Symposium on Pragmatic Particles in (Greek) Talk-in-interaction

June 24th-25th, 2019
Thessaloniki

The Institute of Modern Greek Studies [Manolis Triandaphyllidis Foundation] organized its 3rd Symposium on the Greek language in spoken communication, hold in Thessaloniki on 24-25 June 2019. The Symposium was organized in the framework of the Institute’s activities on spoken Greek and the research project Greek Talk-in-interaction and Conversation Analysis. Its special topic was the Pragmatic Particles in (Greek) Talk-in-interaction.

In the study of the Modern Greek language, ‘particles’ (small, uninflected words) came to the fore already in the early 1950s through the Modern Greek Syntax (by Ach. Tzartzanos), in which the multifunctionality and heterogeneity of these linguistic items (conjunctions, adverbs, interjections, prepositions) became apparent. Contemporary linguistic research has highlighted a multitude of such items across languages, pointing to the lack (or bleaching) of their referential meaning in favor of interactional, structural-organizational, etc. functions.

The variety of theoretical and methodological approaches taken as well as the focus on, in part, different phenomena is reflected in the plethora of terms employed in the literature, for example: Abtönungspartikel (Weydt 1969), discourse markers (Schiffrin 1987, Fraser 1990, Jucker & Ziv 1998, Fischer 2013, Maschler & Schiffrin 2015), utterance particles (Luke 1990), pragmatic particles (Östman 1995, Foolen 1996, Beeching 2002), pragmatic markers (Brinton 1996, Andersen 2001, Aijmer 2013), modal particles (Aijmer 1997, Waltereit 2001), discourse particles (Aijmer 2002, Fischer 2006), interactional particles (Morita 2005), or simply particles (Heritage & Sorjonen 2018). The term pragmatic particles, employed here, is intended to cover the wide spectrum of linguistic items/constructions with indexical and meta-communicative meaning and to serve as a hypernym of the above-mentioned terms, without commitment to individual delineations and categorizations.

This year’s Symposium also hosted a number of talks on pragmatic particles in other languages, so that discussion of the Greek data can be situated in the cross-linguistic perspective of talk-in-interaction.

The keynote speaker of the Symposium was Professor Emeritus

John Heritage (University of California at Los Angeles).

Moreover, the experts Galina Bolden (Assoc. Professor, Rutgers University), Yael Maschler (Professor, University of Haifa), Geoffrey Raymond (Professor, University of California at Santa Barbara) also participated.

The aim of the Symposium was to examine systematically the functions of pragmatic particles in Modern Greek as used in ordinary or institutional interaction. Some of the issues that were of interest are:

the position of a particle within the turn
its function in a particular position
its prosodic variations
the relationship between positions of occurrence and function
possible common features (‘nuclear meaning’) of the different functions
the sequential environment of the particles
the impact of the broader context (discourse type/genre, situation of communication, activity type)
the actions, to whose accomplishment the particles contribute
combinations of pragmatic particles
(sub)categories of pragmatic particles

References

Aijmer, K. 1997. I think – an English modal particle. In Modality in Germanic languages: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, T. Swan & O. Jansen Westwik (eds), 1–47. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Aijmer, K. 2002. English Discourse Particles: Evidence from a Corpus. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Aijmer, K. 2013. Understanding Pragmatic Markers: A Variational Pragmatic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Andersen, G. 2001. Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Beeching, K. 2002. Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Brinton, L. J. 1996. Pragmatic Μarkers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Fischer, K. (ed.). 2006. Approaches to Discourse Particles. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Fischer, K. 2013. Discourse markers. In Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, C. A. Chapelle (ed.), 1956-1960. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Foolen, A. 1996. Pragmatic Particles. In Handbook of Pragmatics, J. Verschueren, J.-O. Östman, J. Blommaert & C. Bulcaen (eds), 1–24. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Fraser, B. 1990. An approach to discourse markers. Journal of Pragmatics 14: 383-395.

Heritage, J. & M.-L. Sorjonen (eds). 2018. Between Turn and Sequence: Turn-initial Particles across Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Jucker A. & Y. Ziv (eds.) 1998. Discourse Markers: Descriptions and Theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Luke, K. K. 1990. Utterance Particles in Cantonese Conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Maschler, Y. & D. Schiffrin. 2015. Discourse markers: Language, meaning, and context. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2nd edn, D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton & D. Schiffrin (eds), 189–221. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

Morita, E. 2005. Negotiation of Contingent Talk: The Japanese Interactional Particles ne and sa. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Östman, J.-O. 1995. Pragmatic particles twenty years after. In Organization in Discourse. Proceedings from the Turku Conference (Anglicana Turkuensia 14), B. Wårvik, S.-K. Tanskanen & R. Hiltunen (eds), 95-108. University of Turku.

Schiffrin, D. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Waltereit, R. 2006. Abtönung: Zur Pragmatik und historischen Semantik von Modalpartikeln und ihren funktionalen Äquivalenten in romanischen Sprachen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Weydt, H. 1969. Abtönungspartikel: Die deutschen Modalwörter und ihre französischen Entsprechungen. Bad Homurg: Gehlen.