. Ama introduces a turn-exchange in which Baj Ganjo interrupts his current discourse with prior discourse; it establishes the nonalignment of the interlocutor albeit with himself, and could even be construed as realizing an action: it serves to incorporate a face-saving action. Essentially, Baj Ganjo reproduces his alleged chain of inferences to justify his overstepping the bounds of propriety, namely that he had actually originally planned to stay at a hotel, and only presumed Jiriček’s hospitality out of respect for Jiriček’s position as a virtual fellow countryman. This example is also consistent with the role of register associated with the choice between ama and no. The exceeding polite and tactful European Jiriček uses the more standard no (along with other features of a more formal register, such as the formulaic blagodarja za vnimanieto ‘thank you for your consideration’ and use of the conditional mood bi zadâržal na drago sârdce ‘I would be pleased’) in his attempt to indirectly refuse Baj Ganjo’s request. Baj Ganjo, on the other hand, employs the more direct and assertive ama, along with other features of the colloquial register, i.e. the Turkism sankim ‘I mean’ and object reduplication (i men mi po-dobre na xotela ‘me as for me at a hotel is better’). Thus, what is being contrasted in this passage is not just implied propositions or assumptions, but the very different cultural behaviors and presuppositions underlying this particular hospitality script. The use of ama by Baj Ganjo reflects the directness, even bluntness of the Balkan peasant versus the more indirect and urbane European.



Chapter 2.╇ Bulgarian adversative connective ama

In general, the juxtaposition of the European and Balkan worlds can be seen as underlying most occurrences of ama in this novel. As a discourse marker, ama procedurally encodes the information that the hearer is intended to follow an inferential route which ends in the contradiction and elimination of not just a contextual, but a cultural assumption. It is part of a response that signals not just the non-alignment with what the speaker has said or assumed, but non-alignment of Balkan with European culture. It is only against this backdrop of culture clash that an “out-of-the-blue” ama, uttered where there is no preceding discourse to oppose, can be explicated. As Blakemore (1992:â•›105) points out, “the cancelled assumption is not necessarily an assumption derived, or even derivable, from an act of communication at all”. And indeed, it is possible for a speaker to use ‘but’ as a means of activating the procedure of contradiction and elimination in utterances which are not preceded by any discourse or act of communication at all. In example (11), ama not only expresses Baj Ganjo’s surprise at not finding a nail in the wall at the baths (as described by Vrina 1999:â•›190), but it is also a challenge to the assumption held by his audience that Germans are more advanced than Bulgarians. Moreover, it is also typical of his blustering manner and self-defensiveness, and his attempt to maintain his negative face (Fielder 2005, 2008b): (11) Toj se ogleda po stenite na koridora, potârsi njakoj gvozdej da zakači vâzela si; toj misli, če štom e stena, trjabva da ima gvozdei po neja, i se obâršta kâm mene: – Ama prosta rabota tezi nemci, edin gvozdej ne im stiga uma da zabijat, pa kazvat, če nie sme bili prosti. He looked along the walls down the corridor, hoping to find a nail he could hang his kit on. He expected every wall to have nails in it, and now, disappointed, he turned to me in disgust: – Ama these Germans are idiots, it doesn’t occur to them to pound in a nail. And they say that we’re stupid.

Thus, a great deal of the humor in the novel Baj Ganjo deals with the clash of expectations and assumptions that Bulgarians and Europeans have about each other. Aleko Konstantinov uses the colloquial discourse connective ama often for humorous effect to reveal this mismatch between expectations and world view, as well as to communicate the attitude of a given speaker, narrator or character with respect to the mismatch. This is the source of the emotive effects of surprise, dismay, or protest that is often associated with utterances prefaced by ama (cf.€Vrina 1999). In comparison with Baj Ganjo, the Aleksova corpus illustrates a later stage of development where ama appears to have lost a great deal of its marked cultural status and is used freely by almost all of the informants. Although it does retain its pronounced colloquial flavor, it is used regularly both as a conjunction, in the

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sense of being used sentence-medially to join clauses and phrases, as well as a discourse marker when used sentence-initially and turn-initially. Example (12) is a typical use of ama as a conjunction in the Aleksova corpus where in a written genre one would expect the more neutral no: (12) L: //n’ama ot nikâde nikâkvi plodove/ ne mogâ da si naprav’â džankovit (FS) džankovijât sok// as ot džanki kakâf sok praim/ ama nema džanki// sok// (Aleksova 1.1)14 //there’s no fruit to be had anywhere/ I can’t make my plums (FS) plum juice// I make a really good juice from plums/ ama there aren’t any plums// juice//

An interesting correlation in the Aleksova corpus is that utterance initial ama is often used to introduce interrogatives and imperatives, that is, ama as a discourse marker regularly functions both to realize an action and to initiate a turn exchange (it does something rather than simply means something). This utterance initial ama is particularly frequent in questions where the speaker is pressing for further information on a topic that the hearer seems to consider exhausted. Tiševa and Rå Hauge even comment on the interviewer’s propensity to preface such probing questions with ama for further information on a topic (2001:â•›251). See example (13) where V (= interviewer) is trying to get more information out of A who has already signaled that she has said all there is to say about the topic: tva e z Baj Žan ‘that’s it for Baj Žan’: (13) V: E koj mu ja redi? A: //edna fondacija/ taja kojato mu uredi izložbata tuka vâf bâlgarija// i vsičkite si romani še gi izdava/ sponsorirani/ i piše i kazá tija dni da se obadim i da otidem do t’ax// tva e z Baj Žan// V: Ama te sa se vârnali ot dolu?! A: // da/ tuka f sofija sâ V: Ama raboti li nešto? A: //koj/ toj li// V: Da. A: //ne//

14. Certain transcription conventions have been retained from Aleksova’s transcripts: “/” indicates a pause or intonational incompleteness when speaker is interrupted by another; “//” indicates a longer pause or intonational completion [for purpose of the text counts, ama following “//” is considered to be utterance-initial]; “…” indicates an extended pause or omitted part of the utterance; “F” stands for the presence of some kind of paralinguistic sound which is explained in parentheses; “FS” is used for what Aleksova terms a “false start”, but in example (12) is more commonly regarded as a repair.

Chapter 2.╇ Bulgarian adversative connective ama







V: A dobre, plaštat li mu nešto za tija izložbi? A: //za izložbite ne/ ako prodade nešto plaštât// V: Ama toj gi prodava! A: //toj e veči pens’oner misl’â// V: Eh, who’s arranging it for him? A: //some foundation/ the one that organizes the exhibition here in Bulgaria// and it will publish all his novels/ sponsored/ and he writes and said these days to call them up and go over there// and that’s it for Baj Žan V: Ama have they returned from down below? A: //yes/ they’re here in Sofia V: Ama is he doing some work? A: //who/ him?// V: Yes A: //no// V: Well okay, are they paying him something for these exhibitions? A: //for the exhibitions no/ if he sells something they pay// V: Ama he’s selling them! A: //he’s already retired I think//

V prefaces each question with ama marking a return to the prior topic. In this way V uses the first two amas to connect her discourse unit, a question, with prior discourse units. With the third ama she rejects A’s response to her question as to whether Baj Zhan was being paid for the exhibits, and retorts that he is selling his novels there. By equating receiving money with getting paid, V challenges the relevance of A’s response. Thus, ama functions as a connective on the discourse level, the information plane and interactional level. Note too that this type of interrogation constitutes a face-threatening act and ama can be construed as a signal of negative face, an assertion of one’s own desires in a situation where the interlocutor does not wish to conform. (Native speakers of Bulgarian have informed me that they would never use ama with someone of higher status, such as a supervisor at work or a teacher, because it would be disrespectful.) It is also noteworthy that when addressing two 7-year-old children in one interview (Aleksova 1.2d and 1.7d), the interviewer does not preface her questions or requests with ama, but typically resorts to a more vague introductory a ‘well/so/and/but’ for questions and the softer ami ‘but’ for requests. Example (14) is an exception, but it is important to note that (a)ma here expresses surprise (cf. example (15)) and is preceded by the unambiguously positive bravo which emphasizes positive face and defuses any negative face effect for (a)ma.

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(14) V: Bravo, ma ti vsičko razbiraš! V: Bravo, ma you understand everything!

The next example (15) displays ama in initial, medial and final position and allows us to view this discourse marker in its full range of expression. The first two tokens (as well as the fifth) preface an idea unit in which a mother (I) is complaining about her young son’s difficult behavior. It would be just as appropriate to translate ama as the English ‘and’ because here it has a primarily connective function, except for the fact that it conveys marked emotional content. The use of ama does not contradict anything she has already said, but rather indicates that her child’s behavior is so unexpected to her, so contrary to her expectations, especially given that it is in front of others. So, here we have examples of ama being used not to connect propositions with adversative content, but rather to indicate an adversative emotional reaction to what is being related. These uses of ama could be classified as expressive particles or even interjections (Vrina 1999), except that they also serve a connective function. The first ama reflects the disconnect between the mother’s expectations and the reality of her child’s behavior: a guest drops in and that moment is precisely when he chooses to behave badly. The second completes a list of bad behaviors. Ama in these contexts is not just a connective, but also an expression of shock and dismay. The fifth and final ama is used with the perfect in what Vrina (1999:â•›190–191) calls an admirative use, that is, expressing surprise at something unexpected.15 (15) V: Kaži kakvo stava. I: //mi kvo stava/ opšto vzeto se oprav’ame:/ toj ot vreme na vreme me nervira ta me iskarva ot nervi// dojde svetla tuka ama toj podiv’a// napravo ti kazvam/ dârža se odvratitelno/ razlivá sok tuka: ligavi se blâska:/ as zex da ja xranâ nali po eno vreme: toj se blâska vâf mene/ blâska ja neja/ štipe ja za krakâ// ama kakvo li ne/ as sâm sipala po edin sok sâs svetla da pieme:/ toj xodi zima í čašata/ a be užas užas// kvo mu staná izvednâš// e toj ne če e mnoo poslušen obače: beše: nevmožen// V: Ama zašto ti pravi vpečatlenie?! Vsički deca sa taka. I: //a be sički sa taka ama// V: Kato če li tja si go njama u doma! 15. Newmark (1998) points out a similar use of ama in Albanian as an interjection expressing sardonic amazement: (a) Ama ç’e paske tharë! (Iron) (mock praise) Boy, you sure have that down cold! (b) Ama na kandise! (Iron) Boy, did you convince us! (We don’t believe a word of it.)



Chapter 2.╇ Bulgarian adversative connective ama

I: //as ne/ ne če se pritesn’aam zaradi neja/ razbiraš li// ne če se pritesn’aam zaradi neja/ vâpros e če toj/ V: Če teb nervira. I: //mene me nervira/ as po edno vreme zex da kreštâ (smee se) i sa kato počna da xlenči… F… (s koeto imitira xlenčeneto na deteto – m’e: m’e:) ama takava lign’a e stanal// užâs// za fs’ako nešto sšo : k (imitira xlenča na sina si) iskal sok primerno// i taka si go iska/ i as vikam kvo snači tva/ stiga si se ligavil/ kaži sok// toj sok (s debel glas imitira deteto) vikam točno taka (smee se)// (Aleksova 1.5) V: Tell me what’s happening I: Well, what’s happening/ in general we’re managing/ from time to time he gets on my nerves, and I lose my patience// Svetla came over ama [=and] he goes wild // I’ll tell you straight/ he behaved abominably/ spilling juice, whining here, banging into things/ I tried to feed her y’know at one point, he smashed right into me/ he smashed right into her/ pinched her leg// ama [=and] what didn’t he do/ I had poured a juice to drink with Svetla/ he comes and takes her cup/ oh he was just terrible just terrible/ what happened to him all of a sudden// it’s not that he’s so obedient but he was just impossible// V: Ama why do you think that? All children are like that. I: //a be [come on/yeah right] they’re all are like that ama/ V: As if she doesn’t have one of her own at home! I: I wasn’t, it wasn’t that I was embarrassed because of her, y’see// I wasn’t embarrassed because of her/ the problem is that he/ V: That he gets on your nerves. I: It’s my nerves he gets on/ one time I almost screamed (laughs) and he starts to whimper… F… (imitates the child whimpering – m’e: m’e:) ama he started to whine so// horrible// for everything little thing juuf (imitates her son’s whine) he wanted juice for example// and that’s how he asks for it/ and I go what does that mean/ stop your whining/ say juice/ it’s juice (imitates the child with a thick voice) I go just like that (laughs)

V then tries to reassure the mother by disagreeing with her assessment and saying that all children are like that. As expected (both for the interviewer and for the context), she prefaces her counterstatement with ama. I responds with “a be” ‘come on, yeah right’ (which expresses protest, disagreement, or conflict between two speakers (Tiševa & Rå Hauge MS)), and then echoes what V just said, concluding with a final ama. This use of ama, I would suggest, is ironic and sarcastic

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and serves to reinforce her non-alignment with V’s position.16 Moreover, the fact that ama can occur in sentence-final position for ironic emotional effect is a non-prototypical use of the connective, and thus poses a serious challenge to the approach of using sentential position as a defining characteristic of conjunctions versus discourse markers.

6.

Concluding remarks

Several generalizations can be made based on the use of ama in Baj Ganjo and in Aleksova’s corpus. In 19th century Bulgarian ama is clearly felt to be a borrowing from Turkish, or at the very least part of the non-standard speech of the Balkan stereotype that Baj Ganjo is supposed to represent. At this point in the history of the literary language, it is used both as an adversative conjunction and as a discourse marker. This still holds true for the current colloquial language, which is interesting because one might expect that with the spread of literacy and the advocation of a standard language, the native Slavic form no would eventually have replaced ama – at least in the conjunction function. However, ama obviously fills certain communicative needs that no does not. Aleksova’s corpus shows that ama has now become an accepted part of colloquial Bulgarian precisely because of its use as a discourse marker. Ama serves an interactional function beyond the canonical connective function in that it may express the speaker’s adversative reaction or relationship with either the preceding discourse or some other element in the extralinguistic context.

References Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan and Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman. Blakemore, Diane. 1992. Understanding Utterances: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell. Blakemore, Diane. 2002. Linguistic Meaning and Relevance: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

16. This use of ama resembles the sentence-final use of the negative particle not in colloquial English in what Haiman (1998:â•›53) calls an “utterance deflater”. Suzuki (2000:â•›125) cites the following example (18) from Haiman and attributes the sarcasm to the fact that utterance that not follows is echoic (Sperber and Wilson 1992). He provides a bumper sticker as an illustration: “Bush/Quale in 1992 … not!” See also Mulder and Thompson (2008) for a discussion of final but in Australian English.



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Dorgeloh, Heidrun. 2004. “Conjunction in sentence and discourse: Sentence initial and and discourse structure.” Journal of Pragmatics 36: 1761–1779. Fielder, Grace. 2005. “Discourse markers as Balkanisms.” Eighth Annual Kenneth E. Naylor Lecture. Ohio State University, April 29, 2005. Fielder, Grace. 2008a. “Discourse markers in Macedonian: Balkan or Slavic?” Proceedings of the Sixth North-American-Macedonian Conference, 27–36. Ohrid: University of Saints Kiril and Methodij. Fielder, Grace. 2008b. “Adversative connectives in Bulgarian: Conjunctions or discourse markers?” In Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The multifunctionality of conjunctions, Ritva Laury (ed.), 79–97. Typological Studies in Language 80. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fielder, Grace. 2008c. “The Status of Discourse Markers as Balkanisms in South Slavic.” In American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists, Christina Y. Bethin (ed.), Volume 1: 1–19. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. Fielder, Grace. 2008d. “Macedonian Discourse Markers in the Balkan Sprachbund.” In Special volume of Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (STUF), Zuzanna Topolinska and Eleni Buzarovska (eds.), 61 (2): 120–127. (GBSKE) Grammatika sâvremennija bâlgarski knižoven ezik. Tom II. Morfologia. [The Grammar of the Contemporary Bulgarian Literary Language. Book II. Morphology.] 1983. Sofia: BAN. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra and Goutsos, Dionysis. 1998. “Conjunctions versus discourse markers in Greek: The interaction of frequency, position, and functions in context.” Linguistics 36–35: 887–917. Greenberg, Robert. 1996. The Balkan Slavic Appellative. Műnchen/Newcastle: Lincom Europa. Haiman, John. 1998. Talk is Cheap. New York: Oxford University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Hölker, Klaus. 1991. “Französisch: Partikelforschung”. Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik. Vol. V. 2: 77–88. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Jucker, Andreas. 1993. “The discourse marker well: A relevance-theoretical account.” Journal of Pragmatics 19: 435–452. Lakoff, Robin. 1971. “If ’s, and’s and but’s about conjunction.” In Studies in Linguistic Semantics, Charles Fillmore and Terence Langendoen (eds.), 114–149. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston. Mulder, Jean and Thompson, Sandra A. 2008. “The grammaticalization of but as a final particle in English conversation.” In Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The multifunctionality of conjunctions, Ritva Laury (ed.), 179–204. Typological Studies in Language 80. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Newmark, Leonard. 1998. Albanian-English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey and Svartik, Jan. 1972. A Grammar of Contemporary English. London: Longman. (RBE) Rečnik bâlgarskija ezik. [A Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language] I. 1977. Sofia: BAN. Rå Hauge, Kjetil. 1999. A Short Grammar of Contemporary Bulgarian. Columbus: Slavica. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schiffrin, Deborah. 2001. “Discourse Markers.” In Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi Hamilton (eds.). Oxford: Blakckwell. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1992. “On verbal irony.” Lingua 87: 53–76.

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Suzuki, Satoko. 2000. “Saying something like: Utterance-final expressions of self-mockery in Japanese.” High Desert Linguistics Society 3: 121–130. Available on line at: http://linggraduate. unm.edu/resources/proceedings/2000/suzuki%2011.pdf Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tiševa, Jovka and Rå Hauge, Kjetil. 2001. “Säjuzi za protivopostavjane v roljata na pragmatični častici.” [“Adversative conjunctions in the role of pragmatic particles”]. Problemi v bälgarskata razgovorna reč [Problems in the Bulgarian colloquial language] 5: 242–252. Veliko Târnovo. Tiševa, Jovka and Rå Hauge, Kjetil. (n.d.). “Častitsa abe kato pragmatičen marker” [“The particle abe as a pragmatic marker”]. MS. Tchizmarova, Ivelina. 2005. “Hedging functions of the Bulgarian discourse marker xajde.” Journal of Pragmatics 37: 1143–1163. Vrina, Mari. 1999. Ekspresivnite chastici v bâlgarsija ezik [Expressive Particles in the Bulgarian Language]. Veliko Târnovo.

chapter 3

Kamo, an attitudinal pragmatic marker of Macedonian* Alexandre Sévigny

Exploring the properties of the Macedonian pragmatic marker kamo in six types of linguistic structure within the relevance-theoretic framework, Sévigny demonstrates that kamo is an indicator of the speaker’s dissociative attitude towards a belief in the hearer’s ability and willingness to perform a certain action. In this way, kamo is defined as encoding procedural information and contributing to the explicit side of communication by signaling the formation of an interpretive, higher-level explicature. The data for Sévigny’s paper were collected in the Egyptian-Macedonian speech community in Canada. This inimitable speech community is composed of immigrants and second and third generation Macedonian-Canadians who have remarkably preserved spoken fluency in the Macedonian variant of their parents.

1.

Introduction

This paper describes the Macedonian discourse marker kamo as an indicator of the speaker’s attitude towards the hearer and/or the situation of utterance. The first two sections of the paper describe data and their sources (2) and give an overview of the comparative interrogatives in other South Slavic languages (3). After a theoretical discussion (4), I analyze kamo in its six contextual occurrences (5). I then proceed to give a proposal for a unified account of the meaning of kamo based on the relevance-theoretic notion of procedural meaning (6): the * I would like to thank Lars Wessman, Christina Kramer, Victor Friedman, Georges Sévigny, Savitsa Sévigny, Lenka Sulevič and Mike Kliffer for their comments, criticisms and opinions. I would also like to thank the editors of this book for their thorough comments and generous support. Any errors or inconsistencies are, of course, my own. . Sévigny (2002) provides a partial description of the pragmatics of kamo; Sévigny (2004) is a brief relevance-theoretic sketch of the analysis in this paper.

46 Alexandre Sévigny

six meanings of kamo are reduced to two generic cases that are signaled by the examined discourse contexts and situations of utterance.

2.

Data and cultural background

The data were collected in the Egyptian-Macedonian speech community in Canada. I interviewed six females, aged 35, 42, 55, 59, 62, 77; and six males aged 22, 31, 45, 60, 77, 80. To test the validity of the Egyptian-Macedonian data, I consulted 15 diasporic speakers originating from the Aegean Macedonia, Bitola, Skopje and Galičnik, all Macedophones who have lived in diasporic communities in Toronto, Detroit, Kuwait City and Egypt. It remains to be seen whether the data are valid for Macedophones actually living and raised in contemporary Macedonia. The data were collected over a period of six months from January 2002 to June 2002 in semi-structured face-to-face dyadic interviews. Consultants were asked to make speaker judgments concerning the grammaticality of sentences and their salience in different discursive contexts. I recorded the interviews on a minidisc and took extensive handwritten notes. I believe it is helpful to give a short history of the unique speech community from which the examples were taken. The speech community is composed of immigrants and second and third generation Macedonian-Canadians for whom the link between linguistic identity and ethnic identity is particularly important, given that the Macedonian variant they speak has been transmitted in a diaspora that is two or three times removed from the source country. Settled in the Greater Toronto Area, this group is composed of people originating from Tetovo, a city in North-Western Macedonia. Most were men who left their homes in 1940 to migrate to Cairo and Alexandria (Egypt) to go “na gurbet”, become “pečalbari” and make their fortune. Once in Egypt, most became successful merchants and thrived, starting families with women who were the children of other pečalbari. Sometimes, they would return to Macedonia to marry. Thrown together into a community in Egypt, the expatriate Macedonians began to form a cohesive diasporic group with a strong cultural identity. As their businesses became more successful and expanded, the

. The original Macedonian phrase ‘odi na gurbet’ is a Turkism that means to go alone to another place in order to work. The other place could be another village or even a different country. . A ‘pečalbar’ is someone who has gone ‘na gurbet’ that is, to work elsewhere because there is no work locally.



Chapter 3.╇ Macedonian attitudinal marker kamo

young pečalbari brought friends from Macedonia and eventually the community achieved the critical mass necessary to be culturally self-sustaining. The community retained a distinctly Macedonian identity although their members had much contact with Serbs and other Yugoslavs through the Yugoslav Club in Cairo, wherein the Serbo-Croatian language and culture were privileged. The young men and women of this original ‘migrant generation’ met and married in Cairo in the 1940s and 1950s and produced a second generation that, for political and economic reasons, rarely had occasion to travel back to Macedonia. This second generation attended American and French schools, and pursued higher education at the University of Cairo and the American University of Cairo. However, conditions changed when King Farouk, a pro-British sovereign, was removed and replaced by Abdel Nasser. Life became very difficult for most non-Arabs living in Cairo, essentially due to the social and economic effects of Nasser’s plan for “arabization”. Given this difficult situation, the Macedonian diasporic community left Cairo and Alexandria under duress, and virtually destitute from governmental expropriation. They migrated en masse, between 1957 and 1966 to Toronto (Canada), and formed an extended community of approximately 300 people who lived in the confines of their cultural and linguistic space. The first and second generations of Macedonian immigrants began to marry, both within their own ethnicity and with Canadians of various ethnicities, and produced a third and a fourth generation who identify themselves as culturally Macedonian, largely due to their linguistic identity. It is remarkable that this linguistic identity was maintained by Macedonian speakers who had never had the opportunity to live in a native Macedophone environment. They were, for the most part, children and grandchildren of people who had neither lived in a Macedophone environment, nor been educated in Macedonian. However, this third and fourth generation has preserved spoken fluency in the Macedonian variant of their parents. Moreover, they have managed to reintroduce literacy and, given the independent status of Macedonia after the Yugoslav dissolution, they have begun to rebuild political, commercial and cultural ties with the ‘old country’. Due to this reestablishment of relations with Macedonia, the community of first, second, third and fourth generation diasporic Egyptian-Macedonian-Canadians has begun to ‘standardize’ their community culture. One of the effects of this identity shift is a move towards literacy in the Macedonian language. The effect of new media and communications, the Internet in particular, has been to reinforce identity ties with Macedonia and the standard cultural variant. It has . The Serbo-Croatian language and culture were accorded a high status in the Former Yugoslavia. It was the language of culture and prestige, serving as a lingua franca for members of the other ethnicities. This situation was mirrored in Yugoslav diasporic communities.

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also led to a more active involvement with the political and economic culture of Macedonia. As a result, there was a shift from what was before a hybrid identity, located somewhere between being “Yugoslav” and being “Macedonian”, toward a more clearly defined “Macedonian” identity. This process of self-definition encompassing four diasporic generations has also evolved through constant exposure to a very diverse set of languages.

3.

A comparison with other South Slavic locative interrogatives

The South Slavic languages differ in how they designate the locative adverb. Serbian and Slovene use one word for a static locative and the other to indicate direction. Croatian additionally designates the destination. Bulgarian and Macedonian, however, use only one form for all three locative meanings: kade, in Macedonian and kŭde in Bulgarian. In addition to kade, Macedonian presents another lexical option for asking the whereabouts of something. As a locative adverb of direction, the meaning of kamo corresponds to English “whither”. However, kamo seems to be much more Table 1.╇ South Slavic locative interrogatives Where is the book? (static location)

Whither are you going? (dynamic direction)

Where to are you going? (destination)

Bulgarian

Kŭde e kniga-ta6? wh cop n-d.art7

Kŭde otivaš? wh v-PRES

Kŭde otivaš? wh v-PRES

Croatian

Gdje je knjiga? wh cop n

Kud(a) ideš? wh v-PRES

Kamo ideš? wh v-PRES

Macedonian

Kade je kniga-ta? wh cop n-d.art

Kade odiš? wh v-PRES

Kade odiš? wh v-PRES

Serbian

Gde je knjiga? wh cop n

Kuda ideš? wh v-PRES

Kuda ideš? wh v-PRES

Slovene

Kje je kniga? wh cop n

Kam greš? wh v-PRES

Kam greš? wh v-PRES

. As noted earlier, this claim is made here only for the vernacular supported by the data for this paper. . Here -ta functions as the definite article. Among the South Slavic languages, only Macedonian and Bulgarian have developed a definite article. . Abbreviations used in this table: WH = question word; COP = copula; DET= determiner; N€= noun; V = verb; PRES = present; D.ART = definite article, O.PRO = object pronoun.

Chapter 3.╇ Macedonian attitudinal marker kamo



than this because it permits the speaker to express a series of affective nuances that the other static locative/dynamic directional interrogative adverbs do not. Moreover, this phenomenon appears to be unique to Macedonian. Before moving on to describe kamo, I shall briefly examine the difference in use between kade and kamo in Macedonian: (1) Kade je kučeto? wh cop n-art.def ‘Where is the dog?’ (2) Kamo go kučeto? wh o.pro n-art.def ‘So, where is the dog?/So, where is that dog?’

Given these preliminary examples, and ignoring for a moment the use of the copula vs. definite pronoun, we can see that kade is a propositional equivalent of the English “where”. Kamo, however, is different. I shall demonstrate in this paper that kamo presents a whole series of beliefs and attitudes on the part of the speaker, which the hearer can use to enrich the basic propositional content of the underlying question.

4.

Some relevance-theoretic considerations

Three ideas from relevance theory will be of particular use to my analysis of kamo, namely, the notions of ‘interpretive resemblance’, ‘metarepresentation’ and ‘echoic mention’.

4.1

Interpretive resemblance

According to relevance theory, human beings have the cognitive capacity to entertain and represent utterances or thoughts not only as descriptions of states . The exception is the idiomatic use of kamo in Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian phrases such as kamo sreće (‘if only [we] were lucky’). . A good introduction to relevance theory can be found in Blakemore (1992). Sperber and Wilson (1995) provide a book-length argument for relevance theory and demonstrate its usefulness to theorists working in different communication-related disciplines. Carston (2002) gives a global presentation of the theory and situates it in the larger linguistic, philosophical and cognitive scientific debates surrounding the study of the mind and language. Sperber (1996) presents relevance theory as a method for taking a naturalistic and materialist approach to the study of culture.

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of affairs, but also as projected, inferential interpretations of other utterances or thoughts. The measure of similarity between the source representation and the inferred interpretive representation is called interpretive resemblance. Interpretive resemblance is usually defined – admittedly rather loosely – as the degree or extent of shared content, that is, of shared logical and contextual implications  (Carston 2002:â•›332). An extreme example of shared content is literal interpretation, in which an utterance shares all of the content of another utterance or thought.

4.2

Metarepresentation

The theoretical concept of ‘interpretive resemblance’ is closely linked to the concept of ‘metarepresentation’. The traditional code model of communication involved three parts: a linguistic form, a message mapped onto that form, and a medium of transmission (a string of sounds or written symbols). Finding the traditional code model inadequate, Grice (1989) developed an inferential model of human communication based in large part on the idea that the transmission of meaning is largely dependent upon the recognition of speaker intention by the hearer. However, the discovery of ‘literal meaning’ was deemed to be of primary importance.10 This focus on what is said radically reduced the inferential component in utterance understanding and resulted in a strongly idealized notion of speaker meaning. This reductivist and idealized stance made it difficult to argue for the psychological plausibility of the Gricean pragmatic model. In an attempt to build a cognitive pragmatic theory which would yield psychologically plausible analyses, relevance theorists developed a meaning-recovery procedure based on a cost-benefit analysis of cognitive resources, which yields one ‘most relevant’ meaning. The relevance-theoretic meaning-recovery procedure starts with a decoding of the fragmentary meaning of the linguistic code that is then enriched to the level of full-propositionality through the use of contextual information. Wilson (2000:â•›420) states the relevance-theoretic meaning-recovery procedure very clearly: Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects a. Consider interpretations in terms of [cognitive] accessibility; b. Stop when your expectation of relevance is satisfied.

10. For Grice, the build-up of the explicit content of an utterance is a purely formal matter (Carston 2002:â•›107–114). This means that inference happens pretty much only at the level of implicature.

Chapter 3.╇ Macedonian attitudinal marker kamo



The inferential way of looking at communication has led to the development of several cognitive psychological concepts, including the concept of ‘metarepresentation’. In a nutshell, humans are uniquely able not only to construct mental representations of lower-order representations but also to construct representations of representations, and to develop the panoply of theories of mind-based strategies for understanding utterances.11 From this perspective, a fully-propositional, contextually-enriched representation of an utterance is embedded in a higher-order representation that reports the speaker’s beliefs, desires, attitudes, etc., concerning what is being – or about to be – said. That higher-order representation may also report the speaker’s attitude towards a thought, utterance or proposition put forward by the hearer in a previous exchange. Three main types of representation have been investigated: abstract representations (e.g. sentences as in (3a)), public representations (e.g. utterances as in (3b)) and mental representations (e.g. thoughts as in (3c)). (3) a. Cats can speak Macedonian. b. Sasha said that cats can speak Macedonian. c. Savitsa believes that cats can speak Macedonian.

In fact, metarepresentation involves three varieties of cognitive abilities: metapsychological, meta-communicative and meta-logical (Noh 2000:â•›61–103; Wilson 2000:â•›411–419). A metarepresentation involves meta-psychological abilities when the original representation is a thought, as in (4a), meta-communicative abilities when the original is a public representation, as in (4b), and meta-logical abilities when the original is an abstract proposition, as in (4c): (4) a. Sasha intends me to believe that cats can speak Macedonian. b. Sasha said that cats can speak Macedonian. c. It cannot be proven that cats can speak Macedonian.

4.3

Echoic mention

Echoic mention is a term that refers to the (partial) repetition of an utterance. Particularly useful to the analysis of kamo is the frequent use of echoic mention to reveal emotional states. Carston (2002:â•›298) explains:

11. “Theory of mind” is the term used by philosophers and psychologists to talk about the human ability to represent in one’s mind thoughts about thoughts that one attributes to other people. For more about the concept of ‘theory of mind’, particularly from the point of view of developmental neuroscience, see, amongst many others, Astington (1993).

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A representation is used echoically when it attributes some aspect of its form or content to someone other than the speaker herself at that moment and expresses an attitude to that aspect. The attribution may be overt (encoded) or tacit (to be inferred), and, similarly, the expression of attitude may be overt or tacit. […] when that attitude is dissociative (which would have to be pragmatically inferred), the utterance is a case of irony.

Often in spoken language, utterances are accompanied by pitch and intonation contour to render association/dissociation explicit, as in the following examples: (5) a. Sasha: It’s cool that our cat can speak Macedonian. [They look at the cat but the cat remains mute] Savitsa (sarcastically): It’s cool that our cat can speak Macedonian, indeed. b. Sasha: It’s cool that our cat can speak Macedonian. [Sasha says something to the cat in Macedonian and the cat looks up] Savitsa (cheerfully): It’s cool that our cat can speak Macedonian, indeed.

Irony is very important for the affective/emotional readings that kamo can trigger, but in order to understand them, the hearer must attribute thoughts to the speaker about the speaker’s beliefs and attitudes towards the hearer and towards the proposition expressed by the utterance in which kamo is used.

5.

The pragmatic marker kamo

The Macedonian pragmatic marker kamo encodes the speaker’s dissociative attitude towards a current belief concerning the hearer’s ability and willingness to perform a certain action. In terms of distribution, kamo occurs in six types of linguistic structure: (1) kamo in questions with definite reference, (2) kamo in questions with indefinite reference, (3) the copular use of kamo+def, (4) the stand-alone kamo, (5) kamo with dative reference and (6) kamo in affectionate frames. I will now examine each of these constructions in turn.

5.1

Kamo in questions with definite reference

There is a complex interplay of factors in kamo+def questions, where ‘def ’ denotes a definite referent, which in Macedonian is prefaced by a definite pronomial.

Chapter 3.╇ Macedonian attitudinal marker kamo



(6) Kamo ga mačka-ta? Where-PART 3SG-ACC-F cat-DEF.ART12 ‘Where is that cat?’

The metarepresentations triggered by this utterance are the following: (6)

a. b. c. d.

I expected you to have produced the cat. I believed that the cat would now be in my sight. I am here and the cat is nowhere to be seen. I believe that you are not able to produce the cat.

The hearer must hold a set of metarepresentations (6a–d) in order to understand the definite question prefaced by kamo. The speaker’s emotive attitude falls into two general categories: (i) frustration and expectation of the hearer’s explanation or excuse; or (ii) an expression of chiding or irony, with an expectation of shared camaraderie and humor. Because kamo goes with emotive irony and frustration, it can only be used when there is a very weak degree of resemblance (or zero-resemblance) between the speaker’s previous expectation and the observable situation at the moment of utterance. The use of kamo with definite referents is restricted to the present tense as evidenced by (6). The event dynamics are simple: a past dynamic event was expected to result in a present situation which has not actually materialized. The prediction that the use of kamo+def is restricted to present time is borne out when we try to use this construction in a non-present time, as in (7) and (8) below: (7) *Kamo beše mačka-ta? Where-PART be-PAST-3SG cat-DEF.ART ‘Where was the cat?’ (8) *Kamo ķe bide mačka-ta? Where-PART FUT be-FUT-3SG cat-DEF.ART ‘Where will the cat be?’

Example (7) is predictably infelicitous: since the situation has already occurred, the frustration felt is no longer actual and the higher-level assumptions in (6) are no longer meaningful. Example (8) is also predictably infelicitous because it does not make sense to have concrete expectations about future events since they have not yet occurred and hence their result is unknown. 12. All grammatical glosses from this point on reflect the Leipzig Glossing Rules developed by Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology’s Department of Linguistics, and can be found at http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php, with an addition of the mark PART for ‘particle’.

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To sum it up, while kamo + def can only be used with an actuated present time reference, the locative kade is used with any time reference.13

5.2

Kamo in questions with indefinite reference

With an indefinite referent, the meaning of kamo appears somewhat different, given that it is normally used in a situation where the speaker is exasperated: (9) Kamo masa? Where-PART table ‘Isn’t there any table here?’

Example (9) illustrates a case of ironic utterance and the lack of referent’s specificity increases the strength of the ironic attitude expressed in the utterance. This usage, which can signal a variety of speaker attitudes ranging from slight exasperation to irritation and frustration depending on pitch and intonation contour, is restricted to discursive situations stemming from a broken promise. Suppose that Zlatko has promised Julena a table; he has put such great emphasis and focus on the table (making repeated reference to the table and its qualities) that Julena has become incredulous as to the table’s existence. In a situation where the promised table is needed but nowhere to be found, Julena, disappointed and proven in her doubts about Zlatko’s false braggadocio, will utter (9) the above, thereby communicating the following beliefs concerning Zlatko: (9) a. The speaker believes the hearer is incapable of producing a table. b. The speaker believes that the hearer does not keep his communicated promises. c. The speaker believes the hearer is an untrustworthy person.

To understand the attitudinal consequences of kamo+indef, in relation to kamo+def, we need to examine the set of metarepresentations which are necessary for comprehending kamo+indef-utterances. Kamo+indef is used to connote 13. For the sake of clarity, note that the use of kade with definite referents follows quite different dynamics. First, there is no pre-expectation that the hearer would have produced the object in question. Hence, the set (6a–d) does not hold. Secondly, because there is no underlying set of beliefs regarding the hearer’s ability to produce the item in question, kade is not limited to the present tense. Hence, the following questions are perfectly acceptable: grammatical Kade beše mačkata? “Where was the cat?” Kade ķe bide mačkata? “Where will the cat be?” Note also that kamo, in contrast to kade, is followed by ‘ga’ which pre-echoes the definite form ‘mačkata’.

Chapter 3.╇ Macedonian attitudinal marker kamo



an emotive restriction: the speaker is reacting to a situation which has generated a frustrating discrepancy between a possible, ideal situation – the one in which Zlatko produces a table as promised – and the real situation in which he cannot or will not produce the table. Note that this use of kamo also requires the present tense in order to allow a reaction to a present discordance between a request and the current inability to comply with it. Normally, kamo+indef is used when there is metacommunicative content since such situations are dependent on the receipt of messages and not upon remembered past promises. In (9), for instance, Julena is (subpropositionally) metarepresenting the utterance whereby Zlatko communicated his promise to deliver a table. The metacommunicative use of kamo in (9) leads to the following set of metarepresentations: (10)

Zlatko said that Zlatko would produce a table. a. Julena believed that Zlatko knew that there was a table here. b. Julena is here and she does not see any table here. c. Julena does not believe there is a table here. d. Julena believes that Zlatko is not able to produce a table here and that Julena’s initial belief that Zlatko knew where a table was located, based on Zlatko’s communicated assurance, was incorrect.

Note that the accumulation of metarepresented information is reflected in an intensified sense of frustration. In fact, kamo+indef standardly signals the speaker’s extreme frustration (bordering on futility) when faced with the interlocutor’s inability to fulfill his communicated promise.

5.3

The copular use of kamo+def

The third use of kamo is somewhat unusual. In this situation, kamo+def can occur with a copular predicate, but only in the 3rd person plural.14 Let us compare examples of kamo+def with a copula (11) and without it (12):15 (11) Kamo sa student-i-ti? Where-PART be-PRES-3PL student-PL-DEF.ART.PL ‘Where are the students?’ [I don’t see them.] a. *Kamo je student-ot? Where-PART be-PRES-3SG student-DEF.ART 14. Exactly why kamo is used with the third person plural, and not with the third person singular, is not quite clear. To explore this intriguing point would take this article too far afield. 15. Sa and je are the third person plural and singular forms of the verb to be. Gi and go, the plural and singular forms of the direct pronoun, are used in complement-doubling situations.

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(12) Kamo gi student-i-ti? Where-PART 3PL-ACC student-PL-DEF.ART.PL ‘Where are those students?’ [I don’t see them.]

Example (11) marks the speaker’s disappointment and/or confusion without attributing any negative beliefs to the hearer’s involvement or responsibility. In this case, the speaker might have entered the room expecting to see the students and was disappointed at not seeing them. However, the speaker had no expectations whatsoever regarding the hearer. While my informants rejected (11a), they considered ‘Kade je studentot?’ acceptable (provided that the student is deemed not to have arrived yet). The set of metarepresentations required for the understanding of kamo+def with a copula is similar to that of kamo+def except for the beliefs regarding the hearer’s involvement and responsibility. Example (12) carries the same nuance with a twist. The speaker, who expected to see the students, blames the interlocutor for their absence and is being ironic with her question. She assumes that it is manifest to both the speaker and hearer that the hearer did not keep his promise about the students. The copular use of kamo+def is marked in comparison to the following neutral alternative, which is a simple request for information: (13) Kade sa student-i-ti? Where be-PRES-3PL student-PL-DEF.ART.PL ‘Where are the students?’

Even though (13) could be made to indicate the speaker’s attitude (irony or disappointment), it would require a different intonational and prosodic pattern.16 Note also that the set of metarepresentations (6a–d) and (10a–d) underlying both the copular and double-referent uses of kamo requires a situational context and an anaphoric textual reference.

5.4

The stand-alone kamo

The stand-alone kamo is regularly used to indicate the speaker’s disbelief in the propositional content of the preceding utterance: (14) a. Vidi, ete ga tsarina-ta! Look-IMP-2SG DEM 3SG-ACC czarina-DEF.ART ‘Look, there is the Czarina!’

16. All of my informants told me that they would find it odd to use this construction for irony, as they would prefer the construction exemplified in (12) to accomplish this goal.

Chapter 3.╇ Macedonian attitudinal marker kamo



b. Kamo? ‘Where?’ [I don’t see her and I don’t believe you see her either. Show her to me.]

Here the speaker of (14b) does not see the Czarina and is incredulous as to whether the speaker of (14a) has really seen what (s)he thinks (s)he has seen. The metarepresentational set captures this situation as a free-standing version of kamo+def questions: (14)

c. d. e. f.

I expected you to have shown me the Czarina. I believed that the Czarina would now be in my sight. I am here and the Czarina is nowhere to be seen. I believe that you are not able to show me the Czarina.

The stand-alone kamo differs from kamo+def in that it is a blend of the metarepresentational dynamics underlying questions with definite reference and those with indefinite reference. Since this is not necessarily a case of unfulfilled expectations, the hearer is more likely to be able to provide the missing information and resolve the interpretive resemblance positively.

5.5

Kamo with dative referent

Examples (15) and (16) demonstrate the essential difference between kade- and kamo-questions: (15) Kade im je kafe-to? Where 3PL.DAT be-PRES-3SG coffee-DEF.ART ‘Where is their coffee?’ (16) Kamo im go kafe-to? Where-PART 3PL.DAT 3SG-ACC coffee-DEF.ART ‘Where is that coffee of theirs?’ [Where is that coffee they promised?]

In (15), the speaker’s attitude ‘I am impatient for P’ is not communicated by the linguistic form of the utterance. Rather, this attitude can only be conveyed with a particular (plaintive/ironic) intonation. Also underlying this is an assumption of the eventual availability of the coffee. In (16), the use of kamo with the dative referent signals a sense of impatience and heightens the scornfully ironic character of the utterance.17 Example (16) requires the following set of metarepresentations: 17. The degree of scorn can range from very mild to highly scornful, depending on discursive context, speaker identity, and intonation.

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(16) a. I expected them to have produced the coffee. b. I believed that the coffee would now be in front of me on the table. c. I am here and the coffee is nowhere to be seen and very likely not to be seen. d. I believe that they are not able to produce the coffee.

In contrast to (15), the speaker of (16) is expressing doubt that the server is capable of producing the coffee and, as we saw earlier, challenging the interlocutor to do so. In this use of kamo, a mocking attitude is also part of the higher-level explicature, especially if the hearer is directly addressed, as in (17): (17) Kamo ti go auto-to? Where-PART 2SG-DAT 3SG-ACC car-DEF.ART ‘So where is that car of yours?’

The speaker utters (17) to mock the hearer when the latter is unable to produce the much-talked-about car. Once again we see that the metarepresentations associated with indefinite questions apply: (17) a. I believed you that you had a car. b. I am here and I do not see any car here. c. I believe that you are not able to produce a car here and that my initial belief that you had a car was incorrect.

This set of metarepresentations leads us to conclude that kamo carries a nuance of confrontation in addition to its nuance of impatience.

5.6

Kamo in affectionate frames

In two emotionally imbued frames – those of play and grief – kamo is used in a specific manner that deserves special attention. In a playful frame involving a child or a pet, kamo is used to demonstrate affection in a game of interpretive resemblance between the presence and pretended absence of the hearer in the speaker’s field of vision. In the interaction between a speaker and a hearer, who is incapable of replying and who occupies the sole place in the speaker’s visual zone of interest (e.g. a small child or a pet), the speaker will indicate affection using expressions given in (18)–(21): (18) Kamo go bebeto? ‘Where is that baby?’

Chapter 3.╇ Macedonian attitudinal marker kamo



(19) Kamo mi go deteto? ‘Where is that child of mine?’ (20) Kamo go mačeto? ‘Where is that kitten?’ (21) Kamo mi go mačeto? ‘Where is that kitten of mine?’

These expressions, always in the third person and indicating that the speaker cannot see the object (the child or pet), are used with an intonation and pitch usually associated with motherese. Kamo here is being used interpretatively (Sperber and Wilson 1995:â•›224–237), that is, it is evoking an utterance which it resembles, and using it to play a game of hide-and-seek. Thus, such questions are not genuine because the speaker does not expect the hearer to provide an answer. Utterances (19) and (21) are more emotionally-charged than utterances (18) and (20), as the possessive, indicated by the pronoun mi in the dative case, appears to pull the object toward the center of the speaker’s psychological zone of interest. Such a construction can also be used in the grieving frame – as the speaker may be evoking a situation where the child is factually not present, making the sentence a tragic and mournful utterance of futile regret.18 By contrast, a kadequestion in the same circumstances constitutes a simple request for information: (22) Kade je bebeto? ‘Where is the baby?’

Example (22) bears no attitude report whatsoever, and is not normally used in the mother/infant interaction (or pet dyad) as described above.

6.

Towards a unitary account of kamo

In relevance theory, inferences that contribute to the construction of the baselevel proposition (e.g. inferences which are used to enrich the logical form, to disambiguate ambiguous expressions or to assign a reference to a referring expression) are considered to form part of the explicit dimension of communication (Matsui 2002:â•›880). These “explicit” inferences are called “explicatures” and they differ from implicit inferences, or “implicatures”, in that they contribute to the truth-conditional content of the proposition expressed in an utterance (Carston 2002:â•›134–152). Building upon the notion of explicature, there is the 18. It is worth noting that several of my informants also mentioned a certain gentle melancholy implicit in this utterance.

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notion of ‘higher-level explicature’, which involves embedding the propositional content of an utterance in speech act and propositional attitude reports. These higher-level explicatures are used to arrive at a more fully developed logical form of an utterance. All of the reports of belief and desire that I have described in this article are higher-level explicatures. That is, kamo contributes to relevance by making the hearer generate a set of higher-order metarepresentations, and in this way it directly affects the explicit side of communication. Concerning the issue of conceptual versus procedural knowledge, I adopt the relevance-theoretic notion, introduced in Blakemore (1987), that there are two sorts of information encoded in the lexical entries of words: conceptual (representational) and procedural (computational). Procedural information is information on how to manipulate representations. Uncontroversial examples include discourse connectives such as so (Blakemore 1987:â•›85–91) and therefore (Blakemore 1987:â•›78–84), as well as questions (Wilson and Sperber 1988) which instruct the hearer to construct a set of representations of desirable answers. Given that kamo necessitates the formation of higher-level explicatures communicating the speaker’s attitude (wherein the main relevance of the utterance lies), I put forward that the primary function of the marker kamo is to trigger procedural information such as the following: (23) Identify a (set of) representation(s) which interpretively resembles P.

where P is a public, mental or abstract representation which the utterance introduced by kamo interpretively resembles. This instruction is, however, too general to properly capture the procedural meaning of kamo and has to be constrained by the specific set of metarepresentations identified by the hearer upon encountering kamo in discourse. This set of metarepresentations will include higher-level explicatures, such as the following: (24)

a. b. c. d.

The speaker indicates a dissociation from the desire to know that P. The speaker does not believe that the hearer believes that P. The speaker believes that P is a consequence of Q. The speaker knows that P is (was) impossible at time t.

In any kamo-construction, instruction (23) applies. If kamo is used to introduce an echo question, instruction (24a) will apply but instruction (24b) will be de rigueur. If kamo introduces a contradictive question, then instruction (24c) applies. If the utterance containing kamo is a futile wish or an interrogative form, then instruction (24d) applies. It appears that underlying all four types of higher-level explicatures, there is a fundamental attitude of disbelief in P. From this

Chapter 3.╇ Macedonian attitudinal marker kamo



fundamental attitude, it is possible to construct higher-level explicatures such as the ones that have been used to explain the meaning of kamo in the examples in Section 5. I will now summarize the analysis of kamo presented in Section 5 in terms of procedural information to clearly bring out the fact that its primary purpose is to indicate that the utterance it introduces is not really a request for information or a wish, but a case of interpretive use, typically a second-order metarepresentation concerning something described in the thought, proposition or idea contained in the kamo-utterance. I will briefly review two generic uses: (i) an echoic question, (ii) a question for instigation.

6.1

Echoic questions

In (25), Sasha uses kamo to ask Savitsa a question regarding a coffee which was promised to him but not delivered: (25) Kamo go kafeto? ‘Where is that coffee?’

We might imagine the scenario where Savitsa was supposed to bring Sasha a coffee but eventually forgot about it. He is frustrated and utters (25) to express his irritation, rather than using a kade-question, as in (26), which would mark a genuine request for information regarding the whereabouts of the coffee: (26) Kade je kafeto? ‘Where is the coffee?’

While the interrogative form in (26) communicates the idea that the speaker finds the answer desirable and relevant, the use of kamo in (25) indicates the speaker’s disbelief that the coffee will be present. Kamo, thus, indicates a dissociative attitude towards the interrogative utterance that hosts it, generating the effect of irony as an expression of the speaker’s irritation.19 Following Sperber and Wilson’s (1981) observation that irony consists of echoing a tacitly attributed thought or utterance with a tacitly dissociative attitude, I analyze this use of kamo as echoic; that is, the utterance expresses Sasha’s dissociative attitude towards his thought that Savitsa can or will provide him with a coffee. To understand example (25), it is necessary to hold the following contextual assumptions: 19. Depending on certain other phenomena such as intonation and pitch, (25) could be a kind reminder, a gentle reproach, a mildly ironic remark, etc.

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(25) a. Sasha desires to have the coffee. b. Sasha does not believe that Savitsa can (wants to) tell him where the coffee is.

According to this set of assumptions, Sasha’s utterance is not a genuine request for information, but a statement of Sasha’s beliefs framed in such a way as to interpretively resemble a question. It is echoic in that by using the utterance, Sasha dissociates himself from the question expressed in the linguistic form of his utterance, thus creating sarcasm and expressing his irritation with Savitsa.

6.2

Instigative questions

Another use of kamo is the “anticipative/instigative use”. (27) Sasha: Ga najdof starata slika od dedo. ‘I found that old photo of grandpa.’ Savitsa (excited): Vistina? Kamo ga slikata? ‘Really? Where is that photo?’

In his utterance, Sasha says that he has found an old picture of his grandfather. Savitsa is excited to see it and tries to indicate her excitement by using kamo to express her incredulity regarding the propositional content of Sasha’s utterance, thereby questioning his ability to produce the picture. Sasha, in turn, has to interpret two levels of representation before arriving at the conclusion desired by Savitsa, namely, that she is anxious to see the picture. The first level of representation is the linguistic form of Savitsa’s utterance, which is an interpretation of Sasha’s utterance that he found the picture. The second layer of representation is Savitsa’s further thought that she might make Sasha speed up showing her the picture of their grandfather if she expresses a dissociative attitude towards Sasha’s ability to produce the picture that he has promised. There are, in fact, two strategies at play: the first dissociation indicates Savitsa’s surprise that the picture is there (that discovery really comes as a surprise to her and there is an intense interest in seeing it). The second dissociation, also expressed by Savitsa, is part of an intentional strategy to obtain a desired result, namely, that Sasha will actually produce the picture, and quickly.

7.

Summary

In this article, I have developed a cognitive account of the functioning of the Macedonian pragmatic marker kamo, which has undergone a grammaticalization cline



Chapter 3.╇ Macedonian attitudinal marker kamo

from a locative adverb with conceptual meaning to a procedural pragmatic marker. What appeared to be a polysemous word is in fact a pragmatic marker that signals certain attitudes of the speaker – specifically attitudes of disbelief€– towards an attributed utterance. I have shown that kamo encodes procedural information and contributes to the explicit side of communication, given that the linguistic meaning of kamo triggers the attitudinal pragmatic metarepresentations I have outlined in this paper.

References Astington, Janet W. 1993. The Child’s Discovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Blakemore, Diane. 1992. Understanding Utterances. Oxford: Blackwell. Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Matsui, Tomoko. 2002. “Semantics and Pragmatics of a Japanese discourse marker dakara (so/ in other words): A unitary account.” Journal of Pragmatics 34: 867–891. Noh, Eun-Ju. 2000. Metarepresentations: A Relevance Theory Approach. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sévigny, Alexandre. 2002. “Formaliser les contraintes pragmatiques: l’exemple d’une particule du macédonien.” In Actes du colloque annuel de l’association de linguistique canadienne 2002, Stanca Somesfalean and Sophie Burelle (eds.). Montréal: Presses de l’UQAM. Sévigny, Alexandre. 2004. “Sketch of a pragmatic Macedonian particle.” In Papers from the 5th International North American-Macedonian Conference, Brian Joseph (ed.). Columbus, OH: Ohio State University. Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1981. “Irony and the use-mention distinction.” In Radical Pragmatics, Peter Cole (ed.), 295–318. New York: Academic Press. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Derdre. 1995. Relevance. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell. Wilson, Deirdre. 2000. “Metarepresentation in linguistic communication.” In Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, Dan Sperber (ed.), 411–448. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Deirdre and Sperber, Dan. 1988. “Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences.” In Human Agency: Language, Duty and Value:Philosophical Essays in Honor of J. O. Urmson, Jonathan Dancy, J. M. E. Moravcsik and Christopher Charles Whiston Taylor (eds.), 77–101. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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chapter 4

Markers of conceptual adjustment Serbian baš and kao Mirjana Mišković-Luković

This paper employs the relevance-theoretic framework to account for the linguistic meaning and pragmatic contribution of two Serbian particles – baš and kao. Starting from a categorization of relations between lexical and communicated concepts, Mišković-Luković shows that baš and kao play the same role in utterance interpretation – they both serve as semantic constraints on the explicit content of an utterance, but they do so in different ways. A baš-utterance communicates a strong explicature with baš serving as a marker of non-loose use: the specificatory baš encodes literalness while the emphatic baš encodes pragmatic strengthening. A kao-utterance, on the other hand, communicates a weak explicature with kao serving as a marker of pragmatic loosening. Additionally, kao may be used to signal interpretive language use – specifically, irony and reporting.

1.

Introduction

The main topic of this paper is the meanings of Serbian particles baš and kao, and the ways in which they contribute to utterance comprehension. Following the relevance-theoretic distinction between conceptual and procedural encodings (Blakemore 1987, 2002 and Carston 2002), it is argued that the particles do not make any conceptual contribution. Instead, they serve as pointers to one of the pragmatic processes that partakes in the transformation of the incomplete semantic representation of a sentence/phrase uttered into the fully developed proposition expressed by an utterance. The ensuing analysis of baš and kao rests on the possibility of building a unified account of ad hoc concept formation from a lexically encoded concept to the communicated one which then figures as a proper constituent of the proposition expressed. It is in this process of pragmatic tailoring that baš and kao contribute to relevance: the former as a marker of literal resemblance and in certain instances, of pragmatic strengthening; the latter as a

66 Mirjana Mišković-Luković

marker of conceptual looseness with the additional function of being an attributive and echo-marker. The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 2 outlines previous approaches to the functions of baš and kao and serves as a starting point for the subsequent relevance-theoretic analysis. Section 3 introduces the relevance-theoretic notion of conceptual adjustment, which is considered to be essential for the proposed semantics and pragmatics of the particles baš and kao in Sections 3.1. and 3.2. The main findings are then summed up in the final section. Before examining the role of the discourse particles baš and kao in utterance interpretation, a few words on the data upon which my analysis is based may be in order. The examples are either constructed (the practice not uncommon in relevance-theoretic analyses, especially when it is necessary to illustrate or underscore a pertinent point in a simple and concise manner, Sperber and Wilson 1997) or they are taken from naturally occurring discourse (such examples are labeled ‘RSHJ’, and their full reference is given in the section References).

2.

Preliminary notes on baš and kao

According to relevance theory, linguistic semantics encodes two basic types of information: conceptual meaning, which enters into a mental representation, and procedural meaning, which indicates certain computational processes detailing how to manipulate conceptual representations. Unlike concepts, which can be brought to consciousness, it is difficult to represent the propositional meaning of procedural encoding (Wilson and Sperber 1993:â•›16). In other words, since

. There are two main reasons why these particular particles have been selected for joint study. First, the two particles are not confined to Serbian, but are also used in other post-Serbo-Croatian linguistic idioms. While I believe that their semantics and pragmatics are shared among the idioms, certain distributional divergences may have occurred. This paper then serves as a starting point for future comparative research. Secondly, both particles exemplify the workings of a single pragmatic process – ad hoc concept formation – but they do so in two different ways: one as a marker of literally encoded meaning, the other as a marker of the pragmatic loosening of literally encoded meaning. . The ‘RSHJ’ corpus (1989) has (for the most part) been recorded in Belgrade and Novi Sad (Serbia). It includes interactions in different settings, between interlocutors of different ages and occupations, and is sufficiently representative of contemporary, conversational Serbian. Although the corpus was recorded in the 1980s, the instances of the use of the particles reflect present-day usage. . See Mišković (2001, 2003) for the earlier versions.

Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao



procedures constrain the inferential phase of comprehension, they are unlikely to figure in the language of thought (Carston 2002). Before showing what procedural information the particles baš and kao specifically encode, a cursory introduction to the general treatment of these words in the literature might be in order.

2.1

Baš

In dictionaries, baš is defined as ‘truly’, ‘just’, ‘exactly’ and ‘precisely’ (cf. Benson 1991; Drvodelić 1989 and Filipović 1989). Vujaklija (1996) cites that baš, a word that has its roots in Turkish, first denoted ‘bow’ (the front part of a boat/ship). It then came to be used adjectivally to mean ‘the oldest’, ‘the first’ and ‘the nucleus’, forming various noun compounds such as baš-čaršija (‘the oldest part of a city’) and baš-knez (‘the senior prince’). Today, baš is a clausal focus particle that is most commonly used in informal discourse. As this paper argues, its meaning has undergone a full conceptual-procedural cline. Baš is usually considered to be an emphatic (Stanojčić and Popović 1992) or focus particle (König 1991). König, for instance, points out that the basic function of focus particles such as baš “is to assert emphatically the identity of two values in different propositions” (1991:â•›135). Baš may also belong to a group of specificatory particles (i.e. particles that render their focus more precise): [R]ečima samo i jedino, baš i upravo ono što se iznosi u dotičnoj rečenici izuzima se od svega ostalog, ili se precizira.  (Stevanović 1986:â•›384) ‘[T]he words samo and jedino, baš and upravo convey that what is said in the sentence is excluded from the rest or is made more precise.’

Let us briefly consider some examples of the emphatic and specificatory uses of the particle. The emphatic baš is illustrated in (1)–(4): (1) Baš viče. ‘S/he is baš shouting.’ (2) Baš brzo vozi. ‘S/he is baš driving fast.’ (‘S/he’s driving real fast’) (3) Baš lepa žena. ‘Baš a beautiful woman.’ (‘Such a beautiful woman’)

. While both samo and jedino can be translated as ‘only’, samo can additionally be translated as ‘just’. Baš and upravo are translated as ‘just’ or ‘exactly’ (see Benson 1991; Drvodelić 1989 and Filipović 1989).

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(4) Baš sam umorna. ‘I am baš tired.’ (‘I’m so tired’)

Although baš focuses on an action in (1), the likely interpretation is stronger, something like, ‘S/he’s shouting extremely loudly’. In (2)–(3) baš is used to intensify the manner and quality denoted by the adverb brzo (‘fast’) and adjective lepa (‘beautiful’). In (4) the state of being tired is amplified to the level of exhaustion. The following examples illustrate the specificatory use of baš: (5) Vratio se u kancelariju baš kad sam ja odlazila. ‘He came back to the office baš as I was leaving.’ (‘He came back to the office just as I was leaving’) (6) (RSHJ) 1 S: Znadete se! Sedi, Mila. Izvoli ovde. ‘You know each other! Sit down, Mila. Here, please.’ 2 M: Hvala lepo, baš mi se tu sviđa. ‘Thanks a lot, baš I like it here.’ (‘Right here is fine’)

In temporal and locative expressions, baš is used to reaffirm the time and place defined by temporal and locative adverbials – in (5), it is no other time than the one specified by the temporal clause kad sam ja odlazila (‘as I was leaving’); in (6), it is no other place than the one delimited by the place-adverb tu (‘there’). The specificatory baš can also occur before nouns, but there are certain restrictions with regards to (in)definiteness. Unlike English, Serbian does not have articles that denote indefiniteness and definiteness such as a and the. Instead, the distinction is marked by other linguistic means, such as demonstratives, adjectival aspect, indefinite pronouns, number, etc. (In)definiteness may also remain (linguistically) unmarked provided that the information is recoverable in context. It seems then that baš cannot be freely used with nouns, as (7a) shows, unless they have been defined somehow. The particle serves to highlight the already restricted focus, such as the deictic ta (‘that’) in (7b) and onaj (‘that’) in (8)–(9): . Serbian distinguishes between ovde (nearest to the deictic centre), tu (near the deictic centre) and tamo or onamo (farthest from the deictic centre). . The particle is normally linked to a constituent that comes under its focus (most likely the first one immediately to the right of the particle), and floating might result in different interpretations (see Mišković 2001). In this example, however, floating does not affect interpretation because the utterance is clearly understood. . Serbian distinguishes between masculine, feminine and neuter proximal and distal deictics: the proximal forms (singular ovaj-ova-ovo and plural ovi-ove-ova) mark nearness to the deictic centre (‘within reach’); the distal forms (singular onaj-ona-ono and plural oni-one-ona) mark

Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao



(7) a. *Baš kuća. ‘Baš house.’ b. Baš ta kuća. ‘Baš that house.’ (‘That very house’) (8) (RSHJ) O: I nikad nije zatvoren, mislim, baš onaj šef sale mi je pričao. ‘And it was never closed down, I mean, baš that maitre d’ was telling me.’ (‘That maitre d’ himself was telling me’) (9) (RSHJ) 1 A: Pa možda u gradu, šta ja znam, ja sam u Stepanovićevu. ‘Well, maybe in a city, what do I know, I live in Stepanovićevo.’ 2 Mi pravimo rezance s makom, rezance sa sirom, i tako dalje, ‘We make pasta with poppy seeds, pasta with cheese, and so on,’ 3 sve to. Međutim, oni baš, specijalno, onaj sos napolitane, ‘all that. However, they baš, especially, that sauce Napoletana,’ (‘However, they like nothing else but that sauce Napoletana’) 4 pa špagete bolonjeze i tako, ta su prihvatili jela. ‘then spaghetti alla Bolognese and so, those dishes they have accepted.’

However, examples (10)–(12) seemingly undermine this observation: (10) 1 A: 2 B: 3 A:

Video sam lava. ‘I’ve seen a lion.’ Baš lava? / Baš? ‘Baš lion?’ / ‘Baš?’ (‘You don’t say!’) Baš! ‘Baš!’ (‘A real lion’)

(11) (RSHJ) 1 S: Da to je zanimljivo. Ne znam ko je sakupljao te podatke? ‘Yes, that’s interesting. I don’t know who was collecting the data?’ 2 B: To je konzulat sakupljao. Ne znam zbog čega. ‘The consulate was collecting it. I don’t know what for.’ 3 S: Konzulat u Štutgartu? ‘The consulate in Stuttgart?’ 4 B: Da, baš konzulat. ‘Yes, baš the consulate.’ (‘That very consulate’)

distance from the deictic centre (‘out of reach and view’); the medial forms (singular taj-ta-to and plural ti-te-ta) mark lesser distance from the deictic centre (‘out of reach but within view’).

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(12) (RSHJ) 1 K: Oni se znaju otkako su imali sedam godina, kao deca. ‘They have known each other since they were seven, as children.’ 2 M: Jao zamisli to je drug, ono baš … ‘Just imagine, it is a friend, like baš’ (‘It’s like being real friends, you know’) 3 K: Baš prijatelj, znaš onako. Mi smo: dođeš ono u tri ujutru, kažeš: ‘Baš friend, you know like. We were: you come like at three in the morning, you say:’ (‘Like a real friend, you know’) 4 “eto, deco .. tako mi je teško”. Oni bi rekli: “pa ti si luda, ajde ćuti, “Well, children .. I feel so bad”. They would say: “Well, you’re being silly, come on, shut up,’ 5 šta ti je”. Znaš ono. To je baš, znaš ono .. ‘what’s the matter with you”. You know, like. This is baš, you know, like ..’ (‘It’s really, you know, like’) 6 ne to se ne kaže drugarstvo, nego baš prijateljstvo. ‘no you do not say palship, but baš friendship.’ (‘No, you can’t call it palship, it’s a real friendship’)

The indefiniteness of the nouns that are modified by baš, namely lav (‘lion’) in (10) 2 and konzulat (‘consulate’) in (11) 4 is more apparent than real since both concepts have already been activated in the addressee’s mind, albeit in slightly different ways. The indefinite reference of (10) 1 is preserved in (10) 2 while the noun in (11) 4 has already been made definite by the prepositional phrase u Štutgartu (‘in Stuttgart’) in (11) 3. Similarly, prijatelj (‘friend’) in (12) 3 and prijateljstvo (‘friendship’) in (12) 6 have already been defined in relation to the weaker term drug (‘pal’) (i.e. in the sense <prijatelj, drug>), so that baš functions here as a scalar indicator of sorts. Moreover, König’s observation about markers of precision, such as precisely and verily, is worth remembering in connection with these examples: An emphatic assertion that something is truly (‘verily’) the case is only called for in problematic contexts, i.e. in those cases in which the focused expression is a remarkable and thus highly unlikely value for a propositional schema.  (König 1991:â•›138)

. There is no overt linguistic marker of definiteness in (11) 4.

Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao



2.2

Kao

Kao is defined as the conjunction equivalent to ‘as’, ‘as if ’ and ‘like’ in English (Benson 1991). Stevanović (1986) considers kao in connection with the conjunction i ‘and’, observing that this expression denotes comparison. Stevanović et al. (1975) list several functions that kao may have, and these (together with the given examples) are briefly examined below. The particle kao may be used to emphasize approximation, but the attributed meanings izgleda (‘it seems’) and reklo bi se (‘one would say’) might also suggest hedging and tentativization (mostly out of politeness considerations): (13) Prijatelj mu se kao malo usteže. ‘His friend is kao slightly inhibited.’ (‘His friend is kinda shy’)

With time adverbials, kao is used to refer to a temporally different but analogous situation: (14) To je bilo kao danas. ‘It was kao today.’ (‘It was like it is today’)

Before parenthetical verbs of saying, kao (also contracted to k’o) indicates the speaker’s uncertainty about the propositional content (possibly even the speaker’s epistemic distance): (15) Ja, k’o velim, već smo se dobro upoznali. I, k’o say, we are already well acquainted.’ (‘What I want to say, sort of, we’re well acquainted’)

Suzuki (2000), for instance, observes that by physically separating a quote from the rest of the sentence, parenthetical particles, like pauses, have the framing effect of psychological non-incorporation of the quoted material within the speaker’s belief system. With the interrogative mood indicator, kao is used to minimize the expected but inauspicious significance of a reply: (16) A kao zašto? ‘And kao why?’ (‘And kinda why?’)

. Discussing the possibility that the meaning of approximation of the Hebrew word kaze ‘like this’ has undergone a process of grammaticalization from its original adjectival function to its current role as a discourse marker, Ziv (1998:â•›217) concludes that “[i]t is thus not surprising to find parallel developments in several unrelated languages, such as American English like, Serbo Croatian kao, Norwegian lissom and Japanese chotto”.

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(17) Čega se kao plašim? ‘What am I kao afraid of?’ (‘What am I afraid of like?’) (18) A šta mu kao znače te reči? ‘And what does he kao mean by those words?’ (‘And what does he mean, sort of?’)

This function of kao, however, is not dissimilar to that of a negative polarity item since it can signal the speaker’s negative epistemic stance to either the proposition or the speaker’s interpretation of someone else’s epistemic stance, marking, therefore, a certain propositional attitude. Used independently, or in combination with hearsay and evidential adverbials, kao may also indicate that the material under the scope is more apparent than real: (19) Carica, koja je dotle kao spavala, otvori oči. ‘The empress, who had been kao sleeping till then, opened her eyes.’ (‘The empress, who had been sort of sleeping, suddenly opened her eyes’) (20) Kao navodno/tobože hoće da se uzmu. ‘Kao allegedly they want to marry.’ (‘Like, they want to marry, as they say’)

In (20), however, it seems more likely that the adverbial navodno (or tobože, which means ‘allegedly’) provides explicit linguistic guidance and triggers relevant inference about how the proposition is to be taken (i.e. by contributing to the construction of a higher-level explicature, namely, that the speaker is sceptical about the proclaimed marriage). If this is right, then kao functions here as an echo-marker (I shall return to this point in my subsequent discussion). But we should begin by examining how the notion of conceptual adjustment is explained within relevance theory, as it is precisely in this process that the particles baš and kao play their essential roles in utterance comprehension.

3.

Conceptual adjustments

In this section I take up Carston’s (2002) idea of linguistic underdeterminacy at the lexical semantic level and explore its implications for a relevance-theoretic analysis of the meanings of the Serbian particles baš and kao. One of the major advantages of Carston’s approach is that it brings into symmetry at least three planes that are relevant to my present discussion: the linguistic/mental relation, the literal/less-than-literal interpretation and the pragmatics of explicit communication. These are briefly explained below.



Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao

The standard linguistic underdeterminacy thesis at the sentence-semantic level says that while natural language sentences do not encode propositions, they do encode templates that will be used in the construction of fully propositional mental representations (i.e. Language of Thought (LoT) sentences). However, Carston also argues for the linguistic underdeterminacy thesis at the lexical-semantic level, which claims that (at least some) words (notably adjectives, adverbs and verbs) are templates that will be used to build concepts or point to a certain conceptual space: “While sentences encode thought/proposition templates, words encode concept templates; it’s linguistic underdeterminacy all the way down” (Carston 2002:â•›360). The actual (i.e. communicated) concepts will then be pragmatically inferred in context.10 The literal/less-than-literal (or non-literal) interpretation is considered to be a relation between the proposition expressed by an utterance and a thought the speaker wants to communicate. To the extent that the proposition expressed by an utterance shares the logical and contextual implications of the speaker’s thought, what results will be more or less a literal interpretation of this thought (with literalness being the limiting case in communication). Carston’s (2002:â•›340) proposal shifts this relation to that of a (local) connection between linguistically encoded and communicated concepts: “The use is a literal one if the logical/definitional properties of the linguistic encoding are preserved; it is non-literal if they are not”. The third symmetry is the most relevant to this paper. It pertains to one of the pragmatic processes that is involved in the construction of explicature – the process which is based on the formation of ad hoc concepts (pragmatically inferred, communicated concepts that are constituents of the proposition expressed) out of linguistically encoded concepts. According to the standard relevance-theoretic view, only ad hoc concepts that result from the process of pragmatic enrichment of encoded concepts (strengthening or narrowing) are communicated, and hence form part of the explicature. Ad hoc concepts that result from loosening (or broadening) – a pragmatic process that goes in the opposite direction of strengthening€– affect the implicit side of communication. In the latter case, the speaker 10. On the standard relevance-theoretic approach, a monomorphemic lexical item encodes an atomic concept which is ‘attached’ to an address in memory that stores three kinds of information. The logical entry includes a set of inference rules for analytic implications of the concept. The encyclopaedic entry contains general and particular assumptions about the concept. The lexical entry stores information about the phonetics, phonology and syntax of the linguistic form that encodes the concept. For instance, the lexicalized concept CAR has a logical entry with an inference rule whose output is MOTOR VEHICLE OF A SORT, and an encyclopaedic entry with the information about its physical appearance, power and comfort. A (monomorphemic) lexical item will inherit the referential (truth-based) semantics of the encoded concept and will feature in LoT (Carston 2002).

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is not committed to the proposition expressed, which is strictly false, and the explicature serves as a starting point for the derivation of implicatures. Carston’s account, however, considers loosening complementary to strengthening. In both cases the same pragmatic mechanisms are at play: the ad hoc concept replaces the encoded concept so that the proposition expressed sufficiently resembles the thought the speaker wants to communicate. With loosening, just as with strengthening, the speaker endorses the proposition expressed: What matters here, at least from a communicative point of view, is that the relevant concept is constructed out of the logical and encyclopaedic information which is made accessible by the encoded lexical concept. Whether the construction process is strictly speaking a loosening or an enrichment, or a combination of the two, does not seem consequential and certainly should not lead to two utterly different ways of treating the resultant concept.  (Carston 2002:â•›347)11

Slightly adjusting this picture in connection with the ensuing analysis, and taking literalness as the limiting case (adjustment = Ø), the following categorization of relations between lexical and communicated concepts might then be posited: (21) Types of conceptual adjustment: CONCEPTUAL ADJUSTMENT

LESS-THAN-LITERAL RESEMBLANCE



PRAGMATIC STRENGTHENING

PRAGMATIC LOOSENING

LITERAL RESEMBLANCE

OVERLAPPING (strengthening + loosening)

In the following section, I put forward a relevance-theoretic analysis of baš and kao as procedural constraints on the pragmatic process of explicature construction through ad hoc concept formation.

3.1

The semantics and pragmatics of baš

In general, baš can be considered an explicit linguistic indicator of the pragmatic process of conceptual adjustment, that is, it procedurally contributes to relevance 11. In strengthening, not only are the logical properties retained, but some of the ecyclopaedic (or stereotypical) properties are also given a defining status. In loosening, by contrast, certain logical properties are discarded.



Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao

at the level of explicature. More specifically, and in terms of the chart given in (21), baš signals literal resemblance (i.e. zero adjustment) between lexicalized and communicated concepts so that the extension of the pragmatically constructed concept is identical to the extension of the lexical concept from which it has been derived. Consider, for instance, (22): (22) a. Papuče su ti ispod kreveta. ‘Your slippers are under the bed.’ b. Papuče su ti baš ispod kreveta. ‘Your slippers are baš under the bed.’ (‘Your slippers are right under your bed’)

The addressee processing either (22a) or (22b) will identify the same proposition expressed, namely that the addressee’s slippers are, at the time of utterance, under the bed (most likely the addressee’s own bed). Even though the omission of the particle will not lead to any loss in propositional meaning, the addressee will interpret (22b) as the speaker’s full endorsement of the literal truth of the utterance (the slippers are literally under the bed) in the sense that not even the smallest deviation from the scope of the particle (the place-adverbial modification ispod kreveta ‘under the bed’) has been intended. In everyday communication, literalness is considered to be an exception: [T]he hearer should take an utterance as fully literal only when nothing less than full literality will confirm the presumption of relevance. In general, some loose(Sperber and Wilson 1986/95:â•›234) ness of expression is to be expected. 

Baš is typically used whenever the speaker wants to make manifest a single precise proposition (or the part of the proposition that comes under the scope of the particle). This is, for instance, the case with the temporal expression in (5) Vratio se u kancelariju baš kad sam ja odlazila (‘He came back to the office baš as I was leaving’); here, the particle signals that no approximation (looseness) is intended. Similarly, baš with referring expressions (as in (7)–(9), which are repeated below for convenience) serves to promote the referents so that the possibility of having any other member selected (more or less fitting the description) is thereby precluded:12 12. It is not uncommon for the particle to occur with proper names. The following excerpt is taken from a newspaper article: [http://www.novine.ca/ARHIVA/2003/01_04_03/sr.cg.html] “Borislav Milošević slovi kao ključna figura u klanu. Njegovo ime uvek se pominje zajedno sa finansijskim poslovima porodice Milošević. Navodno je baš Borislav Milošević u Rusiji pohranio milionske sume, što sam osporava.”

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(7) a. *Baš kuća. ‘Baš house.’ b. Baš ta kuća. ‘Baš that house.’ (‘That very house’) (8) (RSHJ) O: I nikad nije zatvoren, mislim, baš onaj šef sale mi je pričao. ‘And it was never closed down, I mean, baš that maitre d’ was telling me.’ (‘That maitre d’ himself was telling me’) (9) (RSHJ) 1 A: Pa možda u gradu, šta ja znam, ja sam u Stepanovićevu. ‘Well, maybe in a city, what do I know, I live in Stepanovićevo.’ 2 Mi pravimo rezance s makom, rezance sa sirom, i tako dalje, ‘We make pasta with poppy seeds, pasta with cheese, and so on,’ 3 sve to. Međutim, oni baš, specijalno, onaj sos napolitane, ‘all that. However, they baš, especially, that sauce Napoletana,’ (‘However, they like nothing else but that sauce Napoletana’) 4 pa špagete bolonjeze i tako, ta su prihvatili jela. ‘then spaghetti alla Bolognese and so, those dishes they have accepted.’

Baš before the cardinals seems to show this straightforwardly: (23) 1 A: 2 B: 3 A: 4 B:

Koliko imaš strana? ‘How many pages do you have? Pet. ‘Five.’ Baš pet? ‘Baš five?’ (‘Exactly five?’) Da. (Baš. / Baš pet.) ‘Yes.’ (‘Baš.’ / ‘Baš five.’)

‘Borislav Milošević is considered to be a key figure in the clan. His name is always mentioned in connection with financial transactions of the Miloševićs. Allegedly, it was baš Borislav Milošević who had deposited millions in Russia, which he himself denies.’ To all who are familiar with the happenings surrounding this family, it was Slobodan Milošević, the referent’s brother and ex-president of Yugoslavia, who was the most contextually salient figure (having had an absolute power over the “clan”) and therefore likely to be accessed first. Baš before the proper name is used to block this immediately accessible assumption by reaffirming the identity of the referent.



Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao

The question in (23) 3 is not interpreted as a request for information since B has already (precisely) replied in (23) 2. It is, however, interpreted as a request for confirmation that the object in question is no more or no less than the specified number.13 In terms of the sense-general treatment of the cardinals (see Carson 1997), term numbers are semantically incomplete. This means that the process of pragmatic enrichment of the logical form is required before the cardinals can get a specific meaning assigned (‘at least n’, ‘exactly n’, ‘at most n’). Baš in this process constrains pragmatically supplied material to the level of punctual semantics (‘exactly n’). The likelihood that baš will occur in an utterance depends on how much the speaker intends to make strongly manifest an assumption, as is typically the case with assertions. However, consider (24): (24) a. *Košulja je baš možda prljava. ‘The shirt is baš maybe dirty.’ b. Košulja je možda baš prljava. ‘The shirt is maybe baš dirty.’ (‘The shirt may well be dirty’)

Baš is unlikely to occur in the position it takes in (24a), as the whole complement možda prljava (‘maybe/possibly dirty’) would then fall under its scope. However, it may come after the modal in (24b) since the speaker’s attitudinal distance is no longer part of the scope. The likely interpretation of (24b) is that the speaker intends to make strongly manifest her belief that the shirt is, if anything, a dirty one. Apart from serving as a marker of literal resemblance between the lexical and the resultant ad hoc concept, baš, in certain instances, might also signal the relation of less-than-literal resemblance between the lexical and the resultant ad hoc concept, notably that of pragmatic strengthening (or narrowing). The extension of the communicated concept is then a subset of the extension of the lexical concept (i.e. the relevant concept is in each case contextually determined).14 This type of

13. If, for instance, samo (‘only’) is used before the cardinal, the utterance will strongly implicate that the speaker had expected more pages to be written (this utterance may also have a range of weaker implicatures, say, that the speaker is disappointed, surprised, etc.). 14. In short, enrichment works in the following way: the lexical concept L gives access to the attached logical information and a bunch of encyclopaedic information, out of which only a subset is used for the construction of a more specific concept C* that is relevant in a particular context. As certain contextual assumptions have already been made available to the addressee, he will access the logical entry and only the particular information from the encyclopaedic entry in order to construct the relevant concept C*. If C* gives enough cognitive effects, it will be kept as the intended interpretation (see Carston 2002 for a detailed account of this process).

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conceptual adjustment seems to be particularly at work with the “emphatic” use of baš, as in many cases baš focuses on words that encode more general concepts so that some sort of contextual specification might be necessary. Let us briefly reconsider cases of the emphatic baš. We have seen that baš in (1) Baš viče (‘S/he is baš shouting’) narrows down the lexical concept VIKATI ‘SHOUT’ to a more specific one which indicates a particular degree of loudness. In (25) below the lexical concept PEVATI (‘SING’) does not encode any difference in the manner of performance: (25) a. Peva. ‘S/he is singing.’ b. Baš peva. ‘S/he is baš singing.’ (‘Boy is that some singing’)

(25a) would be quite irrelevant (trivially true) if both the speaker and the addressee were witnessing the occasion, which is otherwise not remarkable in any respect (for instance, the singer has never had any vocal problems). (25b), on the other hand, makes manifest to the addressee the assumption that it is not the action itself that the speaker is foregrounding, but the manner in which the action is done (the singer is not only singing, but is doing it extremely well). In both (1) and (25b) the instantiated strengthening goes towards the highest or at least a remarkably high point on a scale. Concepts encoding mental and emotional states encompass a range of distinct feelings. Given the optionality of the pragmatic process of ad hoc concept formation (from a strictly linguistic point of view), it is easy to see how baš facilitates interpretation – it serves as an indicator that some conceptual strengthening is to take place. Thus, the encoded concept UMORNA (‘TIRED’) in (4) Baš sam umorna (‘I am baš tired’) might be strengthened to TIRED TO THE POINT WHERE ANY ACTIVITY BECOMES UNTHINKABLE. With emotion words, such as srećna (‘happy’) and razočarana (‘disappointed’) in (26), baš typically instantiates strengthening as a temporary and intense emotional state: (26) Baš sam srećna/razočarana. ‘I am baš happy/disappointed.’ (‘I’m really happy/disappointed’)

It seems, however, that certain linguistic encodings, such as deictics and scalar adjectives, necessitate pragmatic enrichment (Carston 2002).15 For instance, BRZO (‘FAST’) in (2) Baš brzo vozi (‘S/he is baš driving fast’), might be interpreted in 15. While deictics overtly require strengthening, scalar adjectives (and adverbs), being inherently context-dependent, may contain a covert indexical element as part of their encoded meaning.

Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao



different contexts as ‘fast enough to win the race’, ‘fast enough to kill everybody’, etc.; LEPA (‘BEAUTIFUL’) in (3) Baš lepa žena (‘Baš a beautiful woman’) might express any of the following particular narrowings, such as ‘beautiful enough to advertise Chanel’, ‘beautiful indeed to have won the competition’, ‘indisputably beautiful’, and so on. Out of a range of possible instantiations, the relevant location of the deictics ovde and tu ‘here’ in (6) Izvoli ovde […] baš mi se tu sviđa (‘Here, please […] baš I like it here’) is pragmatically narrowed to the exact place the speaker is pointing at as she speaks. Clearly, there is no constraint for the particle to occur in such an environment, but then it seems that baš simply reaffirms the particular, contextually instantiated narrowing. Finally, let us see how baš constrains the relevance of (10)–(12) (repeated below for convenience): (10) 1 A: 2 B: 3 A:

Video sam lava. ‘I’ve seen a lion.’ Baš lava? / Baš? ‘Baš lion?’ / ‘Baš?’ (‘You don’t say!’) Baš! ‘Baš!’ (‘A real lion’)

(11) (RSHJ) 1 S: Da to je zanimljivo. Ne znam ko je sakupljao te podatke? ‘Yes, that’s interesting. I don’t know who was collecting those data?’ 2 B: To je konzulat sakupljao. Ne znam zbog čega. ‘The consulate was collecting them. I don’t know what for.’ 3 S: Konzulat u Štutgartu? ‘The consulate in Stuttgart?’ 4 B: Da, baš konzulat. ‘Yes, baš the consulate.’ (‘That very consulate’) (12) (RSHJ) 1 K: Oni se znaju otkako su imali sedam godina, kao deca. ‘They have known each other since they were seven, as children.’ 2 M: Jao zamisli to je drug, ono baš … ‘Just imagine, it is a friend, like baš’ (‘It’s like being real friends, you know’) 3 K: Baš prijatelj, znaš onako. Mi smo: dođeš ono u tri ujutru, kažeš: ‘Baš friend, you know like. We were: you come like at three in the morning, you say:’ (‘Like a real friend, you know’) 4 “eto, deco .. tako mi je teško”. Oni bi rekli: “pa ti si luda, ajde ćuti, “Well, children .. I feel so bad”. They would say: “Well, you’re being silly, come on, shut up,’

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5 6

šta ti je”. Znaš ono. To je baš, znaš ono .. ‘what’s the matter with you”. You know, like. This is baš, you know, like ..’ (‘It’s really, you know, like’) ne to se ne kaže drugarstvo, nego baš prijateljstvo. ‘no you do not say palship, but baš friendship.’ (‘No, you can’t call it palship, it’s a real friendship’)

What both (10) and (11) have in common is that baš occurs before the lexical concept, which is marked as problematic in some respect. (10) 2 is interpreted as B’s incredulity at A’s statement in which the lexical concept LAV (‘LION’) occurs: something like ‘Nothing less than a lion’ so that baš focuses on the very defining property of the natural-kind term. In (11) 4 baš serves to confirm the identity between the lexical concept KONZULAT (‘CONSULATE’) in (11) 2 and the concept understood in (11) 3 so that the utterance achieves relevance by strengthening the addressee’s existing assumption. In both instances, baš signals that the logical property is to be retained. In other words, it functions as a marker of non-loose use.16 On the other hand, (12) seems to be an instance of metalinguistic strengthening – baš is repeatedly used before the lexical concepts PRIJATELJ (‘FRIEND’) and PRIJATELJSTVO (‘FRIENDSHIP’) which, being narrower, entail the broader lexical concepts DRUG (‘PAL’) and DRUGARSTVO (‘PALSHIP’).

3.2

The semantics and pragmatics of kao

In general, kao seems to have two major roles. The first draws on the conceptual meaning of the preposition and conjunction (‘in the same manner’, ‘in the manner of’, ‘to the same degree as’) and is standardly used for comparison, as in (27) below: (27) (RSHJ) 1 V: Ovo mi je ovako ko17 saslušanje. “Priznajem, kriva sam”. “Reci sve!” ‘It looks to me in this way ko an interrogation. “I plead guilty”. “Tell us everything!”â•›’ (‘It is thus like an interrogation’) 16. If negation takes scope over the particle, the reverse holds true. Thus, nije baš ‘not exactly’ is taken to express that some degree of looseness of the contextually available focus is required. If the particle takes scope over negation, as in baš nije ‘really not’, then it corroborates the applicability of the focus term to the subject term in the case of predicate denials, or affirms the inapplicability of the focus term to the subject term in the case of affirmative predications. 17. Ko is a colloquial variant of kao (cf. došao and došo ‘(he) came’ and kazao and kazo ‘(he) said’). This phonological reduction and the subsequent lengthening of the remaining vowel are now standardized in writing as kô instead of k’o (Klajn 1997).



Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao

2 B: Stvarno je, što kaže Vera .. ko saslušanje! ‘It really is, as Vera says, ko an interrogation!’ (‘It’s just like Vera says like a real interrogation’)

The simile in (27) may be used to communicate a certain set of implicatures, for instance, that the gathering the speaker is describing is rather formal and somber in tone, that the speaker feels uncomfortable, etc. Depending on the particular occasion of use, the simile in the earlier example (14) To je bilo kao danas (‘It was kao today’) may communicate various implicatures, such as customs have not changed, the situation has not improved, etc. In both cases, however, the lexically encoded concepts DANAS (‘TODAY’) in (14) and SASLUŠANJE (‘INTERROGATION’) in (27) remain preserved. Its second role is that of a discourse particle. Kao, just like baš, has a procedural contribution to the pragmatic process of explicature construction, serving as an indicator of the type of ad hoc concept that is to be built. In terms of the chart given in (21), kao signals a less-than-literal resemblance between the lexicalized and communicated concepts, typically that of loosening, so that the extension of the pragmatically constructed concept includes the extension of the lexical concept from which it has been derived. Let us consider (28)–(31) as instances of loose use: (28) Sunčala se kao ceo dan, a ono ništa. ‘She has been tanning kao the whole day, and like nothing.’ (‘She’s spent like an entire day tanning in vain’) (29) (RSHJ) 1 V: Jesi naučila u Engleskoj kokni? Sećaš se onog pilota u avionu. ‘Have you learned Cockney in England? Remember that pilot on the plane.’ 2 Kako govori engleski? ‘The way he speaks English?’ 3 B: Misliš na film? ‘In the film, you mean?’ 4 V: Da, sećaš se filma? ‘Yes, you remember that film?’ 5 L: To je kao neki kokni? ‘It is kao some Cockney?’ (‘It’s like cockney?’) (30) (RSHJ) 1 S: Da li to znači .. da imate, da idete po različitim mestima, ‘Does this mean .. that you have, that you go to various places,’ 2 ili je samo u jednom? ‘or is it just one place?’

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3 B:

Da, imam tri mesta. To mi je kao centralno mesto, a imam još dva. ‘Yes, I have three places. This is kao a central place, and I have two more places.’ (‘This one is like central and I have two other places to go’)

(31) (RSHJ) 1 S: Ja kažem: “ovi su otkačili totalno“. Bez veze… pusti! ‘I say: “They have completely gone nuts”. It doesn’t matter… forget it!’ 2 Prave kao praznik, kao, znaš za omladinu. ‘They make it kao a holiday, kao, you know for the youth.’ (‘It’s like holiday, like, you know, the thing for youths’)

In all the above examples, kao focuses on a particular lexically encoded conceptual constituent, marking it as a candidate for loose interpretation. Thus, the lexical concept CEO DAN (‘THE WHOLE DAY’) in (28) has certain logical and encyclopaedic properties, (‘equals the duration from dawn till dark’, ‘temporal concept’, ‘contractually binding working time’, ‘24-hour duration’, etc.) not all of which are communicated on the particular occasion. As the lexical concept imparts more information than the addressee needs to be able to understand the utterance, he will ignore the information that is not relevant and instead build an ad hoc concept that is weaker than the encoded concept. In (29) 5, kao instructs the addressee to drop part of the logical entry of the lexically encoded concept (for instance, ‘dialect of the East End of London’) so that the concept communicated and understood is broader and becomes, in fact, superordinate (‘non-standard language’, ‘parole’, ‘dialect not taught at school’, etc.). Meanwhile, statements (30)€3 and (31) 2 may engender an array of concepts differing only in nuance (‘CENTRAL PLACE*’, ‘CENTRAL PLACE**’; ‘HOLLIDAY*’, ‘HOLLIDAY**’, ‘HOLLIDAY***’, etc.). Given that no specific concept is strongly communicated, whichever particular concept the addressee builds from this range will be good enough for the communicative purpose (the resultant concept will closely resemble the concept figuring in the speaker’s thought).18 So far we have seen that kao may focus on encoded concepts whose semantics is determinate, which means that any looseness that comes out is a matter of 18. A concept-term with an asterisk is used to indicate an ad hoc concept (e.g. CENTRAL PLACE* and HOLIDAY*). A concept-term with two or more asterisks (e.g. CENTRAL PLACE** and CENTRAL PLACE***; HOLIDAY** and HOLIDAY***) is used to indicate slightly different ad hoc concepts. For example, the speaker may entertain a concept in terms of her individual preferences, say, as CENTRAL PLACE* (e.g. a frequently visited place, a commercially important place, an easily accessible place, a romantic place, etc.) while the addressee may interpret it, say, as CENTRAL PLACE** (e.g. geographically central). This, however, will not impede communication.



Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao

the speaker’s specific communicative intention. Still, there does not seem to be any restriction on the particle that prevents it from occurring with semantically vague concepts. For instance, in subsentential statement (32) 1, kao indicates that the conceptual string is to be relaxed and simply taken as a point of departure in constructing a complex ad hoc concept: (32) (RSHJ) 1 L: Kao mlad i lep, imaš para, imaš prijatelje, … ‘Kao young and handsome, having money, having friends, …’ (‘Like being young and handsome, lots of money and friends’) 2 V: Položaj … ‘A status …’

The same kind of rather weakly-communicated explicature is typical of cases where kao prefaces exemplification. Given that it is unclear what lexically encoded concept (or a string of concepts) it is true of, the concept is interpreted as communicating an instance. In other words, the addressee is encouraged to expand the concept so as to arrive at an interpretation that will yield enough cognitive effects: (33) Kad završiš pisanje šta ćeš onda. Kao odmarati se malo? ‘When you have finished writing, what then. Kao take some rest?’ (‘Like rest for a while’)

Why would a speaker opt for a less-than-literal utterance? According to relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95 and Carston 2002), the speaker might believe that a less-than-literal utterance will get the speaker’s thought across more easily than a literal one would (e.g. less processing effort, politeness concerns, etc.). Another possibility is that the speaker might not be able to find a literal means to express her thought (or there might not be any). In addition to signalling less-than-literal resemblance in content, kao may signal less-than-literal resemblance in form. In such cases, it targets the lexical entry of an encoded concept: (34) (RSHJ) 1 S: A gde ćeš ti Nevena za Novu godinu. ‘And where will you go, Nevena, for New Year’s Eve?’ 2 N: Pa ne znam. Joca nešto reče .. kao u neku kafanu, ‘Well I don’t know. Joca said something .. kao to a bar,’ (‘Joca has mentioned a bar or something’)

In (34) 2 the speaker is not certain of the exact nature of the establishment referred to as kafana (‘bar’). Since the stereotypical assumptions this encoded

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concept gives access to are standardly negative (‘dilapidated place of a dubious reputation’, ‘cheap and low-quality service’, possibly even ‘filth and squalor’), the speaker might be embarrassed by the statement, or simply unable to find a better alternative. The last point to consider in relation to kao is its role as an attributive and echo-marker. This, however, has to do with interpretive rather than descriptive resemblance. An utterance can be a second-order interpretation: the speaker’s thought, which the utterance represents, might already be an interpretation of someone else’s thought or is from the speaker’s recent or distant past. Metarepresentations achieve relevance based on the reported information, or by expressing certain attitudes to attributed representations. The latter type of interpretation is considered to be echoic: [T]here are echoic mentions of many different degrees and types. Some are immediate echoes, and other delayed; some have their source in actual utterances, others in thoughts or opinions; some have a real source, others an imagined one; some are traceable back to a particular individual, whereas others have a vaguer origin. When the echoic character of the utterance is not immediately obvious, it is nevertheless suggested.  (Sperber and Wilson 1981:â•›309–310)

Kao is used as an attributive or echo-marker in reporting and irony. When conversing, speakers do not normally engage in reporting verbatim what someone else has previously said, thought or believed. A certain degree of loosening of a reported speech is therefore to be expected, even if no linguistic indicator is present. Consider (35), for instance: (35) A: I šta Maja reče? ‘And what did Maja say?’ a. B: Doći će po mene. ‘She’ll pick me up.’ b. B: Kao, doći će po mene. ‘Kao, she’ll pick me up.’ (‘Something like, she’ll pick me up’)

Maja’s words may have been perfectly replicated, and yet the addressee will interpret (35a) as a more or less loose rendering of the original representation. When kao prefaces a quote, as in (35b), it eases the addressee’s efforts to process and recover the intended interpretation, namely, that the quoted material is indeed a less-than-literal interpretation of an attributed thought. This quotative use of kao is quite pervasive in communication, as (36) and (37) illustrate:

Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao



(36) (RSHJ) 1 O: I gledaj sad ovaj fazon! Sad mi kao pričamo sa onim tamo, ‘But listen to this! Now we kao are talking to this guy,’ (‘Here we are like talking to this guy’) 2 a oni se oduševljavaju s tim. ‘and they get excited about it.’ 3 Kao: “Ko nije bio ovde, taj se nije oduševio”. ‘Kao: “Those who hadn’t been here, they couldn’t get excited”.’ (‘Like, tough luck if you’ve missed the show’) (37) (RHSJ) 1 B: I sledeći dan, vidimo mi .. sedimo u gradskoj kafani. ‘And the next day, we see .. we are sitting in a café.’ 2 Zora i ja, kad dolaze Milanče i Nindža sa dve ženske. ‘Zora and I, when Milanče and Nindža come along with two girls.’ 3 Sad ne znam .. računam – to su im valjda nove ženske, ‘Now, I can’t know .. I reckon – they must be their new girls,’ 4 nešto pričaju kao vruće biće .. nešto ovamo onamo – i ništa. ‘they talk something kao it will be hot .. something hither and thither – and nothing.’ (‘they say something like it’ll be real hot .. and this and that, but nothing much’)

Apart from reducing the basic explicature to one of a less-than-literal resemblance (and marking it, in fact, as weak), kao may also contribute to relevance at the level of higher-level explicatures. This explains why so many kao-utterances will have an ironic tinge. According to the relevance-theoretic, pragmatic approach to irony, three conditions are crucial for an utterance to be understood as ironic: (i) recognizing that an utterance is echoic; (ii) identifying the source of the echoed opinion; (iii) recognizing that the speaker’s attitude to the echoed opinion is that of rejection or disapproval. In other words, if no echoing is discernible, an utterance will not count as ironic. Kao facilitates this process by instructing the addressee to recover a higher-level explicature that expresses an ironic attitude to the proposition expressed by an utterance.19 An echoic account of kao can explain fairly unambiguous cases of ironic utterances, such as (16)–(18) (repeated below for convenience): (16) A kao zašto? ‘And kao why?’ (‘And kinda why?’) 19. The echoic use of kao might perhaps be traced back to a deleted pronominal and verb of saying, e.g. kao što kažu ‘as/like they say’.

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(17) Čega se kao plašim? ‘What am I kao afraid of?’ (‘What am I afraid of like?’) (18) A šta mu kao znače te reči? ‘And what does he kao mean by those words?’ (‘And what does he mean, sort of?’)

Additionally, in (38) below, both utterances are understood as echoing the thought (if not the actual utterance) that the speaker ascribes to the addressee, and towards which she expresses a mocking (or derogatory) attitude: (38) a. Kao nije bilo dobro što si završila posao na vreme. ‘Kao (‘like/sort of ’) it wasn’t good that you had finished your work on time.’ b. Kao bilo je dobro što si završila posao na vreme. ‘Kao (‘like/sort of ’) it was good that you had finished your work on time.’

In certain borderline cases, however, it is not clear whether kao marks off a quote or irony. The following excerpt illustrates this: (39) (http://www.vecernji-list.hr/2001/06/04/Pages/pucanje.html) 1 U petak navečer nazvao me je predsjednik Zagrebačkog teniskog ‘On Friday evening, President of the Tennis Association of Zagreb,’ 2 saveza Jozo Ivičević, rekao da se u “Intercontinentalu” sastala ‘Jozo Ivičević, called me to say that in “Intercontinental”’ 3 skupina od petnaestak teniskih entuzijasta i odlučila da je najbolje ‘a group of about fifteen tennis enthusiasts gathered and decided that it was the best’ 4 da dam ostavku. Kao, učinio sam u poslednjih godinu dana mnogo ‘if I submitted my resignation. Kao, I did in the past year a lot’ 5 dobrog u tenisu, no najbolje je da sada odem. ‘for tennis, but it is for the best if I now leave.’ (‘Like, I did much for our tennis in the past year, but I’d better leave now’)

In (39) 4 kao indicates that the following free direct speech (Short 1995) is a lessthan-literal metarepresentation of the speaker’s thought. On the other hand, it may also signal that the addressee is to recover an ironic propositional attitude to the metarepresentation.

Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao



4.

Concluding remarks

Given the possibility of a unified treatment of ad hoc concept construction, my aim in this paper was to explore the semantic and pragmatic properties of bašand kao-utterances. According to the relevance-based account I have given, the particles baš and kao have the same basic role in utterance understanding, serving as semantic constraints on explicatures, albeit in opposite directions. While the explicature communicated in a baš-utterance is standardly strong, the one communicated in a kao-utterance is typically weak. Once a full-content word that productively participated in the formation of compounds, baš has come a long way and is now exclusively used as a pragmatic particle with a range of usages mostly limited to informal interaction. Still, some traces of the original conceptual meaning (‘the nucleus’) are reflected in the contemporary procedural meaning. Given the frequency of loose use in communication, baš is used whenever the speaker wants to ensure that the addressee does not automatically pursue the given lead, but instead takes the subsequent lexical concept literally, or in certain instances, even adjusts it to a more restricted set. A common core for both “specificatory” (literalness) and “emphatic” (pragmatic strengthening) senses would end in a negative characterization of baš as a marker of non-loose use. Kao, on the other hand, has followed a slightly different path. The process of desemanticization (or semantic bleaching) from conceptual to procedural meaning does not seem to have been as inclusive as in the case of baš so that the pragmatic marker exists alongside the preposition and conjunction. Whereas baš typically focuses on a particular propositional constituent, kao also occurs in the left-detached (less frequently in the right-detached) parenthetical position, taking a wide scope over the whole of the proposition. A very brief and rough comparison would also reveal baš as more sensitive to category selection, generally favouring adjectival, adverbial and verbal encodings. Kao is in this respect less discriminate, but there does seem to be a certain preference for noun phrases. Lastly, while both particles indicate the nature of the ad hoc concept the addressee is to build (pragmatic loosening in the case of kao), only kao alone has developed an attributive and echoic usage.20 The attributed thought or utterance is then marked as the speaker’s expression of a dissociative attitude to the representation (irony), or a lack of it (reporting). 20. A possibility that baš may indicate (under certain circumstances and in interaction with prosody) an ironic attitude to the proposition expressed by an utterance cannot be ruled out (e.g. Baš si mi ti neka mustra ‘You are baš something’). This point, however, merits further investigation.

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References Benson, Morton. 1991. Srpskohrvatsko-engleski rečnik. Serbocroatian-English dictionary. Beograd: Prosveta. Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Blakemore, Diane. 2002. Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carston, Robyn. 1997. “Informativeness, relevance and scalar implicature.” In Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications, Robyn Carston and Seiji Uchida (eds.), 179–236. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Drvodelić, Milan. 1989. Hrvatsko ili srpsko engleski rječnik. Croatian or Serbian English dictionary. Zagreb: Školska knjiga. Filipović, Rudolf. 1989. Englesko-hrvatski ili srpski rječnik. English-Croatian or Serbian dictionary. Zagreb: Školska knjiga and Grafički zavod Hrvatske. Klajn, Ivan. 1997. Rečnik jezičkih nedoumica [A dictionary of linguistic uncertainties]. Beograd: Čigoja. König, Ekkehard. 1991. The Meaning of Focus Particles: A Comparative Perspective. London: Routledge. Mišković, Mirjana. 2001. “The particle baš in contemporary Serbian.” Pragmatics 11 (1): 17–13. Mišković, Mirjana. 2003. “Relevance-theoretic semantics and the Serbian pragmatic marker kao.” In Jezik, društvo, saznanje: Profesoru Ranku Bugarskom od njegovih studenata [Language, society, cognition: To Professor Ranko Bugarski from his students], Dušanka Klikovac and Katarina Rasulić (eds.), 165–184. Beograd: Filološki fakultet. RSHJ: Savić, Svenka and Polovina, Vesna. 1989. Razgovorni srpskohrvatski jezik [Conversational Serbo-Croatian]. Novi Sad: Institut za južnoslovenske jezike i Filozofski fakultet. Short, Michael. 1995. “Understanding text: Point of view.” In Language and Understanding, Gillian Brown, Kirsten Malmkjaer, Alastair Pollitt and John Williams (eds.), 169–190. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1981. “Irony and the use-mention distinction.” In Radical Pragmatics, Peter Cole (ed.), 295–318. New York: Academic Press. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1986/95. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1997. “Remarks on relevance theory and social science.” Multilingua 16 (2/3): 145–151. Stanojčić, Živojin and Popović, Ljubomir. 1992. Gramatika srpskoga jezika [A grammar of the Serbian language]. Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva. Novi Sad: Zavod za izdavanje udžbenika. Stevanović, Mihailo. 1986. Savremeni srpskohrvatski jezik I [The contemporary Serbo-Croatian language I]. Beograd: Naučna knjiga. Stevanović, Mihailo, Pešikan, Mitar, Nikolić, B. and Gortan-Premk, Darinka. 1975. Rečnik srpskohrvatskog književnog i narodnog jezika [A dictionary of the Serbo-Croatian literary and folk language]. Knjiga IX. Beograd: Institut za srpskohrvatski jezik Srpske akademije nauka i umetnosti.



Chapter 4.╇ The Serbian particles baš and kao

Suzuki, Satoko. 2000. “Surprise and animosity: The use of the copula da in quotative sentences in Japanese.” In Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude, Gisle Andersen and Thorstein Fretheim (eds.), 239–253. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vujaklija, Milan. 1996. Leksikon stranih reči i izraza [A lexicon of foreign words and phrases]. Beograd: Prosveta. Wilson, Deirdre and Sperber, Dan. 1993. “Linguistic form and relevance.” Lingua 90: 1–25. Ziv, Yael. 1998. “Hebrew kaze as discourse marker and lexical hedge: Conceptual and procedural properties.” In Discourse markers: Descriptions and Theory, Andreas H. Jucker and Yael Ziv (eds.), 203–221. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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chapter 5

The Bosnian discourse particle ono Aida Premilovac

This paper proposes a relevance-theoretic analysis of the discourse particle ono in Bosnian informal discourse. Basing her analysis on the distinction in accounting for the linguistic meaning and pragmatic contribution of a linguistic expression, Premilovac shows that ono is a non-truth conditional particle which encodes procedural information about a loosely used proposition and contributes to the explicit side of communication. In this respect, ono is similar to the English pragmatic marker like (Andersen 1998), but further research will have to explain why ono may freely co-occur with kao ‘like’, and with the focus particle baš ‘exactly’. Premilovac’s analysis of ono invites reanalysis of a host of discourse particles that originate from demonstratives (e.g. ovo, ovaj and ovi) that are also used as discourse particles in Bosnian informal discourse.

1.

Introduction

When used as a demonstrative pronoun, the Bosnian ono ‘that’ occurs as an integral part of the noun phrase whose position in an utterance is predictable and constrained by the word order. However, ono in informal discourse may violate these syntactic rules by occurring independently of the noun phrase and almost anywhere in an utterance. Such uses of ono have typically been evaluated as meaningless, signaling nothing more than speech production issues on the part of the speaker. In this chapter, I re-examine this position on the non-demonstrative uses of ono in informal discourse and suggest that, in such cases, ono functions as a discourse particle. The methodical tools for my analysis come from relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95). Specifically, I investigate how ono as a discourse particle

. Against the English dyadic system of demonstratives (this and that), Bosnian (and Croatian and Serbian) has a triadic system (ovaj, taj and onaj), which reflects the relationship of an entity to the deictic center: within/out of reach/view.

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relates to its host utterance with respect to the theory’s main aspects of truth-conditionality, the conceptual/procedural distinction, and the explicit/implicit distinction. I suggest that ono is a non-truth-conditional and procedural linguistic device, which contributes to the relevance of a host utterance by constraining its explicit content. After a short discussion of the functions of demonstratives in interaction (2), I focus on the particular functions of the Bosnian demonstrative ono (3) and highlight certain problems with the traditional approach to ono as a particle. This is then followed by a relevance-theoretic account of the discourse particle ono (4). In this section, I also indicate parallels between ono and the English pragmatic marker like (4.1) and establish its unique status in informal discourse by comparing ono to onaj, another discourse particle which originates from a demonstrative (4.2). I go on to discuss ono with respect to the relevance-theoretic aspects of truth-conditionality, the conceptual/procedural distinction, and the explicit/implicit distinction (4.3). In conclusion (5), I summarize my findings and discuss implications for further research.

2.

Demonstratives

The definition and functions of demonstratives in language are usually discussed in relation to their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects (Diessel 1999). Thus, with respect to their syntax, demonstratives are regarded as deictic expressions, which serve specific syntactic functions. For instance, they occur in noun phrases as head modifiers (e.g. this book/these books or that book/those books). With respect to their semantics, demonstratives are considered to be deictically contrastive features, that is, they specify the relationship of an entity to the deictic center. Diessel (1999) writes that languages typically distinguish between proximal demonstratives, which refer to entities that are near the deictic center (this book), and distal demonstratives, which refer to entities that are considered to be far from the deictic center (that book). But as Diessel points out, some languages also make use of distance-neutral demonstratives. He cites the unusual case of German, in which the demonstrative pronoun dies can be used to mark an entity using both this and that. Likewise, Scollon and Scollon 2003 (citing Reed at al. 1977) emphasize that some languages make finer distinctions in their repertoire of demonstratives than English does. As one example, the authors discuss the Yup’ik Eskimo language, which makes use of thirty-one demonstrative pronouns. . E.g. Dies Buch gefällt mir nicht (‘I don’t like this/that book’). I thank Kurt Jankowsky for this example.

Chapter 5.╇ The Bosnian particle ono



From the pragmatic perspective, demonstratives are discussed as features with specific pragmatic functions. For instance, speakers may use demonstratives to draw attention to some entity in interaction, to arrange and keep track of information in talk, or to activate some existing, specific, and shared knowledge. As pragmatic units, demonstratives help interlocutors orient each other to an entity regardless of whether the entity is physically observable or not in the immediate context as in the utterance Did you read that newspaper article? (cf. Laury 1997 and Diessel 1999). In this example, the person asking the question uses that to activate some existing knowledge about an entity (‘newspaper article’) which is not directly observable.

3.

The demonstrative pronoun ono

In terms of its syntactic functions, the demonstrative pronoun ono modifies neuter entities in the third person singular. The following table illustrates the gender and number agreement between Bosnian (and Serbian and Croatian) distal demonstratives and the adjacent nouns: m. f. n.

Singular onaj jastuk ‘that pillow’ ona kuća ‘that house’ ono nebo ‘that sky’

Plural oni jastuci ‘those pillows’ one kuće ‘those houses’ ona neba ‘those skies’

Furthermore, the demonstrative ono, like other distal demonstratives, is declined according to the six (out of seven) traditional noun cases as the following table demonstrates:

Singular Nominative ono nebo ‘that sky’ Genitive onog neba Dative onom nebu Accusative ono nebo Vocative [not applicable] Instrumental onim nebom Locative onom nebu

Plural ona neba ‘those skies’ onih neba onim nebima ona neba [not applicable] onim nebima onim nebima

. Ono ‘it’ is also a personal pronoun (singular, neuter). In this paper I consider the pragmatic uses of ono to have developed out of its demonstrative uses since other demonstratives also exhibit non-restrictive uses in informal discourse.

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From the syntactic perspective then, ono is an integral part of the noun phrase, and its occurrence in an utterance is predictable and constrained by its position in the word order. According to Jahić et al. (2000), Bosnian distinguishes among three word orders: basic (SVO), actualized (SVO can be violated according to specific textual and contextual demands), and obligatory (constrained by the sentential prosody). With respect to the SVO word order, the demonstrative ono modifies either the subject or the object of an utterance as examples (1) and (2) show: (1) Ono dijete čita knjigu.  ‘That child is reading a book.’ (2) Poznajem ono dijete. ‘I know that child.’

(ono in subject position) (ono in object position)

Given appropriate textual and contextual demands, it is possible to express examples (1) and (2) in the OVS, as in (3) and (4), or SOV word orders, as in (5) and (6): (3) Knjigu čita ono dijete.  ‘A book is being read by that child.’

(ono dijete, subject in OVS order)

(4) Ono dijete poznajem. ‘That child I know.’

(ono dijete, object in OVS order)

(5) Ono dijete knjigu čita. ‘That child a book is reading.’

(ono dijete, subject in SOV order)

(6) Ja ono dijete poznajem. ‘I that child know.’

(ono dijete, object in SOV order)

In the actualized word order, ono can occur without the succeeding noun when the entity which is marked by ono is contextually known or otherwise made available to the hearer. Examples (7) and (8) demonstrate such possibilities (‘< >’ indicates that the noun is an optional constituent): (7) Ono <meso> je dobro skuhano. ‘That <meat> is well cooked.’ (8) Ono <slovo> je preveliko. ‘That is too big.’

The obligatory word order specifies the position of non-stressed grammatical components such as clitics. Examples (9) and (10) show that the noun phrase . In this example, the subject of the utterance is covert and signaled by the verb inflection. As a pro-drop language, Bosnian regularly omits an overt pronominal subject (Jahić et al. 2000).

Chapter 5.╇ The Bosnian particle ono



with ono – like any other noun phrase in Bosnian – can by discontinued by enclitics (e.g. je ‘is’): (9) Ono je dijete lijepo. ‘That is child beautiful.’ (10) Ono je meso ukusno. ‘That is meat tasteful.’

According to the syntactic properties, the singular, nominative and neuter form of the demonstrative pronoun ono is used as a discourse particle, although several other demonstratives have also developed certain particle-like functions. From the semantic perspective, the demonstrative ono expresses an entity’s distance from the deictic center as being ‘out of reach and view’, and stands in contrast to the proximal demonstrative ovo, which expresses that an entity is ‘within view’ from the deictic center. Ono and ovo are further distinguished from the third demonstrative to, which may be used to indicate that an entity is at some distance from the deictic center or ‘out of reach but within view’ (cf. Mišković 2001ff.). Semantically then, ono is among the most distal demonstratives. The pragmatic functions of the demonstrative ono arise from the conjunction of its syntactic and semantic functions and specific contextual demands. Thus, ono can be used to draw the listener’s attention to something that is ‘out of reach and view,’ but which may already be known to the interlocutors. For instance, the interlocutors may be discussing the meat they had for dinner (together or individually) on a previous occasion, and one of them might say something like Ono meso je bilo dobro (‘That meat was good’). Even though the meat is both out of reach and view, it is, nevertheless, cognitively accessible. Still, the same utterance can be used to define meso (‘meat’), which is at a considerable distance from the interlocutors but may still be within their view. For instance, two people at a party might be discussing how much they enjoyed their individual dinners. One of them might point to a table across the room, which still has some dinner meat available. If the speaker says Ono meso je bilo dobro, the hearer will know which meat is being referred to, regardless of whether she personally tried it or not. Thus, the pragmatic uses of the demonstrative ono depend very much on . Rather than having a restricted syntactic position, the discourse particle ono appears to be floating. . Jahić at al. (2000) relate the functions of the Bosnian demonstratives ono, ovo, and to to the pronominal categories of the first (I/we), second (you/you) and third (she/he/it/they) person and state that ovo marks something which is in the territory of the first person, to marks that which is in the territory of the second person, while ono relates to that which is in the territory of the third person.

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the varying levels of knowledge of the immediate and distant contexts that each interlocutor brings into the interaction. In essence, the pragmatic functions of the demonstrative ono can be thought of as different ways of expressing the speaker’s and hearer’s orientation toward some present or absent entity. All interactants must share knowledge of the entity in focus, however, in order for the demonstrative ono to be properly understood.

3.1

Problems with a traditional account of ono as a particle

In addition to what has been said so far about the syntactically or contextually constrained properties of the demonstrative ono, whose occurrence is dependent on its position in the noun phrase, there is another use of ono which, as an independent, positionally unrestricted constituent (i.e. not an integral part of the noun phrase, and hence not constrained by the number and gender of the succeeding items) is highly frequent in informal discourse. Examples (11)–(13) illustrate this use: (11) Ona je ono dobra plivačica. ‘She is ono a good swimmer.’ (12) Jučer sam ono spavao do podne. ‘Yesterday I ono slept till noon.’ (13) Bilo je ljudi ono koji su ostali u zgradi [za vrijeme rata]. ‘There were people ono who remained in the apartment building’ [during the war.]

In (11), ono precedes the noun phrase dobra plivačica (‘a good swimmer’) which is marked for the singular, feminine form. In (12), ono occurs between the auxiliary sam (‘to be’, 1st person sg) and the main verb spavao (‘to sleep’), which is marked for masculine gender. In (13), ono occurs before an entire relative clause koji su ostali u zgradi (‘who remained in the apartment building’) and is prefaced by the relative plural pronoun koji (‘who’). Since such syntactically unrestricted occurrences of ono are confined to spoken and informal discourse, ono has traditionally been relegated to a syntactically diverse and semantically vague category of particles, which more often than not indicates speech production issues. Furthermore, a traditional account cannot explain the cases of the utterancefinal ono with falling intonation, whereby the speaker signals that her utterance is about to be completed: (14) Daj ti nama tvoj broj, pa ćemo mi tebe zovnuti ono. ‘Give us your number, and we will call you ono.’

Chapter 5.╇ The Bosnian particle ono



(15) Običaj je bio piti kafu oko pet, pola-šest ono. ‘The custom was to have coffee around five, half past five ono.’

The argument which seems to support the traditional account of ono as a particle that indicates processing and speech production efforts (or errors) draws on the fact that several other traditionally-established particles that originate from demonstratives (e.g. onaj ‘that’ and ovo/ovaj ‘this’) are also used in informal discourse in similar ways. However, the question of how to explain the differences in use among these various lexical items that belong to the same syntactic and semantic category – specifically, in instances where it is clearly manifest that the speaker is making a selection – remains. In other words, if all of these items serve the same function (giving the speaker a chance to buy more time as she is producing or correcting her utterance), why is it that we see clusters of such items as illustrated in (16)?: (16) 1. 2. 3.

Ja sam, onaj, ‘I, onaj,’ ono kad je narod pokupljen, znaš, ‘ono when people were taken away, you know,’ doš’o pred zgradu. ‘came in front of the building.’

In what follows, I use the relevance-theoretic framework to show that ono, when not used as a demonstrative, is a discourse particle with distinct pragmatic functions that differ from those of other Bosnian particles (originating from demonstratives). For this purpose, I define discourse particles in the following way: [P]redominantly associated with (especially informal) spoken language, their function is to express pragmatic aspects of communication, for instance by marking propositional attitude or illocutionary force, or by signaling intratextual (sequential) or interpersonal relations, and they do not contribute to the propositional content of the utterance in which they occur.  (Andersen 1998:â•›147)

The data for my analysis come from informal conversations (see Note 7).

4.

A relevance-theoretic analysis of the discourse particle ono

The term relevance refers to a trade-off between contextual effects and processing effort: an optimally relevant utterance is one that “achieves an adequate range of contextual effects for the minimum justifiable processing effort” (Blass 1990:â•›62). This trade-off affects context selection. Relevant information may be derived not

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only from verbal stimuli, but also from observation, memory and inference. The context for interpreting the speaker’s intended message is chosen by the hearer so that he can arrive at an optimally relevant interpretation of the message. In other words, conversation is a cognitive activity in which different factors (physical, social, cultural, etc.) may affect the speaker’s construction and the hearer’s interpretation of a message; however, the hearer’s selection of the right assumptions occurs not before but during the actual process of utterance interpretation. Particularly important for my analysis of the pragmatic particle ono is the relevance-theoretic notion of loose talk. Sperber and Wilson (1986/95) argue that looseness, and not literalness, is a general property of utterances. Consider the following exchange: (17) a. Margaret: How old is your co-worker? b. Kristin: He is 41 years old. c. He is 41 years and 3 months old.

Kristin’s utterance in (17b) is, strictly speaking, a false response to Margaret’s question while the response (17c) describes a true state of affairs. However, unless Margaret demands the exact birth-information about Kristin’s co-worker, Kristin will most likely opt for a less-than-literal response (e.g. (17b)), which she believes to be true. By doing so, Kristin is not requiring Margaret to engage in any unnecessary processing of information, which utterance (17c) would otherwise require under the same set of circumstances. In the ensuing analysis I will show that the non-demonstrative occurrences of the Bosnian ono in informal discourse – ono as a discourse particle – perform the pragmatic role of loosening the propositional material that is under the scope of ono, thereby instructing the hearer that the intended proposition is to be taken interpretively (i.e. representing a thought or report) rather than descriptively (i.e. representing a true state of affairs or what the speaker believes to be true). The following example will illustrate this point: (18) Zamisli nas, ono non-stop zimi sjedimo u autu. ‘Imagine us, ono non-stop in the winter we sit in the car.’

In (18) the speaker describes monotony in his hometown and the way he and his friend tend to spend their winter days. The speaker cannot be taken to mean literally (i.e. to rely on the linguistically encoded meaning of the expression) that during winter he and his friend sit in the car for 24 hours, 7 days a week. In other words, ono, which precedes non-stop in this example, allows the speaker to signal to the hearer that he is aiming for a loose interpretation of the propositional constituent rather than a literal (encoded) one. As such, ono is a pragmatic particle of loose talk.

Chapter 5.╇ The Bosnian particle ono



My approach to ono is driven by the hypothesis that it is similar to the pragmatic marker like in English. To show this, I shall briefly review Andersen’s (1998) relevance-theoretic presentation of like in different utterance environments.

4.1

English like and Bosnian ono

In her relevance-theoretic analysis of like, Andersen (1998:â•›153) shows that notwithstanding a vast number of utterance elements that can be taken in the scope of like, these different uses of the marker can be subsumed under the general claim: “[l]ike appears to provide an explicit signal of a discrepancy between the propositional form of the utterance and the thought it represents”. Andersen suggests that like is a pragmatic marker which reduces the hearer’s processing efforts and makes an utterance optimally relevant by signaling a loose interpretation of the speaker’s thought. In order to better assess the similarity between like and ono, I will reproduce here Andersen’s list of items which can become objects of loose interpretation when they come under the pragmatic scope of like (1998:â•›154) (see Table 1). Table 1 Object of loose interpretation

Pragmatic scope of like

Numerical expression

the re= most latest ones have been from like → [six] years ago

Other measurable unit

and there’s like → [that much] gap between the earth and the top of the thing

NP

Well I think they must have made it so conscious for like → [fags and booze].

VP

Scott said to me if Paul like → [tries to take on Ollie] he’s just gonna break it up

AdvP

He lives in Mallorca, like → [really close to my house]

AdjP

But Megadrives do make their game, their games like → [easy] as well

PrepP

and she’ll completely ignore you and you’re left and she’ll do that like → [at a dinner party] or something

Whole declarative  proposition

Like → [she’s got enough.] You don’t show it but like → [she don’t go out and buy new posh clothes and everything.]

Whole interrogative proposition

Like → [who was it who reckoned there was a corner on a boat?]

Direct quotation

but I stand up here, when I see him I’m like → [oh yeah ha ha] you know laugh along with his jokes and

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An examination of objects of loose interpretation which may come under the pragmatic scope of ono indicates striking parallels between the occurrences of like and ono in informal discourse. The examples with ono I offer below are taken from a set of naturally occurring tape-recorded conversations among four friends. Example (19) shows that ono may take a numerical expression under its scope: (19) Lezi tu ono → [dva, tri] sata i idi doma. ‘Lie down here ono → [two, three] hours and go home.’

In (19) the speaker is conveying her surprise about the amount of time a person is allowed to stay in hospital after a medical intervention. The use of ono allows the speaker to signal to her audience that she is not describing the actual amount of time but that she uses this expression interpretively to indicate ‘less time than one would normally expect.’ Example (20) illustrates ono preceding some other measurable unit: (20) Neke generacije su morale ovih deset godina živjet’ ono → [jedno] deset života do sada. ‘Some generations must have lived these ten years ono → [about] ten lives until now.’

In (20), the speaker is commenting on the recent war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which saw some generations of people experience the war more intensely than others. The speaker modifies ‘[about] ten lives until now’ with ono to signal that the intended interpretation of the message ‘some people lived an intense life’ does not come from the literal meaning of ‘some people had ten lives in ten years’ but from a looser interpretation of the metaphor. The following example indicates that ono can take a noun phrase under its scope: (21) Uglavnom ono → JNA, predstavnici JNA i vlasti. Ja i Aida. ‘Mostly ono → YPA, representatives of YPA and government. I and Aida.’

In (21) the speaker describes the opening night of a theater performance for which she and I had tickets. Given that many military and government representatives . These data were recorded in 2001 in Stolac, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as part of a project on identity construction in naturally-occurring conversations. In this encounter, four friends, all aged 29 years, meet in their hometown for the first time after ten years. . The abbreviation YPA (JNA in Bosnian) stands for Yugoslav People’s Army.

Chapter 5.╇ The Bosnian particle ono 101



were also present, the speaker endows her utterance to a friend with an ironic tone. Specifically, she wonders about how the two us, being ‘unimportant’, managed to obtain the tickets. The use of ono before YPA (Yugoslav People’s Army) indicates that the speaker does not mean that the entire Army attended the performance or that there were no other ‘unimportant’ people. That the speaker intends a less-than-literal message is additionally demonstrated by her subsequent repair in which JNA ‘YPA’ is replaced with predstavnici JNA ‘representatives of YPA’. Example (22) shows that ono can modify a verb phrase: (22) Žena ono → [popi flašu pelinkovca.] ‘The woman ono → [drank a bottle of liquor.’]

(22) is similar to (21) in that the speaker expresses her surprise at the unusual drinking habits of a woman she has met at a bar. The role of ono is to indicate a loosened interpretation, namely, that the relevance of the propositional constituent lies in the information about the overall (rather large) quantity of the consumed liquor during a (contextually provided) stretch of time, and not in the exact measure encoded in the logical form of the utterance (i.e. the entire bottle of alcohol in one take). Example (23) illustrates the pragmatic marker ono before an adverbial phrase. The speaker gives an approximation of the distance Marija has to cover on her way to work instead of providing exact information on the physical location of her work: (23) Marija radi ono → [blizu svoje zgrade.] ‘Marija works ono → [close to her apartment building.’]

Ono can also take an adjectival phrase under its scope. In (24), the speaker modifies the expression luda (‘crazy’) to signal that she does not intend to speak about the actual (diagnosed) mental state of the said woman but rather, means to convey an unexpected behavioral instance: (24) Ona je ono → [luda] žena. ‘She is ono → a [crazy] woman.’

Ono can also precede a prepositional phrase. The use of ono in (25) allows the speaker to indicate that he and his buddies enjoy hanging out in the town of Mostar (rather than describe a particular part of the town that is enjoyable): (25) Naljepše nam je kad smo ono → [u Mostaru.] ‘We like it best when we are ono → [in Mostar.’]

102 Aida Premilovac

The last three examples from the above set of naturally occurring data demonstrate that the particle ono may preface an entire declarative proposition (26), an interrogative proposition (27), and a direct quotation (28): (26) Ono → [on je imao neke kuće.] ‘Ono → [he had some houses.’] (27) Ono → [ko je mogao napraviti takvu grešku?] ‘Ono → [who could make such a mistake?’] (28)

Kad te zovne iz Amerike i pita te ono, ‘ when she calls you from America and asks you ono,’ → [“Mogu li ja ono iskoristiti?”] → ‘[“Could I use that thing?”]’

Having considered the different objects of loose interpretation which may come under the scope of ono, we see that there are striking parallels between this particle and the English like. In sum, the main pragmatic role of the discourse particle ono in informal discourse is to signal a loose interpretation of the speaker’s utterance.

4.2

Bosnian ono and onaj

Other Bosnian demonstratives, such as onaj, have also developed particle-like functions in informal talk. In the following conversational exchange both ono and onaj are used as particles: (29) 1. Aida: 2. 3. 4. Sejo: 5. Aida: 6. Irma:

Mislim da im je sada onaj… ‘I think that they now have onaj...’ da ne dovode sad. ‘that they are not bringing now.’ Obično petkom dovode. ‘They are usually bringing <someone> on Friday.’ Da, da. ‘Yes, yes.’ Ali sad pošto je ljeto znaš, ‘But since it is the summer now you know,’ Ja. ‘Yeah.’

. While apparent similarities between ono and like are shown and discussed, this contrastive topic is not the object of my study.

Chapter 5.╇ The Bosnian particle ono 103



7. Aida: 8.

i raja se raštrkala i ono, ‘and people are dispersed and ono,’ ne isplati mu se. ‘he is not making money.’

In example (29), Sejo, Irma, and myself discuss a concert hall in a neighboring town which hosts different bands and singers on Friday evenings. However, I had previously found out that the place was not going to host anybody that summer because the owner could not make a profit with everyone being on vacation. Against this background, onaj in line (1) signals an interpretation which more closely resembles the literal interpretation (i.e. the linguistically encoded information) of the upcoming utterance than ono in (7).10 So, while ono loosens the propositional content, onaj prefaces the information that the speaker believes to be more factually relevant (i.e. that the place is not going to have any shows rather than the information about the reason given later on). This point is further illustrated in examples (30) and (31), both of which host€onaj: (30) 1. Irma: 2.

Onaj, kolika imaju stana? ‘Onaj, how many apartments do they have?’ Tri, četiri? ‘Three, four?’

(31) 1. Irma: 2. Aida: 3. 4. 5. 6.

Šta se radi sa onim kockicama? ‘What does one do with those small dice?’ Onaj, svaki igrač ima onaj svoje puce. ‘Onaj, each player has onaj his pieces.’ I sad kad bacaš kocke, ‘And when you throw the dice,’ <pokazuje rukom na stolu> Fazon je ‘<points with her hand on the table> The trick is’ da ovaj prebaci puce ovamo, ‘that this one moves pieces over here,’ ovaj ovamo. ‘this one over here.’ Teško mi je objasniti bez table. ‘It is hard for me to explain without the board.’

10. The relevance-theoretic notion of interpretive resemblance is contextually dependent: “two propositions P and Q may resemble one another closely in one context and less closely or not at all in another context” (Sperber and Wilson 1991:â•›542).

104 Aida Premilovac

In both (30) and (31), information is being sought or provided. In (30) Irma asks about the number of apartments that some people own in our hometown. It is difficult to imagine this type of request as a geniune request for information. Rather, as it is prefaced by onaj, it should be understood as a comment based on some existing knowledge of the apartments in question. Similarly, in (31) Irma asks me to explain how the game of backgammon is played. While telling Irma some of the rules of the game, it is in my interest to relay that information in a precise rather than vague manner.. Thus, if the utterance hosted ono instead of onaj, my response would presume that either the speaker has some previous knowledge of the game or that I am not taking her request for information seriously. Finally, to establish the difference between ono and onaj, let us briefly examine the co-occurrence of the two particles in (32): (32) 1. Tiho: 2. 3.

Ja sam, onaj, ‘I, onaj,’ ono kad je narod pokupljen, znaš, ‘ono when people were taken away, you know,’ doš’o pred zgradu. ‘came in front of the building.’

In (32) the speaker is describing the delicate position he is in as a Croat, and how lonely he felt in his hometown after Bosniaks had been driven out by Croat extremists. In line (1) Tiho shifts from marking the utterance “when people were taken away” with onaj to marking it with ono to signal a different interpretation. If Tiho prefaced the utterance with onaj, the hearer would get the impression that Tiho was in front of the building on the day of deportation, that he witnessed the event or even took part in it. By marking the utterance with ono, Tiho signals a loose interpretation of the message, namely, that he was in front of the building on some day following the deportation. The use of ono allows Tiho to veil his role in, or attitude toward, the actual event in front of his Bosniak audience. This and the above examples featuring ono and onaj indicate that these two discourse particles have distinct functions in informal discourse. While ono loosens the intended interpretation of the host utterance, onaj seems to mark a literally (or at least a less loosely) intended message, which is a result of either seeking or providing exact information. The particular status of ono as a discourse particle of loose talk will be further examined in the following section, where I discuss the relevance theoric approach to the notions of truth-conditionality, the procedural/conceptual distinction and the explicit/implicit distinction as they relate to ono.

Chapter 5.╇ The Bosnian particle ono 105



4.3

Ono in truth conditions, the procedural/conceptual,  and explicit/implicit distinctions

Pragmatic markers are usually defined as devices that do not affect the truth conditions of an utterance. So, the question is whether the absence of ono affects the truth conditions of its host utterance. Consider examples (33) and (34) below: (33) Bilo je ljudi ono koji su ostali u zgradi [za vrijeme rata]. ‘There were people ono who remained in the apartment building’ [during the war.] Bilo je ljudi koji su ostali u zgradi [za vrijeme rata]. ‘There were people who remained in the apartment building’ [during the war.] (34) Žena ono popi flašu pelinkovca. ‘The woman ono drank a bottle of brandy.’ Žena popi flašu pelinkovca. ‘The woman drank a bottle of brandy.’

In (33), three interlocutors discuss whether there were any robberies in their town during the war and agree that there were. Meanwhile, the current speaker constructs possible evidence for the opposite. Specifically, the speaker claims to not have heard of any robberies, which she explains with the fact that some apartments continued to be occupied during the war, like those in her building. Thus, the people’s continued presence in their apartments might have been the reason why they were not robbed. By using ono the speaker signals that she does not intend to say that the people who were around during the war were not leaving their apartments at all. Rather, she asserts that their presence (more abstractly construed) may have been the reason why she has not heard of any robberies committed. That the speaker intends to convey a loose interpretation is also evidenced by an utterance following the discussed example, in which she says Valjda su bile straže ‘There may have been guard posts’. What happens to the truth conditions of utterance (33) when ono is absent? I suggest that ono does not affect the truth condition of the utterance because when ono is absent, the hearer is not led to the interpretation (that the speaker meant) that people who were around during the war stayed in their apartments all the time. It may seem, out of context, that the absence of ono in (34) signals something different, namely, that the