University of Zurich, Department of English, Andreas H. Jucker
 

Seminar: Discourse Markers, Interjections and other Inserts in English

A.H. Jucker
Wednesday, 14:00-15:45, Room PLH 105
Updated: October 24, 2008

Course description:

Inserts are stand-alone words or expressions which normally do not enter into syntactic relations with other structures. Discourse markers, like well, right, and now, and interjections like oh, ah, oops or whoops are inserts that have received a fair amount of attention in the relevant literature. But we shall also deal with greetings and farewells, such as hi, hello, bye, attention signals, such as hey, response elicitors, such as right?, huh?, or okay? and some others. We shall try to understand the use and function of a range of illustrative inserts and we shall discuss the theoretical frameworks needed for their description. The different types of inserts also have in common that they are rarely, if at all, explicitly taught in foreign language classes. We shall try to assess to what extent this should be changed and how this might be done.

The course will cover the requirements of a “Fachwissenschaftliche Vertiefung mit pädagogischem Fokus” for the MAS-SHE, and award credit points accordingly, as specified by the Institut für Gymnasial- and Berufspädagogik.

Required reading for first session:

Chapter 14.3.3 “More on non-clausal units: inserts”. In: Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman, p. 1082-1099. (available through OLAT, “ES_08_AS_Jucker_Seminar”)

Additional course materials and resources will be available online (OLAT). In order to access these, students will need their UniAccess user name and password. (If you have lost the details of your account or if you need help, please contact: Beratung der Informatikstelle Rämistr. 74.)

Papers

Deadline for term papers: February 20, 2009. There will be NO extensions.

All papers for this seminar are to be submitted in electronic form to ahjucker@es.unizh.ch. Please, check the relevant style sheet.

Provisional syllabus

Date Topic Reading assignment Presenters
17.9 Inserts: The basics Biber et al. 1999: 1082-1099 AHJ
24.9 Corpus methodology McEnery et al 2006: Unit A1 and A2 AHJ
1.10. Discourse markers: Definitions and overview Jucker & Ziv 1998; Schiffrin 2001 AHJ
8.10 *** cancelled ***
15.10 Discourse marker well Müller 2004 Jens Poulsen, Jeannette Spreuer
22.10 Discourse marker now Aijmer 2002: ch 2 Christian Brodbeck, Stephanie Hämmerle
29.10 Discourse marker you know and I mean Fox & Schrock 2002

Sandra Derungs, Katherine White, Eve Lendi

5.11. Interjections Aijmer 2002: ch 3; Heritage 2002

Rico Bamert, Olivia Inauen, Alexandra Kindler

12.11. Greetings and farewells Eisenstein et al. 1996 Seraina Bieri, Michael Graf, David Ehrat
19.11. Attention signals Romero Trillo 1997 Silja Ang-Tschachtli, Stefan Gasser
26.11. Response elicitors and response forms Stenström et al. 2002: ch 7 Susanne Kammerer, Iris Pauli
3.12. Polite speech-act formulae: thanks Aijmer 1996: ch 2

Rahel Rivera Godoy, Pei Bei Xu

10.12. Expletives Stenström 1991; Daly et al. 2004

Daniela Belfiore, Frederik Martin

17.12. Summary and conclusion AHJ

References

Aijmer, Karin. (1996) Conversational Routines in English. Convention and Creativity. London: Longman.

Aijmer, Karin. (2002) English Discourse Particles. Evidence from a Corpus. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 10). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.

Daly, Nicola, Janet Holmes, Jonathan Newton and Maria Stubbe. (2004) Expletives as solidarity signals in FTAs on the factory floor. Journal of Pragmatics 36, 945-964.

Eisenstein Ebsworth, Miriam, Jean W. Bodman and Mary Carpenter (1996) Cross-cultural realization of greetings in American English. In: Susan M. Gass and Joyce Neu (eds.). Speech Acts Across Cultures. Challenges to Communication in a Second Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 89-107.

Fox Tree, Jean E., and J. C. Schrock. (2002) Basic meanings of you know and I mean. Journal of Pragmatics 34, 727-747.

Heritage, John. (1984) A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In: J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage (eds.). Structure of Social Action. Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 299-345.

Heritage, John. (2002) Oh-prefaced responses to assessments: A method of modifying agreement/disagreement. In: Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox, and Sadra A. Thompson (eds.). The Language of Turn and Sequence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 196-224.

Jucker, Andreas H., and Yael Ziv. (1998) Discourse markers: Introduction. In: Jucker, Andreas H., and Yael Ziv (eds.). Discourse Markers. Descriptions and Theory. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 57). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-12.

McEnery, Tony, Richard Xiao and Yukio Tono. (2006) Corpus-Based Language Studies. An Advanced Resource Book. (Routledge Applied Linguistics). London: Francis and Taylor.

Müller, Simone. (2004) “Well you know that type of person”: Functions of “well” in the speech of American and German students. Journal of Pragmatics 36, 1157-1182.

Romero Trillo, Jesús. (1997) Your attention, please: Pragmatic mechanisms to obtain the addresees attention in English and Spanish conversations. Journal of Pragmatics 28, 205-221.

Schiffrin, Deborah. (2001) Discourse markers: Language, meaning and context. In: Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.). The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell, 54-75.

Stenström, Anna-Brita. (1991) Expletives in the London-Lund Corpus. In: Karin Aijmer, and Bengt Altenberg (eds.). English Corpus Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Jan Svartvik. London: Longman, 239-253.

Stenström, Anna-Brita, Gisle Andersen and Ingrid Kristine Hasund. (2002) Trends in Teenage Talk. Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 8). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.


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