The use of the expectation marker actually in spoken conversation is an interesting topic. This study investigates the different functions of actually and the importance of context in eight spoken conversations from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. The chosen conversations are different when it comes to social factors like the participants’ age or gender. The interactions are studied using Karin Aijmer’s suggested functions of actually. Aijmer divides the expectation marker into two major functions: contrastive and emphatic. Basically, the contrastive actually functions as an opposition between points of views, and the empathic actually is used to justify or explain an earlier statement. The method used for the study is of a qualitative character as I study the interactions thoroughly both by listening to the conversations as well as studying the available transcript versions of the interactions. Overall, the study shows that emphatic actually is most common in the data used, and it is mainly used to explain or justify something or as a marker of a participant’s style of speech. In other words, actually is more often used as a way to underline an utterance rather than to correct or make a contrast to another participant’s statement. Actually is often used as a marker of style, a way for a speaker to signal or mark a specific style of speech. All of the conversations are taken from everyday life and should therefore be considered unprepared. When it comes to context it seems as if actually is more frequently used in conversations between participants close in age and who are involved in a closer sort of relationship, for example cousins or a couple in a love relationship. As for gender, actually is used by both women and by men.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第24685号 / 人博第1058号 / 新制||人||248(附属図書館) / 2022||人博||1058(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)教授 藤田 耕司, 教授 谷口 一美, 准教授 守田 貴弘, 教授 田中 伸一 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

One of the distinctive features of Japanese is the presence of discourse particles. The only way to truly resolve what these particles mean and how they are used is to examine them in use and to study the entire system of many particles. In order to add to the attempt to do this by providing more data for the study of particles, this exploratory study examines a large corpus of naturally occurring telephone conversations in the online CallFriend Japanese corpus and conversations taken from the Japanese TV drama "HERO." This analysis of both naturally occurring and scripted data will lead to further understanding both of actual patterns of particle use by real speakers and the language ideology that informs the usage of language created for a specific purpose. The results suggest that using this method of analysis shows a great deal not only about how particles are used in discourse strategies and in showing a speaker's affective commitment to the conversation but about the semantics involved in their use.

Adopting an eclectic analytic perspective of discourse analysis, conversation analysis and functional approaches, this study conducts an in-depth pragmatic analysis and describes the function of three pragmatic particles yani, iSte and Sey in casual, conversational Turkish. All three particles have multiple functions, which are described by reference to occurrences in utterances within three different domains of conversation. While utterance initial occurrences of yani are mainly connective and continuative, the utterance final placement of yani mainly acts as a situating particle with a strongly interactional nature. The utterance medial occurrences are basically &lsquo / self-editing&rsquo / whereby the speaker marks the clarification of a point in his/her prior talk. iSte mainly acts as a frame particle demarcating utterances as containing detailed, highlighted, and reported information as well as connecting distant pieces of utterances. The third particle Sey basically marks the speaker&rsquo / s temporary mental effort of extracting the linguistic information from the memory. In addition to its major role in repair organisation whereby marking its producer&rsquo / s verbal planning and word search, Sey displays caution and discretion and marks politeness when assessing/asserting something about the self or the other.

This thesis examines a set of three utterance particles—ge3, laak3, and lo1—in Hong Kong Cantonese in terms of evidentiality, epistemic modality, and mirativity. Cantonese utterance particles have long been studied; however, close investigation of evidentiality and mirativity on a small set of particles is relatively rare. Previous accounts claim that ge3 and laak3 convey certainty. On the other hand, linguists also claim that the use of the utterance particle lo1 assumes a high level of knowledge from a hearer. This thesis has two main purposes: to untangle the differences between the utterance particles ge3 and laak3 in terms of epistemic modality and evidentiality and to reveal the mirative meanings of the utterance particle lo1. I postulate that the utterance particle ge3 conveys both epistemic modality and evidentiality. For epistemic modality, ge3 concerns a speaker’s knowledge. The evidential meaning—access to prior knowledge—is realized through implicature. This pragmatic reading is highly context dependent. In contrast, the utterance particle laak3 conveys only epistemic modality which concerns a state of affairs and signifies a change of state. Lastly, this study also reveals that the utterance particle lo1 has mirative values of sudden realization and counterexpectation under certain conversational contexts.

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit dem Phänomen der deutschen Modalpartikeln (MPn), das in der linguistischen Forschung viel Aufmerksamkeit erhalten hat, aber fast immer nur innerhalb der Satzgrenzen betrachtet wurde. Es wurde mehrfach vorgeschlagen, dass MPn eine Funktion im Hinblick auf Common Ground-Management haben, jedoch wird nie ausgeführt, wie diese zustande kommt. In dieser Arbeit wird gezeigt, wie die Bedeutung und Funktion verschiedener MPn im Rahmen eines erweiterten Common Ground-Modells erfasst werden kann. In einem zweiten Schritt wird in zwei empirischen Studien die Interaktion von MPn mit Diskursstruktur analysiert, wobei Diskursstruktur hier im Rahmen von Diskursrelationen modelliert wird. Dafür wurden in einem Korpus von Parlamentsreden (126.000 Token) alle Sätze, die eine MP (ja, doch, eben, halt, wohl und schon wurden analysiert) enthalten im Hinblick auf ihre Relationen zu adjazenten Diskurseinheiten annotiert. Verwendet wurde dafür die in der Rhetorischen Strukturtheorie (Mann & Thompson 1989) vorgeschlagenen Relationen. Die statistische Analyse der Ergebnisse zeigen signifikante Präferenzen der einzelnen MPn für bestimmte Diskursrelationen. Diese wurden anschließend in einem Lexical Choice Experiment überprüft und bestätigt, bei dem SprecherInnen im Kontext verschiedener Diskursrelationen auswählen sollten, welche MP am natürlichsten in einen Diskurs passt. SprecherInnen verwenden MPn, um zu zeigen, in welchem Verhältnis eine Proposition zu anderen steht oder um die Proposition auf eine bestimmte Art und Weise im Diskurs zu verankern, z.B. in dem sie als Hintergrundinformation markiert wird. Die beiden empirischen Studien zeigen zum ersten Mal, wie SprecherInnen diese Funktionen nutzen – und teilweise ausnutzen – um Diskurs zu strukturieren, Diskursrelationen hervorzuheben und so Kohärenz zu fördern. Gleichzeitig zeigt diese Arbeit, dass ein erweitertes Common Ground-Modell notwendig ist, um den Beitrag von MPn adäquat zu erfassen. / This work focuses on the phenomenon of German modal particles (Mps) which has received much attention in linguistic research – however mainly restricted to an analysis inside the sentence boundaries. It has been proposed that the function of Mps can be described with respect to common ground management, but this has never been spelled out in detail. Here, the meaning and function of different Mps will be captured in a broadened common ground model. In a second step, two empirical studies analyse the interaction of MPs and discourse structure – here modelled in terms of discourse relations. In a corpus of parliament speeches (126.000 word tokens), all sentences containing a modal particle (ja, doch, eben, halt, wohl and schon have been analyzed) were annotated for their discourse relations towards adjacent discourse units. The statistical analysis of the results reveals clear preferences of the single particles for different discourse relations. These preference were tested again in a follow-up experiment, a lexical choice task in which speakers had to decide which particle fits most naturally in contexts of different discourse relations. The results verified the findings of the corpus study. Overall, MPs can be used to indicate to the addressee how a proposition that is asserted by the speaker is related to (an)other proposition(s) and anchor information in discourse structure in a certain way, e.g. by marking it as background information. The results of the empirical studies show for the first time how speakers can make use of these functions – sometimes by exploiting them – to structure discourse, enhance the function of discourse relations and thereby establish coherence. At the same time, it becomes clear that a broader model of common ground is needed to capture this function of MPs in discourse appropriately.