Discourse and Pragmatic Markers in the Romance Languages

Discourse and pragmatic markers are functional units, universally present in human language, that deictically relate text fragments, propositions, utterances, and discourse chunks to the context of speech. They manage the interaction of the discourse participants in the speech situation and facilitate successful communication. This group of functional units includes elements as diverse as discourse and pragmatic markers in the broad sense, illocutionary markers, sentence particles, modal particles, and connectives. Romance languages, particularly the spoken varieties, exhibit all those types of elements, even modal particles, which have often been claimed to be absent in Romance. As in other languages, discourse and pragmatic markers mostly develop out of adverbs and adverbials (especially prepositional phrases), but nouns, adjectives, verbal forms, and other (parenthetical) phrases are further possible sources. One case that is peculiar to Romance is the ability to combine lexical material with the common complementizer corresponding to ‘that,’ which leads to more or less grammaticalized items that function as discourse and pragmatic markers. The wealth of data for Romance and Latin offers plenty of opportunities for the study of the diachronic evolution of discourse and pragmatic markers. In this context, the question whether discourse and pragmatic markers represent cases of grammaticalization or pragmaticalization and discoursivization remains a matter of some debate. In particular, the increased interest in linguistic interfaces in formal linguistic grammar theory has led to highly detailed investigations of the Romance left periphery, which has been shown to host all kinds of discourse-related phenomena.

CLIL at the linguistic interfaces

This study explores the effect of CLIL on the acquisition of nominal morphology (syntax-morphology interface) and article use (syntax-semantics-discourse-interface), linguistic areas that have been scarcely investigated in CLIL settings. Here we compare article omission and overuse errors in an oral production task performed by L1 Basque-Spanish learners of L3 English in two CLIL and non-CLIL groups matching in age at testing time and amount of exposure. Results indicate that as regards nominal morphology, CLIL and non-CLIL learners are equal in terms of the omission of the definite and the indefinite article, but CLIL learners learn to solve article overuse more quickly than non-CLIL learners. Taking together these results and the findings from our previous study (Martínez-Adrián & Gutiérrez-Mangado, 2015a), which revealed the non-existence of CLIL benefits with respect to the acquisition of verbal morphology, we conclude that while the syntax-morphology interface seems to be unaffected by CLIL, CLIL can aid in the acquisition of features from the syntax-semantics-discourse interface.

Intonation, information structure and syntax in yes-no questions in the Spanish of Barcelona

The aim of this work is to study the intonation of yes-no questions in Spanish of Barcelona, analysing the interface with informative and morphosyntactic structure. To this purpose, we present new data to describe this kind of utterances and we examine the state-of-the-art and controversial issues. Even if experimental phonetic and phonological research has paid particular attention to yes-no questions, there still exist some open problems. We use a transcription system which is closely linked to the phonetic realization of the intonation contour, running it in a semiautomatic mode by a program that provides a stylization algorithm and an annotation process. Our findings provide empirical evidence which shows that information structure and morphosyntactic level do affect prosodic realizations of utterances. We can definitely conclude that even if it presents various theoretical and methodological problems, the study of linguistic interfaces is very useful and it allows a deeper and a better description compared to the separated analysis of the same linguistic levels.

A Formal Language to Convey Linguistic Information. A Study in Practical Logic

The author discusses problems of treating formal languages to present linguistic data in machine translation systems or linguistic interfaces for man-computer communication.