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Journal articles on the topic 'Conversational markers'
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1
McFarland, David H. "Respiratory Markers of Conversational Interaction." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 44, no. 1 (February 2001): 128–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2001/012).
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Respiratory movements were recorded from 10 dyads (20 subjects) during quiet breathing, reading aloud, spontaneous monologue, scripted dialog, and spontaneous conversation. Timing measures of inspiratory, expiratory, and total cycle duration were used to compare respiratory function during quiet breathing, listening, and speech. Cross-correlation analyses of the respiratory movements of conversational partners provided an index of conversational synchrony. Inspiratory duration was found to be the most consistent and sensitive measure for discriminating quiet breathing from speech breathing. In the scripted dialog and spontaneous conversation conditions, respiratory kinematics changed during listening to more closely resemble speech, and systematic changes were observed in anticipation of turn-taking speech onset. For the breathing cycles immediately surrounding turn changes and simultaneously produced vocal events, the kinematic signals of conversational partners were strongly correlated. Results are discussed in the context of similar findings concerning conversational interactions and motor preparation for speech.
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Simmons-Mackie, Nina N., and Jack S. Damico. "The Contribution of Discourse Markers to Communicative Competence in Aphasia." American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 5, no. 1 (February 1996): 37–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/1058-0360.0501.37.
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Discourse markers, expressions used to organize conversational interaction, are widely used by speakers in social conversation. An ethnographic investigation of compensatory strategies employed in natural communication by two aphasic subjects revealed a variety of behaviors fulfilling the requirements of discourse markers. The role of discourse markers as compensatory strategies to promote conversation in aphasia is discussed, with descriptive examples drawn from the ethnographic study.
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Thörle, Britta. "Turn openings in L2 French." Discourse Markers in Second Language Acquisition / Les marqueurs discursifs dans l’acquisition d’une langue étrangère 7, no. 1 (August 12, 2016): 117–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lia.7.1.05tho.
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In this contribution we will analyze a corpus of telephone conversations between German students of French and native speakers from an interactional linguistic point of view. The study is based on a corpus of ten formal conversations performed as role play between German university students and native speakers of French. Taking an interactional approach, the use of discourse markers will be described as a situated activity of learners who use the resources at their disposal to accomplish conversational tasks. The analysis will concentrate on the accomplishment of turn openings and point out the dynamic nature of the use of discourse markers in exolingual interaction. During the conversations, learners employ forms already available in their repertoire as discourse markers, they use the interlocutor’s example as a model, and they develop their own routines. Against this background, certain characteristics of discourse markers in L2 can be described as the result of communication and acquisition strategies that allow learners to maintain the conversation as well as to build, expand or adjust their repertoire.
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Attardo, Salvatore, Lucy Pickering, and Amanda Baker. "Prosodic and multimodal markers of humor in conversation." Pragmatics and Cognition 19, no. 2 (August 10, 2011): 224–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pc.19.2.03att.
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This case study extends the findings of Pickering et al. 2009 to the domain of conversational humor. We find that, as was the case in humorous narratives, conversational humor is not marked by higher pitch or volume, increased speech rate, or significant pauses. Unlike narrative humor, conversational humor is not produced at a lower pitch and slower rate than non-humorous parts of the text. We find that smiling and laughter tend to occur with humor.
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Ivic, Milka. "Unexpectedness and its pragmatic markers in standard serbian." Juznoslovenski filolog, no. 60 (2004): 15–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/jfi0460015i.
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The paper sets about to identify something researchers fail to consider: the principles that in Standard Serbian govern the occurrence of the pragmatic devices vec, jos, jos uvek, and vise (ne..) by means of which the speaker discloses that the information about an actual state of affairs he is giving to his conversation partner happens to be an unexpected news for him. It highlights also the informational effects of vec on somebody who is listening to the conversation between the speaker and the addressee but who does not share in all details their stock of knowledge about the conversational topic and it rises the relevant question of the theoretical status of such effects.
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Stenström, Anna-Brita. "Avoid silence! Keep talking!" Discourse linguistics: Theory and practice 21, no. 1 (April 7, 2014): 30–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/fol.21.1.03ste.
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The primary aim of this study has been to find out whether the choice and frequency of pragmatic markers can be said to distinguish phatic talk (‘chats’) from informative talk. A secondary aim has been to consider the bonding effect of the pragmatic markers. Five conversational extracts from COLT (The Bergen Corpus London Teenage Language), four representing boys’ and girls’ phatic talk, and one representing informative teacher talk have been investigated. The study shows that the distinction between the two types of talk is not a matter of frequency but a matter of marker choice. The bonding effect of the markers dominates in the girls’ talk in the form of appeals for agreement and encouragement signals. In both types of talk, the pragmatic markers are successfully used to avoid conversational gaps.
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Özyürek, Asli. "How children talk about a conversation." Journal of Child Language 23, no. 3 (October 1996): 693–714. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900009004.
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ABSTRACTThis study investigates how children of different ages talk about a conversation that they have witnessed. 48 Turkish children, five, nine and thirteen years in age, saw a televised dialogue between two Sesame Street characters (Bert and Ernie). Afterward, they narrated what they had seen and heard. Their reports were analysed for the development of linguistic devices used to orient their listeners to the relevant properties of a conversational exchange. Each utterance in the child's narrative was analysed as to its conversational role: (1) whether the child used direct or indirect quotation frames; (2) whether the child marked the boundaries of conversational turns using speakers' names and (3) whether the child used a marker for pairing of utterances made by different speakers (agreement-disagreement, request-refusal, questioning-answering). Within pairings, children's use of (a) the temporal and evaluative connectivity markers and (b) the kind of verb of saying were identified. The data indicate that there is a developmental change in children's ability to use appropriate linguistic means to orient their listeners to the different properties of a conversation. The development and use of these linguistic means enable the child to establish different social roles in a narrative interaction. The findings are interpreted in terms of the child's social-communicative development from being a ‘character’ to becoming a ‘narrator’ and ‘author’ of the reported conversation in the narrative situation.
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Kurniawan, Eko, and Shofi Mahmudah Budi Utami. "Conversational Implicature Of Women’s Language By Shin Tanokura In Drama Series Of Oshin." IZUMI 10, no. 1 (May 21, 2021): 184–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.14710/izumi.10.1.184-192.
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This study aims to describe the conversational implicature of women’s language by Shin Tanokura in the drama series of Oshin. Research-based on a theory of Azuma (2009) for implicature as women’s language and Yule (2006) for conversational implicature. It is a kind of qualitative research. The data collection technique used is the observing method. The method used in this research is the descriptive analysis with Connect and Compare Equation Technique and Connect and Distinguishing Technique. The result showed that the conversational implicature of women’s language by Shin Tanokura in the drama series of Oshin is generalized conversational implicature, particularized conversational implicature, and scalar implicature. These three implicatures present markers that confirm the utterances belong to the variety of women’s language. In conclusion, the use of the implicature with high intensity is a marker of the utterance that belongs to the variety of women’s language. The variety of women’s language with the use of implicature gives an impression and an image about the characteristic of women and the variety of women’s language.
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Cannava, Kaitlin E., Andrew C. High, Susanne M. Jones, and Graham D. Bodie. "The Stuff That Verbal Person-Centered Support Is Made of: Identifying Linguistic Markers of More and Less Supportive Conversations." Journal of Language and Social Psychology 37, no. 6 (August 21, 2018): 656–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0261927x18793683.
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Although the functions of messages varying in verbal person centeredness (PC) are well-established, we know less about the linguistic content that differentiates messages with distinct levels of PC. This study examines the lexicon of different levels of PC comfort and seeks to ascertain whether computerized analysis can complement human coders when coding supportive conversations. Transcripts from support providers trained to enact low, moderate, or high levels of PC were subjected to the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary. Results reveal that several categories in the LIWC dictionary vary systematically as a function of conversational PC level. LIWC categories, particularly pronouns, social process, cognitive process, anxiety, and anger words, reliably predict which level of the PC hierarchy an interaction represents based on whether a conversation was designed to be high, moderate, or low in PC. The implications are discussed in the context of the lexicon of conversations that vary in PC.
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Sakita, Tomoko I. "Discourse markers as stance markers." Pragmatics and Cognition 21, no. 1 (November 1, 2013): 81–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pc.21.1.04sak.
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Stance is inherent in conversational interaction and is interactional in nature. When speakers take a stance, they pay attention to both prior stances and stance relations, as well as to the anticipated consequences of their stancetaking. They manage stance relations as a way of dealing with the “sociocognitive relations” of intersubjectivity (Du Bois 2007). Using the dialogic framework proposed by Du Bois, this paper shows that the discourse marker well in American English works as a resource for the management of relationships among stances. With its referential and grammatical flexibility, it is uniquely characterized as a meta-stance marker because, rather than indexing a specific stance, it negotiates and regulates stance relations. Well is analyzed in two contextual categories: first, at stance divergence among utterances, and second, at stance shifts embedded in topic shift.
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Pokharel, Sujal, K. Sharma, and S. Shrestha. "Acquisition of case markers in typically developing 3-7 years old Nepali speaking children." Nepalese Journal of ENT Head and Neck Surgery 5, no. 1 (February 28, 2017): 17–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/njenthns.v5i1.16855.
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Objective: To describe spoken language case markers of Nepali language, to study their presence in typically developing children in the age of 3-4, 4-5, 5-6, and 6-7 years in the conversational sample and picture description and to report on the frequency of occurrence of these case markers in the obtained sample.Material and Methods: 87 (male=54, female=33) typically developing Nepali speaking children of age range 3-7 years, were randomly selected from english schools at kathmandu (Oriental Academy and Mount Secondary English Boarding School) between June 2011 to June 2012. Participants were assigned into 4 groups (i.e. 3-4 years, 4-5 years, 5-6 years and 6-7 years) according to their age during sample collection. Common case markers of Nepali were selected. Conversational samples were collected and analysed.Results There is a general increase in the acquisition as well as the frequency of usage of any type of case marker with the increase in the age of children. Among the different types of case markers, nominative and locative case marker types are the most developed type of case markers among any age group of children.Conclusion: There is an overall positive progression in the acquisition of types of case markers as well as their frequency of occurrence along with the increase in age of the child in normal typically developing children in Nepali language
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Borreguero Zuloaga, Margarita. "Topic-shift discourse markers in L2 Italian." Language, Interaction and Acquisition 8, no. 2 (December 31, 2017): 173–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lia.15045.bor.
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Abstract This paper examines how native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) of Italian approach topic organisation (topic shift, topic closure, digressions, topic recovery, and summary) in oral interactions. The research focuses on which discourse markers (DMs) are used when speakers try to organise discourse topics, and the differences between NS and NNS when performing such metadiscourse functions. The analysis is based on data from a spoken corpus designed to study conversational strategies in Spanish learners of L2 Italian. It reveals that the acquisition of metadiscourse functions progresses at different rates depending on the function: whereas learners have a good pragmatic competence in using DMs for the introduction of new topics in conversation, they have difficulties with other functions, such as topic closure or summary. In addition, the function of topic recovery after a digression is explicitly marked by NNS by DMs which are not found in native varieties.
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Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. "Attitude Markers and Conversational Implicatures in Turkana Speech Acts." Studies in Language 20, no. 2 (January 1, 1996): 249–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.20.2.02dim.
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Turkana has a set of particles expressing attitudes on the part of the speaker towards the propositional content of utterances in which such markers are used. Attitude markers in Turkana form a closed set whose distributional behavior partly follows from syntactic principles of the language. The absence of these attitude markers from certain syntactic positions follows from their lexical meaning and from pragmatic structure. Their current meaning is argued to have emerged through metonymic extension in certain lexical items, and through conventionalisation of their conversational implicatures. In addition some methodological issues are discussed concerning the interaction between grammar and culture-specific language use, by means of a comparison with similar markers in a number of other languages.
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Chady, Shimeen-Khan. "From connectors to extension particles, the meaning of sipa ki in Mauritian Creole." Taikomoji kalbotyra 15 (June 4, 2021): 9–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/taikalbot.2021.15.2.
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The extension particles are not considered as discourse markers by all researchers mainly considering the grammatical function the connectors which they are based on can present. However, as for discourse markers which “desemantisation” has been revoked, other researchers argue that extension particles maintain part of their original meaning while endorsing an intersubjective value. I try to study this question in this article for the Mauritian Creole extension particle sipa ki which is formed on the connector sipa. A fine-grained conversational and pragmatics analysis of 6 hours of ordinary conversations, collected in 2014 shows how sipa ki plays a part in conversational relation co-construction. While helping the enunciator to construct their own discourse and showing their attitude towards it, sipa ki provides information on the way the sentence has to be interpreted by soliciting (assumed) shared experience by interlocutors for message reconstruction. I argue that speech effects provided by extension particle sipa ki partly rely on the meaning of connector sipa on which it is constructed and which also holds an intersubjective value.
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Köymen, Bahar, and Aylin C. Küntay. "Turkish Children's Conversational Oppositions: Usage of Two Discourse Markers." Discourse Processes 50, no. 6 (August 2013): 388–406. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0163853x.2013.811334.
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Tudini, Vincenza. "Virtual immersion." Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. Series S 18 (January 1, 2004): 63–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/aralss.18.05tud.
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Most studies in the field of synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) deal with interactions between language learners, while interactions between native speakers (NS) and learners have not been explored to the same extent, particularly to ascertain whether chatting with NS can provide a pedagogically sound bridge to conversation. Through the analysis of interactions within a NS Italian chatline, this paper considers whether the chatline environment can act as a bridge to conversational Italian by providing the same opportunities for second language acquisition reputedly offered by face-to-face interaction. Italian NS chatline discourse is analysed for its conversational ‘flavour’ by considering variety of Italian, range of topics, questions, discourse markers, feedback tokens and negotiations. The findings of this study suggest that NS chat discourse can provide learners with exposure to colloquial and regional varieties of Italian, which are generally unavailable in language textbooks. Furthermore, NS chatline discourse offers learners a type of informal conversational practice which also includes negotiation of meaning, thus confirming its role in promoting language learning.
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Amuzu, E., A. E. A. Kuwornu, and S. Opoku-Fofie. "“Awww, we r sorry wai”: Pragmatic functions of L1 discourse markers in Ghanaians’ English-based WhatsApp conversations." Contemporary Journal of African Studies 5, no. 2 (November 27, 2018): 60–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/contjas.v5i2.3.
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The use of discourse markers (DMs) in written conversations has long been seen as features of oral conversations that chatters transfer into their written conversations when they wish to activate the informal relationships they developed in oral conversational contexts (see e.g. Landone 2012 and Ramón 2015). This paper shows this conclusion to be true of the use of seven DMs (o, wai, saa, paa, waa, koraa and la) by Ghanaians in their in-group English-based WhatsApp conversations. The DMs are from some Ghanaian languages, and using the Markedness Model of Myers-Scotton (1993, 1998, 1999) it is shown that they occur as marked codeswitches in the otherwise English texts where, in addition to informalising interactions, serve as exhibits of chatters’ Ghanaian identity and in-group solidarity; it is unlikely that such forms as wai, saa, paa, waa, koraa and la will appear in chats of non-Ghanaians. Data analysed for the study were extracts from WhatsApp platforms with only Ghanaian participants.
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Opsahl, Toril. "Wolla I swear this is typical for the conversational style of adolescents in multiethnic areas in Oslo." Nordic Journal of Linguistics 32, no. 2 (October 23, 2009): 221–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0332586509990059.
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This paper argues that the conversational style of adolescents in multiethnic areas in Oslo is characterized by an extended degree of epistemic focus and expressions pointing explicitly towards the news value of utterances. The linguistic traits contributing to this notion is a set of discourse markers where wallah, or as it is often referred to in Norwegian; wolla (orig. Arab. ‘I swear by Allah’), seems to be prominent, together with Norwegian counterparts such as sverg, jeg sverger and helt ærlig (‘swear’, ‘I swear’ and ‘quite honestly’). Equipped with methodological insights from Interactional linguistics, the distribution and discourse functions of the markers are analysed in a corpus of conversations between adolescents growing up in multiethnic areas (the Upus/Oslo-corpus) and compared to another larger, representative corpus of modern Oslo dialect (the NoTa/Oslo-corpus). The discourse markers in question are also discussed in light of grammaticalization processes.
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Azi, Yaseen A. "Fillers, Repairs and Repetitions in the Conversations of Saudi English Speakers: Conversational Device or Disfluency Markers." International Journal of Linguistics 10, no. 6 (December 23, 2018): 193. http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v10i6.14016.
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Based on the literature review, the three patterns (fillers, repairs and repetitions) in the conversations of the native English speakers are generally regarded as results of the normal speaking between people. On the other hand, the same patterns in the conversations of the L2 speakers are always seen as a marker of disfluency and linguistic disabilities of the nonnative speakers. Therefore, this study simply focuses on finding how the three disfluency patterns are used by the Saudi English speakers from different levels of fluency. The sampling of the study includes two groups of participants from different fluency levels. Through the transcriptions and the discourse analysis of one hour recoding of the two groups, the results showed that the three patterns (fillers, repairs and repetitions) should not be generally associated with disfluency. Instead, repetitions and self-repairs have been equally used by the two groups and such patterns can be used as a conversational device. However, the filler “uh” with longer pausing can clearly predict disfluency among the Saudi English speakers.
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Fischer, Ann Kathrin, and Kristina Herbert. "„Vor allem – da erste Gedanke is ja oft auch gar nicht so gmeint“ Operatoren zur Charakterisierung des kommunikativen und mentalen Status von Äußerungen im sozialen Raum." Linguistik Online 110, no. 5 (October 19, 2021): 229–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.13092/lo.110.8145.
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This paper investigates discursive structures of spoken language in formal and informal communication settings (almost 62 hours of recorded time) of urban speakers in Austria’s two biggest cities Vienna and Graz and their surroundings. We focus on so-called bipartite “Operator-Skopus-Strukturen” (‘operator-scope-structures’), examining their pragmatic and discourse organising function within specific conversational situations. Our main aim is to offer in-depth analyses of these structures by characterising the mental and communicative status of such utterances. Starting out with a discussion of characteristics of spoken language research, especially by arguing for the replacement of the grammatical concept of sentences with the interactional concept of turn-constructional units, we address the phenomenon of discourse markers and Operator-Skopus-Strukturen in particular. This is followed by the description of our data set and the subsequent analyses and discussion of the selected examples. According to our findings, Operator-Skopus-Strukturen appear in both conversational settings and among all groups of speakers. We demonstrate that all speakers use the structures with the same pragmatic function of giving information to their conversation partner on how to interpret and understand the message behind the utterance. Within this scope, the speaker’s intention can vary depending on the conversation partner, the topic of the conversation or the situation.
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Werner, Valentin. "Catchy and conversational? A register analysis of pop lyrics." Corpora 16, no. 2 (August 2021): 237–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cor.2021.0219.
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This study presents a register analysis of pop lyrics. To this end, it applies multi-dimensional register analysis to empirically test claims regarding the allegedly conversational nature of pop lyrics. It thus follows broader calls for the linguistic exploration of performed language as represented in non-canonical pop culture registers. This text-linguistic investigation relies on a corpus of contemporary pop lyrics and uses the Multidimensional Analysis Tagger ( Nini, 2018 ), software that replicates Biber's (1988) tagger, to identify register features to contrast lyrics with other varieties of text. In addition, the n-gram and keyword functionalities of a concordancer are used for establishing register markers and style features to identify characteristic properties of pop lyrics. In line with earlier claims, it becomes apparent that pop lyrics indeed carry some conversational force despite situational factors being indicative of planned and performed production. Furthermore, this analysis identifies additional features that are highly distinctive of pop lyrics ( versus general conversation), and is suggestive of the special status of this register on the speech-writing continuum.
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Karttunen, Laura. "How to distinguish hypothetical from actual speech in fiction." Literary Linguistics 3, no. 1 (June 3, 2013): 108–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ld.3.1.07kar.
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This paper investigates the connection between counterfactuality and stereotypicality in direct speech representation. In Monika Fludernik’s theory of schematic language representation, quotations typify rather than reproduce, and typicality coincides with stereotypical expressivity in the form discourse particles, among other features. By distinguishing hypothetical speech proper from the more general concept of typifying direct speech, we can see that in fiction hypothetical speech is not always stereotypically expressive. In conversational storytelling, discourse markers serve the functions of source-tracking, emplotment, and expressing the quoter’s emotions and evaluation. I discuss reasons why fiction differs from conversational storytelling in this respect. Fludernik’s treatment of discourse markers or ‘typicality markers’ in direct speech representation is here complemented with Bakhtinian notions of dual expressiveness, speech genres, and the responsive quality of utterances. The arguments presented are illustrated by passages from the fiction of Carol Shields, Peter Bichsel, and Junot Díaz.
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Kinder, John J. "Transference markers in New Zealand Italian." Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 11, no. 1 (January 1, 1988): 9–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/aral.11.1.02kin.
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Abstract The spoken Italian of migrant Italians in New Zealand contains verbal devices which accompany items transferred from English. These “transference markers” (paralinguistic and prosodic features, hesitation phenomena, hedges, synonymous glosses and explicative statements) convey the speaker’s awareness that the marked items are in fact transfers, and invite a response, verbal or otherwise, from the hearer. This exchange of signals is one way in which conversational interactants negotiate a consensus as to what is comprehensible and acceptable linguistic behaviour to both. Migrant bilinguals can thus be shown to be not only creative language users but also more able than is usually thought, to monitor and control the transference process in their speech.
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Guendouzi, Jackie, Ashley Meaux, and Nicole Müller. "Avoiding interactional conflict in dementia." Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 4, no. 1 (August 11, 2016): 8–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jlac.4.1.01gue.
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Sociolinguistic research in the general population has established the existence of gender differences in the social use of language. In particular, it has been noted that women use more markers of politeness, small talk and structural devices (e.g. minimal responses, tag questions) to help maintain their conversations. Analysis of interactions involving people with dementia (PWD) suggests that these gender based differences were still present in the face of dementia. Furthermore, the use of these forms of language helped the women with dementia to avoid conflict and extend the length of their interactions. This study investigated whether the use of such language helped or hindered women with dementia in maintaining conversational satisfaction.
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DELISLE, SYLVAIN, BERNARD MOULIN, and TERRY COPECK. "Surface-marker-based dialog modelling: A progress report on the MAREDI project." Natural Language Engineering 9, no. 4 (November 25, 2003): 325–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1351324903003231.
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Most information systems that deal with natural language texts do not tolerate much deviation from their idealized and simplified model of language. Spoken dialog is notoriously ungrammatical, however. Because the MAREDI project focuses in particular on the automatic analysis of scripted dialogs, we needed to develop a robust capacity to analyze transcribed spoken language. This paper summarizes the current state of our work. It presents the main elements of our approach, which is based on exploiting surface markers as the best route to the semantics of the conversation modelled. We highlight the foundations of our particular conversational model, and give an overview of the MAREDI system. We then discuss its three key modules, a connectionist network to recognise speech acts, a robust syntactic analyzer, and a semantic analyzer.
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Chojnicka, Joanna. "Stance and politeness in spoken Latvian." Lingua Posnaniensis 57, no. 1 (June 1, 2015): 25–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/linpo-2015-0002.
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AbstractThe present article is concerned with the concept of stance and its relationship to face, face work and politeness applied to Latvian spoken discourse. It offers an extensive review of relevant literature on stance and politeness theories, followed by an illustrative analysis of politeness strategies and stance markers found in a radio interview. On this basis, the article argues that stance markers - epistemic, evidential, mirative and hedging devices - may be considered a negative politeness strategy, responding to the speaker’s and hearer’s desire for autonomy. In conclusion, it suggests a hypothesis that could explain differing use of stance markers and politeness strategies by speakers fulfilling varying conversational roles and of various social standing.
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STAHNKE, JOHANNA. "Lexical and prosodic routinization in conceptional orality: conversational self-reformulation in French." Journal of French Language Studies 28, no. 3 (December 17, 2017): 301–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0959269517000230.
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ABSTRACTThe present study investigates the functions and forms of conversational self-reformulation in spoken French. (Self-)Reformulations in general are a typical feature of unplanned and spontaneous conceptional orality (as opposed to conceptional distance; Koch and Oesterreicher, 1985). They exhibit retrospective modification of a reference expression, which is semantically equivalent in paraphrases and semantically different in corrections. The latter are therefore communicatively more problematic with regard to discourse intervention and turn-taking. As for the linguistic marking of self-reformulation, paraphrases are preferably introduced by lexically polyfunctional markers and prosodic deaccentuation, while corrections are marked by lexically monofunctional and prosodically overaccented structures. Since the accessibility to context-dependent forms is specifically related to conceptional orality, a more important linguistic marking of self-reformulation is hypothesized to occur in conceptional orality when compared to conceptional distance. The results of an empirical study contrasting two conceptionally different corpora suggest a generalization of paraphrastic markers in conceptional orality. This tendency is attributed to speaker-strategic routinization in which corrections are re-marked as paraphrases in order to avoid conversational intervention and, as a consequence, turn-taking. When taken over by other speakers, this routine may cause variation and, eventually, linguistic change.
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Dodge, Hiroko, Nora Mattek, Mattie Gregor, Molly Bowman, Adriana Seelye, Oscar Ybarra, Meysam Asgari, and Jeffrey Kaye. "Social Markers of Mild Cognitive Impairment: Proportion of Word Counts in Free Conversational Speech." Current Alzheimer Research 12, no. 6 (July 17, 2015): 513–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/1567205012666150530201917.
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Calvo, Clara. "Pronouns of Address and Social Negotiation in as You Like it." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 1, no. 1 (February 1992): 5–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/096394709200100102.
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None of the extant approaches to Early Modern English you and thou can satisfactorily account for all types of pronominal shift present in Shakespeare's plays. The difficulty often lies in swift changes of pronoun performed by one speaker while addressing the same hearer, sometimes in the course of the same dramatic scene or even within the same conversational turn. In this article, some landmarks in the study of the pronouns of address — Brown and Gilman (1960), McIntosh (1963), Wales (1983) — are briefly discussed before concentrating on some of the problems posed by Celia's and Rosalind's shifts of pronominal choice in As you like it. McIntosh's analysis of you and thou in this play is questioned, and the shortcomings of approaches in terms of the norm/deviation or marked/unmarked dichotomies lead to the conclusion that the pronouns of address in Early Modern English must have fulfilled other functions beside those of conveying ‘expressive’ or ‘attitudinal’ overtones. Finally, it is suggested that you and thou might have functioned as markers of in-group or out-group relations in the negotiation of social identities, and as discourse markers signalling a change of conversational topic and the presence of a boundary in the structure of the dialogue.
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Dubois, Betty Lou. "Pseudoquotation in current English communication: “Hey, she didn't really say it”." Language in Society 18, no. 3 (September 1989): 343–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500013646.
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ABSTRACTTo investigate discourse and interactive functions ofquote formula+hey+pseudoquotation, that is, invented quotation, in current English communication, tokens were collected from public and commercial broadcasts and miscellaneous readings during a four-month period. In addition, all instances ofheywith context were extracted from the Brown Corpus of American English. Only 26 possible tokens, the majority from radio and television, were located; one instance inBrownindicates existence as early as 1961. A speaker uses quote formula +hey+ pseudoquotation to dramatize and thereby give emphasis to an important point (in these examples, generally in an expository discourse), a practice reported for both sophisticated and folk discourse. Instead of a rhetorical question, the device makes arhetorical answerto an unasked question. Although pseudoquotation can be found either without discourse marker or with other discourse marker,heyis an appropriate marker for pseudoquotation, simultaneously to mark an important point in a discourse and to bind listeners to the ongoing interaction by (re)capturing their attention. (Discourse markers, conversational interaction, pragmatics, dramatization,hey, quotation)
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UCCELLI, PAOLA. "Emerging temporality: past tense and temporal/aspectual markers in Spanish-speaking children's intra-conversational narratives." Journal of Child Language 36, no. 5 (February 19, 2009): 929–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000908009288.
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ABSTRACTThis study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense, temporal/aspectual markers and narrative components were analyzed to explore interrelationships among grammatical and discourse skills. Children progressed from scattered unsystematic means of encoding temporality to mastering a basic linguistic system that included devices to mark location of events, temporal relations and aspectual meanings. The consolidation of perfective past tense to express narrative events marked a crucial developmental point which preceded an explosion of additional verb tenses and temporal markers. The value of spontaneous language data, and the need to study grammar and discourse simultaneously to construct a comprehensive developmental picture are highlighted. Results are discussed in relation to theoretical proposals on the development of temporality.
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Baek, ji-hun. "A study on curriculum in conversational Chinese - Focusing on pragmatic markers to improve ‘strategic competence’." Journal of Sinology and China Studies 72, no. ll (September 2017): 31–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.18077/chss.2017.72..002.
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Tse, Shek Kam, Hui Li, and Shing On Leung. "Tense and temporality." Chinese Language and Discourse 3, no. 1 (June 11, 2012): 35–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cld.3.1.03tse.
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This study investigated how a representative sample of 492 Cantonese-speaking children aged 36, 48 and 60 months expressed time during naturalistic conversations with peers. Spontaneous utterances produced by dyads of children in a 30-minute role-play context were collected, transcribed and analyzed. A productive repertoire of 62 nouns, 69 adverbs and 9 aspects was identified and classified into an appropriate typology. An age-related increase in types of temporal noun and adverb and repertoire size was found. It was also discovered that three-year-olds might already possess knowledge of aspect markers even though they might not be able to produce temporal nouns about “season” and “week” before 4 or 5 years of age. Some instances of double aspectual marking and misplacing aspects were found in the expressions. Linguistic, cognitive and conversational influences presumed to shape performance are discussed together with the implications of the findings for early childhood language education.
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Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara. "Identity, emotions and cultural differences in English and Polish online comments." International Journal of Language and Culture 4, no. 1 (October 17, 2017): 47–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.4.1.04lew.
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Abstract The focus of the present paper is to examine the extent to which the language used in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and online discourse emotional behavior are good predictors of individual and group cultural types and their identities. It is argued that the identity marking CMC interactants develop has to be stronger, more salient, and, possibly less ambiguous than that used in direct conversation and that the emotionality markers the users apply in their discussion, particularly those engaging negative emotions and reflecting negative judgments, are argued to be used by online discussants for the purpose of increasing the CMC commentators’ conversational visibility. The questions of cultural and linguistic divergence between English and Polish emotional communication patterns are the main points discussed. Three sets of corpus materials are used and the research methodology involves both the qualitative analysis of the emotion types as well as a quantitative (frequency) approach, particularly with respect to culture-specific corpus-generated collocation patterns.
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Overstreet, Maryann. "The English general extender." English Today 36, no. 4 (August 8, 2019): 47–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078419000312.
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In the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999), a new category is identified in the grammar of the English phrase. In conversational data, the most frequent forms cited as examples of this category are or something, and everything, and things and and stuff, which are described as ‘coordination tags’ by Biber et al. (1999: 115–16). This label has not been widely adopted, but the linguistic category it describes has clearly become established as part of modern English. The term ‘general extender’ (Overstreet, 1999) is now commonly used to refer to this category: ‘“general” because they are nonspecific and “extender” because they extend otherwise complete utterances’ (1999: 3). There are two subcategories: adjunctive general extenders, beginning with and, and disjunctive general extenders, beginning with or. In casual conversation, general extenders are typically phrase- or clause-final, consisting of and/or plus a vague noun (stuff/things) or a pronoun (something/everything), with an optional comparative phrase (like that/this). In everyday spoken British English, the phrase and (all) that is also extremely common. In written and formal spoken English, forms with quite different structures, such as et cetera, and so on, and so forth, and or so are more typically used to fulfill related functions. All of these forms are grammatically optional and fall within the more general category of pragmatic markers, along with you know, I mean, like and sort of, ‘expressions which may have little obvious propositional meaning but which oil the wheels of conversational social interaction’ (Beeching, 2016: 1).
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Benfilali, Ismail, Bendaoud Nadif, Brahim Khartite, Driss Benattabou, and Abdelouahed Bouih. "Cross Gender Oral Communication from Biological Difference and Socialized Identity to Mutual Understanding." Journal of World Englishes and Educational Practices 3, no. 5 (May 29, 2021): 13–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/jweep.2021.3.5.2.
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Language is an indispensable instrument whereby we organize and build our social ties in our communities, and society at large. Human language is critically interwoven into the processes whereby human beings communicate, build knowledge, transmit information, and determine the identity of both the addresser and the addressee in any communicational exchange. We could hypothetically assert that if there is unmistakably one thing without which man as a species can hardly live in the social realm, it is language par excellence. In an admittedly multi-layered and inherently complex sociolinguistic configuration, the individual speaker’s linguistic choice, the different roles he or she plays, be they in a position of addresser or addressee, and the various situations where the speech takes place do serve as markers reflecting one’s identity and communication styles. In this respect, factors such as sex, age, level of education, occupation, race, and geographical origin can virtually be reflected via one’s speech. This article sets out to analyze (1) the influential role of speech, (2) gender and identity, (3) dominance/difference, and (4) cross-gender oral communication in the Moroccan context using a homogenous convenience sample of Moroccan participants. This study falls within the scope of gender studies. Its major aim is to demonstrate the roles that mixed-gendered interlocutors can play in order to maintain effective communication. Therefore, their perceptions regarding interruptions, conversation dominance, turn-taking and choice of topics in conversations are analyzed. Different research instruments have been implemented to collect data including recordings of real-life conversational speech, classroom observation, and interviews. The findings indicate that gender-based differences permeate the conversational styles of both men and women across cultures and with divergent degrees of strength and expression. It has also been shown that although communication breakdown is a source of frustration, it remains a common phenomenon in social interactions. Therefore, overcoming difficulties in maintaining effective communication between members of different genders is dependent on the interlocutors’ belief that accepting difference in language and communication styles can make cross-gender communication a satisfactory social experience. This study is expected to raise awareness regarding the socialization processes the two sex groups have gone through which shape in substantial ways the way they speak, behave and interact among each other.
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Thompson, Sandra A. "“Object complements” and conversation towards a realistic account." Studies in Language 26, no. 1 (June 21, 2002): 125–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.26.1.05tho.
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Based on a corpus of conversational English, I argue that the standard view of complements as subordinate clauses in a grammatical relation with a complement-taking predicate is not supported by the data. Rather, what has been described under the heading of complementation can be understood in terms of epistemic/evidential/evaluative formulaic fragments expressing speaker stance toward the content of a clause. This analysis, in which CTPs and their subjects are stored and retrieved as formulaic stance markers accounts for the grammatical, pragmatic, prosodic, and phonological data more satisfactorily than a complementation analysis.
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Kim, Taeho, and Han-gyu Lee. "An Empirical Study on Heritage Korean Speakers’ Uses of Subject and Object Markers in Conversational Korean." Journal of Linguistics Science 93 (June 30, 2020): 1–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.21296/jls.2020.6.93.1.
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Uclés Ramada, Gloria. "Epistemic (a)Symmetries and Mitigation in the Description of Conversational Markers: The Case of Spanish ¿No?" Corpus Pragmatics 4, no. 1 (November 14, 2019): 107–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s41701-019-00068-7.
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Hall, Jessica, and Elena Plante. "Data-Informed Guideposts for Decision Making in Enhanced Conversational Recast Treatment." American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 29, no. 4 (November 12, 2020): 2068–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2020_ajslp-20-00017.
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Background To maximize treatment efficiency, it would be useful to determine how long to continue a treatment approach before concluding that it is not effective for a particular client, whether and when generalization of treatment is likely to occur, and at what point to end treatment once a child is approaching mastery. Method We analyzed aggregate data from 117 preschoolers with developmental language disorder from a decade of treatment studies on Enhanced Conversational Recast therapy to determine whether the timing of treatment response impacts its overall effectiveness and whether certain levels of accuracy during treatment enable 100% accurate generalization after treatment ends. Results We found that children who take longer than 10 days to answer one item correctly during treatment are unlikely to ever respond to the treatment approach. Generalization accuracy closely followed treatment accuracy, suggesting the two are tightly linked for this treatment method. We did not find evidence that attaining a certain level of accuracy below 100% during treatment enabled children to generalize with 100% accuracy after treatment ended. Conclusions Clinicians using Enhanced Conversational Recast treatment can use these markers to help make evidence-based decisions in their practice regarding how long to continue treatment. Importantly, these data suggest that stopping treatment before a child has attained 100% accuracy (for at least three sessions) does not ensure that a child will ever reach 100% accuracy on their own.
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Kotovych, Maria, Peter Dixon, Marisa Bortolussi, and Mark Holden. "Textual determinants of a component of literary identification." Scientific Study of Literature 1, no. 2 (December 31, 2011): 260–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ssol.1.2.05kot.
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Three experiments were conducted on how properties of the text control one aspect of the process of identifying with the central character in a story. In particular, we were concerned with textual determinants of character transparency, that is, the extent to which the character’s actions and attitudes are clear and understandable. In Experiment 1, we hypothesized that the narrator in first-person narratives is transparent because narratorial implicatures (analogous to Grice’s (1975) notion of conversational implicatures) lead readers to attribute their own knowledge and experience to the narrator. Consistent with our predictions, the results indicated that stating the inferred information explicitly leads readers to rate the narrator’s thoughts and actions as more difficult to understand. In Experiment 2, we assessed whether this effect could be explained by differences in style between the original and modified versions of the text. The results demonstrated that there was no effect of adding text when the material was unrelated to narratorial implicatures. In Experiment 3, we hypothesized that transparency of the central character in a third-person narrative can be produced when the consistent use of free-indirect speech produces a close association between the narrator and the character; in this case, readers may attribute knowledge and experience to the character as well as the narrator. As predicted, the central character’s thoughts and actions were rated as more difficult to understand when the markers for free-indirect speech were removed. We argue that transparency may be produced through the use of what are essential conversational processes invoked in service of understanding the narrator as a conversational participant.
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Fantasia, Valentina, Cristina Zucchermaglio, Marilena Fatigante, and Francesca Alby. "‘We will take care of you’: Identity categorisation markers in intercultural medical encounters." Discourse Studies 23, no. 4 (August 2021): 451–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14614456211009060.
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Ethnomethodology research has systematically investigated discursive practices of categorisation, looking at the various ways by which social actors ascribe both themselves and others to identity categories to accomplish various kinds of social actions. Drawing on a data corpus of oncological visits collected in an Italian hospital, involving both native and non-native patients, the present work analyses how participants in these intercultural medical encounters invoke and make relevant social identity categories by the marking of collective pronouns in their talk. Our results showed that whilst institutional identities (e.g. those of the doctors, the local hospital or the Tumour Board) prevailed, categorial formulations related to cultural or linguistic identities were rarely displayed in interactions with non-native patients. Conversational participants made very little of their linguistical or cultural background and when they did so, their cultural and linguistic identities were deployed for rhetorical and pragmatical aims, such as testing and negotiating common knowledge and epistemic authority. This study shows how even speakers’ minimal lexical choices, such as marked pronouns, impact the negotiation of meanings and activities in life-saving sites such as oncological visits.
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Fried, Mirjam. "Discourse-referential patterns as a network of grammatical constructions." Constructions and Frames 13, no. 1 (August 2, 2021): 21–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cf.00046.fri.
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Abstract Grammatical organization of conversational language presents us with the challenge of incorporating recurrent contextual and discourse-relevant properties in grammatical descriptions, as part of speakers’ conventional knowledge. Using data from conversational Czech extracted from the Czech National Corpus, I address this issue by tracing the relationships among a set of dative-marked expressions of interpersonal relations (traditionally labeled ‘ethical datives’) and their connection to argument-expressing dative NPs. The discourse-referential expressions form a family of distinct patterns, the differences having to do with person (1st, 2nd) and number (sg. vs. pl.); functionally, they range from marking subjectively assessed newsworthiness to signaling evidentiality and solidarity to expressing the speaker’s emotional state. The attendant reorganization of formal, semantic, and discourse features that define these dative-marked items amounts to several patterns – ‘interactional datives’ – and I show that they have the status of grammatical constructions, which are conventionally tied to certain types of discourse settings and speaker-hearer expectations. In order to represent these constructions and their relationship to other, partially related, patterns, I propose a network representation in the form of contiguous functional spaces that overlap at the boundary between argument-expression and interactional markers.
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COLAS, ANNIE. "Introducing infants to referential events: a development study of maternal ostensive marking in French." Journal of Child Language 26, no. 1 (February 1999): 113–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s030500099800364x.
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It is well known that mothers give their infants lessons in conversational competence from an early age. This study considered how maternal gestures and prosody contribute to this developing competence. It examines how mothers use ostensive marking to point out common references at different stages of development. The corpus consisted of longitudinal observations of four mother–infant dyads during free play (infants aged 0;4 to 1;1), at three stages of sensorimotor development (III, IV and V). Four dimensions of ostensive marking were considered: (1) the span of the marked utterance (holistic vs. local); (2) the communication channel used (gestural vs. prosodic); (3) the type of gestural marker (oriented, iconic, conventional, beats); and (4) the type of prosodic marker (emphasis, prosodic cliché, reinforced nuclear stress, focal accent). Although there was no clear change in the patterns of specific types of gestural or prosodic markers, the results showed that mothers adapt their gestures to the infant's processing level. Between stages III and V, they move from holistic to local and from gestural to prosodic marking. Stage IV appears to be an excellent period for observing the transition.
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Rabain-Jamin, Jacqueline, and Emilie Sabeau-Jouannet. "Maternal Speech to 4-month-old Infants in Two Cultures: Wolof and French." International Journal of Behavioral Development 20, no. 3 (April 1997): 425–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/016502597385216.
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The infant-directed speech of Wolof-speaking Senegalese mothers and French-speaking mothers living in Paris were compared to relate infant-directed communicative acts to the value system of the society to which the speaker belongs, and to describe the child’s place in those societies. Mother-infant linguistic interactions with 4-month-old infants were recorded (five dyads in the French group and four in the Wolof group). The discourse variables of the pragmatic and semantic categories in the mothers’ speech were analysed. The cross-cultural analysis included a comparison of the conventional versus shifted use of person markers by the mothers in the two cultures. The results demonstrated some features common to both groups, namely, a high percentage of expressive speech acts and the importance of affect-related statements. Some culture-specific emphases and tendencies were also noted. Whereas the French mothers’ conversational exchanges with their infants were dyadic in organisation and centred on the immediate physical environment, the Wolof mothers frequently expanded the dyadic framework to introduce third parties as conversational partners but talked very little about the immediate physical environment. Thus, it appears that cultural conceptions influence not only the content of mother-infant exchanges but also their participant structure.
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Norrick, Neal R. "Negotiating the reception of stories in conversation." Narrative Inquiry 18, no. 1 (August 15, 2008): 131–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ni.18.1.07nor.
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In this article, I explore strategies storytellers use to increase listener response to their performances, such as (1) repeating a salient phrase, particularly a piece of dialogue; (2) adding an explanation of the point of a story; (3) drawing out some consequence of the story; and particularly (4) the unobtrusive strategy of producing a minimal response to draw out a more extensive reaction from listeners. This last strategy came to light in a large-scale corpus-based search. Instead of working from a set of narratives, I begin by looking at a linguistic element, namely items from the class of discourse markers like so and y’know in all kinds of contexts in a very large corpus, and slowly narrowed my focus to narrative passages within the whole array of examples. In the process, I discovered distributions and functions for items, which have not been described in previous research on conversational narrative.
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Rauchbauer, Birgit, Bruno Nazarian, Morgane Bourhis, Magalie Ochs, Laurent Prévot, and Thierry Chaminade. "Brain activity during reciprocal social interaction investigated using conversational robots as control condition." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 374, no. 1771 (March 11, 2019): 20180033. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0033.
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We present a novel functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm for second-person neuroscience. The paradigm compares a human social interaction (human–human interaction, HHI) to an interaction with a conversational robot (human–robot interaction, HRI). The social interaction consists of 1 min blocks of live bidirectional discussion between the scanned participant and the human or robot agent. A final sample of 21 participants is included in the corpus comprising physiological (blood oxygen level-dependent, respiration and peripheral blood flow) and behavioural (recorded speech from all interlocutors, eye tracking from the scanned participant, face recording of the human and robot agents) data. Here, we present the first analysis of this corpus, contrasting neural activity between HHI and HRI. We hypothesized that independently of differences in behaviour between interactions with the human and robot agent, neural markers of mentalizing (temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex) and social motivation (hypothalamus and amygdala) would only be active in HHI. Results confirmed significantly increased response associated with HHI in the TPJ, hypothalamus and amygdala, but not in the medial prefrontal cortex. Future analysis of this corpus will include fine-grained characterization of verbal and non-verbal behaviours recorded during the interaction to investigate their neural correlates. This article is part of the theme issue ‘From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human–robot interaction'.
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Mansfield, Courtney, Sara Ng, Gina-Anne Levow, Mari Ostendorf, and Richard A. Wright. "What does parity mean? A detailed comparison of ASR and human transcription errors." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 150, no. 4 (October 2021): A346—A347. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0008536.
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Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has seen dramatic improvements as a result of advances in deep learning. This has led several recent studies to conclude that ASR is approaching parity with human performance, at least in certain speech contexts. These studies use average word error rate (WER) as their primary evaluation metric, dividing the total insertions + substitutions + deletions by the reference length (WER = (I + D+S)/Nr), to compare ASR systems to human transcribers. Averaging combined error types obscures important differences between human and ASR error patterns which impact human comprehension of the output. Human transcribers tend to delete pragmatic and discourse markers (such as fillers and backchannels) and disfluencies, whereas ASR tends to make more substitution errors on words. In conversational settings listeners are able to recover from missing discourse markers, function words, or backchannels, but word substitutions are harder to recover from because they interrupt the information flow. WER is a reasonable first pass metric of ASR performance, but when it comes to communicative parity, it averages out important ways in which it differs from human transcription.
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Romero Trillo, Jesús, and Elizabeth Lenn. "Do you "(Mis)Understand" What I Mean? : Pragmatic Strategies to Avoid Cognitive Maladjustment." Journal of English Studies 9 (May 29, 2011): 223. http://dx.doi.org/10.18172/jes.173.
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This article studies misunderstanding as a key factor in identifying the psychological basis of interactional cognitive maladjustment. The study focuses on the linguistic strategies to avoid pragmatic misunderstanding employed in conversations in Spanish and English and between native and non-native speakers of English. In particular, we analyze the use of pragmatic markers as adaptive management to avoid misunderstanding in conversation. Through the classification of pragmatic markers as rhetorical or overt, we study the distribution and use of each type of pragmatic marker and the implementation of pragmatic markers, with the lexical and intonational implications in cross-linguistic conversation for the adaptive Management of misunderstanding.
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Wiemer, Björn, and Veronika Kampf. "On Conditions Instantiating Tip Effects of Epistemic and Evidential Meanings in Bulgarian." Slovene 1, no. 2 (2012): 5–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.31168/2305-6754.2012.1.2.1.
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The article deals with tip effects between evidential and epistemic components in the meaning potential of evidential markers in Bulgarian, the focus being on sentential adverbs with inferential functions. We justify (and start with) the following assumptions: (i) for any unit we should distinguish its stable semantic meaning from its pragmatic potential which can be favored (or disfavored) by appropriate discourse conditions; (ii) there is a trade off between evidential and epistemic meaning components that are related to each other on the basis of mutual or one-sided implicatures; (iii) one-sided implicatures occur with certain hearsay markers whose epistemic implicatures can be captured as Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs). On this basis, we show that (iv) GCIs work also with inferential markers; they can be classified depending on which component (the inferential or the epistemic one) can be downgraded more easily. A crucial factor favoring the inferential meaning is a perceptual basis of the inference. In general, (v) the more complicated the reconstruction of the cognitive (or communicative) basis leading to an inference, the clearer the epistemic function emerges while the evidential function remains in the background, and vice versa. The study is corpus-driven and also includes an attempt at classifying micro- and macro-contextual conditions that (dis)favor a highlighting of the evidential function.