Functional Grammar

13th ICFG 2008

Abstracts

13th International Conference on Functional Grammar

Interactive discourse acts in spoken Brazilian Portuguese

Eduardo Penhavel, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil
Alessandra Guerra, Universidade Estadual Paulista, São José do Rio Preto, Brazil

In spoken Brazilian Portuguese there is a set of expressions which share the following features: they are syntactically independent, they do not convey semantic meaning, they are usually prosodicaly independent, they allow no or little morphological variation and they have a function of conveying an interactive relationship between speaker and addressee. Examples of these expressions are né? (right?), veja bem (you see), bem (well) etc. Because of such characteristics, these expressions seem to be similar to what has been defined as interactive acts within Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) (Hengeveld & Mackenzie, 2008). Therefore, the objective of this work is to analyze these expressions in grammatical terms in order to see to what extent they could be described as interactive acts within FDG.

Interactives involve an interactive illocution and both speaker and addressee (and potentially communicated content). In interactives, the head slot of the basic illocution slot is fulfilled by interjections and related expressions. In some cases, the interactive illocutionary expression is the whole linguistic material of the act. These characteristics provide the main clues suggesting the interactive act status of the expressions addressed here, i.e. the fact that interactives concern an interactive relation between speaker and addressee and the fact that they can concern only an interactive item which is an interjection or a related expression.

There are two types of interactives: interactives as Congratulations, Good morning etc. and vocatives, as Hey – the latter type being the most similar to the expressions under consideration. One of the main differences between these two subclasses seems to be the fact> that whereas an expression as Congratulations can be the only act of a move, vocatives must be used in a move within which there is at least one more act to which they can refer and which is central in relation to them. The same kind of restriction verifies with the expressions concerned here. Some clues for their status as particular categories arise from constraints on their positions inside the move. They fall into three subclasses: checkings, injunctives and initiators. Checkings can never occur in the initial position of a move. Injunctives and initiators cannot occur in final position, and they have preference for the initial position (especially initiators). And vocatives present even another pattern once they can occur in all those positions.

In this work, we discuss a number of aspects such as the ones introduced above as well as some conclusions. The data have shown that, if the expressions concerned here were identified as grammatically relevant, they should be described as another subclass of interactives alongside vocatives. However, a main conclusion has been that, despite presenting some grammatical particularities, these expressions still seem to be considerably discourse-oriented. Considering vocatives, checkings, injunctives and initiators, which, from a discourse point of view, constitute four particular categories that share the general function of gaining the addressee’s attention, it seems that spoken Brazilian Portuguese provides systematic grammatical pattern just for vocatives. By accounting for these issues, this work addresses the discourse-grammar interface and tries to systematize an aspect of its shape. To this respect, the work also addresses the discussion developed in Hannay & Kroon (2005) on the discourse act status of expressions as well, eh? and you know and on the relationship between discourse and grammar.

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References:

Hannay, M. & Kroon, C. (2005). Acts and the relationship between discourse and grammar. Functions of Language. 12 (1), 87-124.
Hengeveld, K. & Mackenzie, J. L. in press, 2008. Functional Discourse Grammar: A typologically-based theory of language structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.