The Prosody of Initial Discourse Markers (ProIDiM)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Pia Bergmann
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 532151809

In spoken interaction, the initial position in a turn is crucial for the organisation of talk. It is the relevant position to signal connectivity to previous talk, as well as expectations for upcoming talk, to regulate turn-taking and other dimensions of interaction (cf. Auer 1996: 310–312; Heritage and Sorjonen 2018: 1–6; Traugott 2014: 72–73). In many languages, specific particles and phrases have evolved to deal with these functions ('actually', 'anyway', 'in fact', 'well' / 'also', 'jedenfalls', 'naja' etc.). Often, these elements have homophones in other lexical classes, from which they are supposed to derive (Auer and Günthner 2005; Traugott 1995). Since about the 1980s, many studies have dealt with this phenomenon, e.g. under the term of discourse markers or pragmatic markers (Beeching and Detges 2014: 5–8). However, despite the great interest in discourse markers in recent decades, one question that remains under-researched is how the prosodic and segmental-phonetic realisation of a turn-initial element is systematically related to discursive functions. This research proposal addresses this gap. It examines six contemporary German elements that fulfil discourse-related functions in the left periphery and that also occur in a) non-peripheral, medial position and b) as stand-alone elements: 'also', 'auf jeden Fall', 'genau', 'jedenfalls', 'klar' and 'natürlich'. By comparing the forms and functions of left-peripheral occurrences with those of medial occurrences and stand-alone occurrences, the proposal sheds light on both the ways in which left-peripheral elements are realised and on the factors that systematically contribute to each realization. The proposal combines a qualitative approach couched in the Interactional Linguistics framework with a quantitative approach informed by usage-based approaches and Laboratory Phonology. The data are taken from the FOLK corpus (‘Research and teaching corpus of spoken German’) of the DGD (https://dgd.ids-mannheim.de/dgd/pragdb.dgd_extern.welcome) and from the CallHome corpus (Canavan, Graff and Zipperlen 1997).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants