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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Summary Details


Query:   Cross-Linguistic Particles
Author:  Morrison -
Submitter Email:  click here to access email
Linguistic LingField(s):   Syntax

Language Family:   Indo-European

Summary:   In a previous message (Linguist 14.2157) , I summarised the responses
to my query (Linguist 14.2267): ''Can anyone recommend an introductory
cross-linguistic overview of particles that extends beyond the
Indo-European languages?'' At that time I had received a single,
although most helpful, response from Dr Petek Kurtboke, regarding
Turkish particles.

Since then, I have received several further responses. Although it
seems that there is no single introductory cross-linguistic overview of
particles, I was nevertheless directed towards a wealth of resources,
which I summarise as follows:

Mike Maxwell pointed me towards the following website:
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_subject.asp?code=PRT

Tim Baldwin mentioned a recent workshop in Toulouse entitled ''The
ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and
their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications''. 20

Rosa Rodriguez advised that Mayan languages are rich in particles, and
recommended Brown & Levinson's ''Politeness: Some Universals in Language
Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press'' (1987).

Jim Miller referred me to his paper in ''Language Science'' (1996), with a
more complete account of his work to be published soon. Jim's work
primarily draws upon English, German, Catalan, Hungarian and Bulgarian.

Guido Oebel did a Google search and came up with 3280 ''particle-related''
hits simply by using the keywords ''particle'' and ''cross-linguistic''.
This one is going to keep me busy for a while!

Prof. Dr. Anneli Sarhimaa directed me towards two papers Marja Leinonen
which discuss certain Russian particles in relation to Permic languages.

Mary Erbaugh has done some work on Burmese, Mandarin, Laho, Thai,
Cambodian and Vietnamese particles as discourse markers. Adrien Tien
also commented on discourse particles in Mandarin.

Ans van Kemenade advises me that there are a number of articles that may
be useful now available in the ''Yearbook of Morphology 2003''.

Dr Andrew McIntyre suggested that a query about ''particles'' may have
been a bit too broad, since the term can cover several discrete usages
(eg. modal particles, verbal particles, question particles), but is also
sometimes used as a generic term for any uninflected grammatical
category. I guess it is this second sense that I had in mind when I
posted the original query - amongst other things, I wanted to get a feel
for current perceptions of the viablity/usefulness of the generic usage
of this term cross-linguistically.

I'd like to thank everyone for the time that they took in responding to
my query, and the helpful nature of their suggestions. I hope that I
haven't inadvertently left anyone off my summary!

Anne Morrison
PhD Candidate
Communication, Information and New Media
University of South Australia

LL Issue: 14.2880
Date Posted: 22-Oct-2003
Original Query: Read original query


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