The marking of uncontroversial information in Europe: presenting the enimitive

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with the typology of elements which, as I argue, are best described as markers of uncontroversial information. In order to be able to speak of this class of functions cross-linguistically, I propose the label enimitive, which is derived from the Latin particle enim. On the basis of the data provided in language-particular descriptions, parallel corpora, and my own questionnaire, I investigate the core functions of the enimitive, and typical polysemy models exhibited by enimitive markers cross-linguistically. The polysemy patterns of enimitive markers of the languages of Europe are presented in the form of semantic maps. I argue that in a part of Europe, the geographical distribution of enimitive marking with a particular polysemy type exhibits an areal pattern. I also investigate some particular language-contact mechanisms in both the functions and morphosyntax of enimitive markers which could have led to the present state of affairs.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse particles
• modal particles
• uncontroversial information
• shared knowledge
• typology
• areal typology

Acknowledgments

This piece of research would be impossible without the help and advice of many people. First of all, I thank everyone who found time to fill in my questionnaire. I am also grateful to everyone who replied to my query in Lingtyp mailing list, and many others who sent me valuable materials related to the topic of the paper. I thank Diana Forker, Axel Holvoet, and Eitan Grossman, for discussing with me some crucial points of the present paper. I thank Ringailė Trakymaitė for her help with the Scandinavian languages. I am also grateful to Hartmut Haberland for his advice and involvement during the revision process, and to the anonymous reviewers. Some other names are mentioned in footnotes.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Sources

Hans Christian Andersen. Kejserens nye klæder [The Emperor’s New Clothes]. Original: https://www.andersenstories.com/da/andersen_fortaellinger/kejserens_nye_klaeder. Accessed on 16 December 2019. German: https://maerchen.com/andersen/des-kaisers-neue-kleider.php. Accessed on 16 December 2019. English: https://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html. Accessed on 16 December 2019. Russian: https://deti-online.com/skazki/skazki-andersena/novoe-plate-korolja/. Accessed on 16 December 2019.

Marcus Tullius Cicero. Topica. Lateinisch – Deutsch, hrsg., übers. und erläutert von Karl Bayer, München: Artemis and Zürich: Winkler, 1993.

Marcus Tullius Cicero. The Republic and the Laws. Translated by Niall Rudd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Mark Tullij Ciceron. Dialogi. [Marcus Tullius Cicero. Dialogues]. Translated into Russian and commented by V.O. Gorenštejn. Moskva: Ladomir, 1994. http://ancientrome.ru/antlitr/t.htm?a=1414870001. Accessed on 16 December 2019.

LKT – Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language, http://tekstynas.vdu.lt/tekstynas/

NKRJa – Russian National Corpus, www.ruscorpora.ru

The Latin Library, https://www.thelatinlibrary.com

Notes

¹ The Leipzig glossing Rules are followed, with a few additional category labels: icvb imperfective converb, msd masdar (verbal noun), part partitive, pol polite form, pp past participle. Since eminitives do not translate well into English, they are also glossed as if they were categories, as doch in (1a) and že in (1b).

² In the examples in the present paper, references are given in all the cases when examples are taken from secondary sources. No references are given if examples have been elicited from native speakers.

³ Cf. the term ‘iamitive’ coined by Dahl and Wälchli (2016) and derived from the Latin adverb iam ‘already’.

⁴ For a discussion of the issue of using parallel texts in cross-linguistic studies of “discourse markers”, see Aijmer, Foolen, and Simon-Vandenbergen (2006). In this paper, I do not analyze in detail translational equivalents between languages. This is an interesting goal in itself. I have only used translations in order to get a general impression of whether a certain language has regular means of expressing the category under investigation. The present study is primarily questionnaire-based.

⁵ I should provide a short comment about the procedure invoked in my work with the Questionnaire. For some languages, I only interviewed one speaker, for others, I managed to find up to four speakers who agreed to volunteer. The average number of speakers for one language is two. In the majority of cases, the process of filling in the questionnaire was not formal, but interactive, especially in the cases of face-to-face communication. In the cases of online communication, multiple informal comments were often provided in personal messages. Although the input sentences in the Appendix are in English, other languages (known to the speakers) were also invoked as stimuli during the interviews. For instance, given that many of my informants are familiar with Russian or German, I asked them to try to think of the equivalents for ja/doch or že/ved’ in their native languages, and I gave the speakers of Scandinavian languages and Finnish examples from other Scandinavian languages and asked them whether the provided uses sound natural in their own language. There were no dramatic differences between the intuitions of the speakers of one language. The disagreements consisted mostly in the evaluation of the possibility to use an enimitive marker as “fine” or “not very natural”. In cases of such disagreements, the uses are interpreted as existing, and so it is reflected in the semantic maps. It should be noted, however, that absolute precision is hardly achievable in such a large-scale cross-linguistic comparison. The Questionnaire method, being a powerful tool in typology, has its inevitable shortcomings and sometimes misses important details. A more fine-grained comparison by means of other methods is a subject for future research.

⁶ As an anonymous reviewer and also Rinas (2006, 199) remark, the substitutability of a doch with a ja does not imply automatically that they have completely identical functions, and there may be subtle differences. However, as Rinas argues, it is important that in the same speech situation and in identical utterances both particles are possible. My questionnaire data support this view: in some contexts, speakers indicated both ja and doch as equally acceptable, see a semantic map in Section 4.3.

⁷ Being integrated into the intonation pattern means that the host sentence does not exhibit any break of intonation when the particle is added. Counterexamples are elements like the German sentence-final oder which requires a rise of intonation which singles it out, even if there is no pause before it: Du bist zuhause, ↗oder? ‘You are at home, right?’.

⁸ See Arndt (1960) for an insightful comparison of morphological, syntactic and prosodic properties of the “modal particles” of German and Russian. Part of his criteria are applied here, see also Panov (2020a) for the notion of “sentence particles” applied to Lithuanian. It seems that in Europe, many languages tend to have elements which share similar sets of both morphosyntactic and functional properties, and which can be roughly termed “modal particles”. Beyond Europe, the so-called (sentence-)final particles in the languages of East, Southeast, and Northeast Asia exhibit very similar properties (Hancil, Haselow, and Post 2015; Panov 2020b; for an explicit comparison between the European and the Asian particles, see Obe and Haberland 2018).

⁹ In this paper, I restrict myself to the analysis of sentence types. However, there is evidence that at least in some languages, it is speech acts and not sentence types that are responsible for the functional contribution of enimitive markers and the possibility for an enimitive marker to be used. There are enimitive markers which occur in, e.g. questions that, however, represent assertive speech acts. For instance, the Russian particle ved’ does not occur in information-seeking questions, but it occurs in rhetorical questions which, in fact, are assertions:

*Ved’ gde Vasja?

ved’ where Vasya

Ved’ gde Vasja?Doma.

ved’ where Vasya at_home

‘Where is Vasya? He is at home.’ [i.e. the intended proposition is ‘Vasya is at home, as you probably know’]

Unlike ved’, že does occur in information-seeking questions:

Gde že Vasja?

where že Vasya?

‘So, where is Vasya?’

Therefore, analysing only grammatically marked sentence types is a certain simplification, and I leave the issue of occurrence of enimitives in indirect speech acts for future research. In the questionnaire (see the Appendix), only direct speech acts are represented, that is, the declaratives are statements, the interrogatives are questions, and the directives are commands.

¹⁰ In the well-known quotation from H.C. Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (“Keiserens nye Klæder”), Men han har jo ikke noget på (‘But he hasn’t got anything on’), used as the epigraph to the present paper, the meaning of surprise is arguably present, but the function of jo and its translation equivalents in many languages is still marking the proposition as uncontroversial: the fact of king’s being naked is obvious for the child. The meaning of surprise itself is rather coded by the sentence-initial elements men (Danish), aber (German), and da (Russian).

¹¹ See Wauchope (1991) for more detail about the use of thoh in Old High German.

¹² https://yourdailygerman.com/meaning-of-doch/. Last accessed on 10 March 2020.

¹³ Sampsa Holopainen, personal communication.

¹⁴ However, it seems likely that the Czech (as well as Slovak) form derived from the 2sg imperative of the same verb, and not from the 1sg of the present tense. In Slovene, there is an interesting parallel: the form vedi (know:imp.2sg) can be used in the discourse function of reminding and attracting the hearer’s attention, as in vedi, tu sem jaz gospodar ‘You know, I am the boss/master here’ (Mladen Uhlik, personal communication).

¹⁵ Axel Holvoet, personal communication.

¹⁶ For a detailed discussion of the semantic map method, the cognitive/psychological reality behind semantic maps, and different kinds of semantic maps, see Sansò (2010). For the notion of “classical semantic map” in particular see van der Auwera (2008).

¹⁷ In theory, the notions “hypothesis” and “principle” are epistemologically different: the former is an idea not yet proved to be correct, whereas the latter applies to claims supposed to be true. In practice, however, the terms “connectivity principle” and “connectivity hypothesis” are not always clearly distinguished. Moreover, Grossman and Polis, who use the term “connectivity principle”, actually demonstrate that Croft’s hypothesis is not correct when applied to matter borrowing (for the term, see Sakel 2007) – the “principle” can be violated in this case.

¹⁸ Sanzhi Dargwa and Modern Hebrew are not immediately adjacent to the core area of our interest. However, both of them have been in contact with either Russian or other Eastern-European languages.

¹⁹ Gil (2016) suggests that one should speak of languoid-associated descriptive categories, when treating categories of interdependent languages. This solution enables one to reconcile language-particular descriptive categories and comparative concepts (Haspelmath 2010).

²⁰ However, Standard Chinese employs its enimitive marker ma in imp, see example (13).

²¹ Icelandic presents a slightly difficult case. The native speakers of Icelandic I worked with (3 persons) marked the use of jú as either impossible or unnatural in all the contexts provided by the Questionnaire. This seems to be related to the perception of such uses as highly colloquial and non-normative (Icelandic has a rather rigid normative register respected by its speakers). In fact, the particle is used in colloquial speech and even in newspapers at least in simple enimitive constructions since the late 19^th century. However, such uses have been claimed to be calques from Danish by language-regulating institutions. (I thank Hartmut Haberland, personal communication for this information.) In my maps, I mark Icelandic as exhibiting simple enimitive uses, since Ellertsson (1993) gives Icelandic jú as the translation equivalent of the German simple eminitive ja.

²² The standard European Spanish lacks enimitive marking. However, my questionnaire data show that the element pues (originally ‘so, then’, derived from the Latin post ‘after’) can be used in core enimitive contexts in some South and Central American varieties, cf. a translation of context (4) of the Questionnaire filled in by a Guatemalan speaker: Por supuesto que está cerrado. Pues, es domingo. (‘Of course it’s closed. It’s Sunday’). My European Spanish informants report such uses as unnatural or archaic.

²³ Mladen Uhlik, personal communication.

²⁴ The problem of the diachrony of the common Slavic element ž(e) is beyond the scope of the present paper, it requires a separate in-depth study. The main questions I see as relevant regarding the diachrony of že are: (1) In which order did its enim, ctr.enim, wh-q, and imp functions evolve in different Slavic languages? (2) Did these functions evolve from each other, or did each function evolve independently from ctr?

²⁵ In the Baltic Region, Low German dialects were gradually replaced by High German by the early 19th century. For an account of High German spoken in Estonia, see Kobolt (1990; see also the dictionary by von Gutzeit 2001 [1859–1898]).

²⁶ For a detailed study of harey in Modern Hebrew in the Relevance-Theoretical framework, see Ariel (1998, 1999).

²⁷ Estonian Online Etymological dictionary (http://www.eki.ee/dict/ety/index.cgi?Q=vist&F=M). Accessed on 12 September 2019.

²⁸ Kirill Kozhanov, unpublished fieldwork data.

²⁹ A phonetic variant of že.

³⁰ Kirill Kozhanov, personal communication. See also Oslon (2018, 357–359) for an overview of Kalderash particles.

³¹ I am not claiming, however, that these affinities are the result of a direct influence on Lithuanian from Russian. Rather than the standard contemporary Russian, it is the local East Slavic (Belarusian) varieties that had a stronger structural impact on Lithuanian. Unfortunately, these idioms are endangered and poorly described, and materials about them are not easily accessible. One can only suspect that the behavior of enimitives in these idioms is close to that found in Russian. Ukrainian also has two enimitives with a positional and functional distribution very close to that of Russian (že = ž/že/žež, ved’ = adže). Adže is restricted to the formal register, and its position is more strictly sentence-initial than that of the Russian ved’ (95% of occurrences). Standard Belarusian only has ž(a); vidz’ used in colloquial language is reported to be a direct borrowing from Russian (Anikin 2012, 175).

³² nu/nå-elements is a cover term applied by the authors to discourse markers of a special type widespread in a large part of Europe and beyond. They all start with an [n]-sound and a vowel which varies cross-linguistically, e.g. the Russian nu, the Norwegian nå, the German na, the Polish no. Supposedly, these markers originated from one source which, however, remains obscure. Cross-linguistically, they exhibit similar sets of functions, the core function being the relation of the proposition under scope to the previous discourse fragment or extralinguistic circumstances (‘so, … ’). In Danish, the element nu grammaticalized to a further stage and occurs in the middle field, as other modal particles, covering the imp and wh-q contexts of the enimitive conceptual space.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Social Fund (project No 09.3.3-LMT-K-712-02-0010) under grant agreement with the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT); European Social Fund [09.3.3-LMT-K-712-02-0010].

Notes on contributors

Vladimir Panov

Vladimir Panov is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre of General Linguistics, Institute for the Languages and Cultures of the Baltic, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University, and a research fellow at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences. His research interests are the typology of grammatical categories, areal typology, the languages of Northeast Eurasia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe.