The grammaticization of but as a final particle in English conversation
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Jean Mulder
Abstract
We examine the behavior of turn-final but in a corpus of spoken American and Australian English, proposing two hypotheses. First, the behavior of but can be modeled as a continuum from a prosodic-unit-initial to a prosodicunit-final discourse particle. Second, as but “moves” along this continuum, its conversational function changes, in a way that is consistent with what has been described in the grammaticization literature.
In both our American and Australian data, both prosodically and sequentially, speakers give evidence of taking another’s prior but-ending utterance as having been finished, but with an implication left “hanging”. However, our Australian data provide considerable evidence of Australian English “final but” having become a “fully-developed” final particle marking contrastive content.
Abstract
We examine the behavior of turn-final but in a corpus of spoken American and Australian English, proposing two hypotheses. First, the behavior of but can be modeled as a continuum from a prosodic-unit-initial to a prosodicunit-final discourse particle. Second, as but “moves” along this continuum, its conversational function changes, in a way that is consistent with what has been described in the grammaticization literature.
In both our American and Australian data, both prosodically and sequentially, speakers give evidence of taking another’s prior but-ending utterance as having been finished, but with an implication left “hanging”. However, our Australian data provide considerable evidence of Australian English “final but” having become a “fully-developed” final particle marking contrastive content.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- List of contributors vii
- Introduction ix
- From subordinate clause to noun-phrase: Yang constructions in colloquial Indonesian 1
- On quotative constructions in Iberian Spanish 35
- Bulgarian adversative connectives: Conjunctions or discourse markers? 79
- Projectability and clause combining in interaction 99
- Conjunction and sequenced actions: The Estonian complementizer and evidential particle et 125
- Clause combining, interaction, evidentiality, participation structure, and the conjunction-particle continuum: The Finnish että 153
- The grammaticization of but as a final particle in English conversation 179
- Quotative tte in Japanese: Its multifaceted functions and degrees of "subordination" 205
- Quoting and topic-marking: Some observations on the quotative tte construction in Japanese 231
- Index of names 247
- Index of subjects 251
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- List of contributors vii
- Introduction ix
- From subordinate clause to noun-phrase: Yang constructions in colloquial Indonesian 1
- On quotative constructions in Iberian Spanish 35
- Bulgarian adversative connectives: Conjunctions or discourse markers? 79
- Projectability and clause combining in interaction 99
- Conjunction and sequenced actions: The Estonian complementizer and evidential particle et 125
- Clause combining, interaction, evidentiality, participation structure, and the conjunction-particle continuum: The Finnish että 153
- The grammaticization of but as a final particle in English conversation 179
- Quotative tte in Japanese: Its multifaceted functions and degrees of "subordination" 205
- Quoting and topic-marking: Some observations on the quotative tte construction in Japanese 231
- Index of names 247
- Index of subjects 251
