Abstract
This paper tackles the problem of interaction between multiple discourse particles in the same utterance. It examines how presuppositions and/or implicatures contributed by individual particles are combined to account for connotations which arise in utterances containing multiple particles. The subject of study is free combinations of set-evoking colloquial Russian particles –to, že, and ved’. The data are drawn from constructed minimal discourses. The study integrates the theories of information structure (Vallduví, The informational component, 1992), scalar implicatures (Hirschberg, A theory of scalar implicature, 1985/1991), and discourse organization (Büring, On D-trees, beans, and B-accents, 2000). The current approach to decomposing the meaning of particles by examining them in combination sheds new light on the context-independent interpretations of the particles and makes another step toward understanding their complex roles in discourse.
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- 1.
This situation is adapted from Vasilyeva (1972: 179) where a proposition in the preceding discourse, shown in (i), is followed by an utterance in (ii):
- 2.
The presence of negation in the tested sentence should not affect conclusions on the contributions of each particle. The constructed discourse situation could be reversed: A and B could be talking about a bestseller that nobody in the group except A has read; and B would be soliciting A’s advice by uttering a sentence which asserts You have read it and contains the particle(s). However, I am finding this situation slightly more unnatural than in (1) above, especially with particles že and/or ved’ which add the tone of contradiction to the utterance. This issue is worth discussing in more detail in the future.
- 3.
For example, short prepositions, like v ‘in’ cannot host – to, while it can cliticize to phonetically longer ones, such as vnutri ‘inside’ (see McCoy 2001: 160–162).
- 4.
However, the essential property of – to as a marker of a set of sets of propositions will also be satisfied when the link is marked as kontrastive by some other linguistic means (prosody, other lexical expressions that mark kontrast, etc.) and – to encliticizes to the (kontrastive) rheme. In this case, which is not the default option, the set of sets of propositions is still marked by – to (however, with additional help of some other linguistic expression marking the kontrastive status of the link).
- 5.
The position of – to in the sentence is determined by which element plays the role of a contrastive topic/theme/link: if, for example, – to were cliticized to eё ‘it/this book,’ the generated set of questions (or the set of sets of propositions) would be organized around the contrast on this book versus that book or this book versus this article versus this dissertation and the respective properties of each of these entities (the property of not having been read by you versus other relevant properties).
- 6.
- 7.
The particle že also occurs in wh-questions (and quasi-questions with wh-words). One possible way to render their meaning into English is by a phrase (who/what/…) in the world or its synonyms in the ‘familiar’ mode of communication (who/what/…) the hell….
- 8.
For a previous attempt to analyze particles in combination see McCoy-Rusanova (2008).
- 9.
The same happens with two occurrences of že in one clause. Parrott (1997:166ff.), however, points out that multiple že is functionally identical to its single use besides its occurrence in emotional speech and the flavor of being somewhat substandard. She also calls attention to the existence of the marginal colloquial form žež (which is common in Belorussian).
- 10.
The implicatures of the utterance in (25) can be made even more explicit when other linguistic elements are added to the sentence, such as certain interjections (a ‘oh’), reflexive pronouns (sam ‘yourself’), adverbs (eschё ‘yet/still’), as shown in (i) below. Such linguistic elements work in concord with the particles and highlight the contrasts brought up by them. The interaction of the particles with other linguistic means and the requirements for their compatibility are worth exploring in the future:
- 11.
See McCoy (2002) for an analysis of a colloquial Russian construction “X-to X, a…” which has both the particle – to and the conjunction a.
- 12.
Thanks to an anonymous review for the suggestion.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Paul Hagstrom for support and encouragement and to Emily Diehl for another pair of attentive eyes. Previous versions of this talk were presented at SURGE (Rutgers Semantics Research Group) and as a poster at FASL 2007 (Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, Stony Brook University). I would like to thank the organizers (especially Professor Chungmin Lee) and the participants of the Workshop on Contrastiveness in Information Structure and/or Scalar Implicature at CIL 18, two anonymous reviewers, and the audiences at previous venues, for helpful comments. All remaining errors are mine, of course.
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McCoy-Rusanova, S. (2017). Scalar Implicatures, Presuppositions, and Discourse Particles: Colloquial Russian –to, že, and ved’ in Combination. In: Lee, C., Kiefer, F., Krifka, M. (eds) Contrastiveness in Information Structure, Alternatives and Scalar Implicatures. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 91. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10106-4_6
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