A próxima sessão do Seminário CLUL decorrerá no próximo dia 3 de março, sexta-feira, entre as 17h e as 18:30h na sala B112.C da FLUL
Marco Favaro (Gramática & Recursos)
Título: The interplay between illocutionary force and information managing. A comparison of the pragmatic functions of It. un po’ and Eu. Port. lá
Resumo: A profitable approach to describe the meaning of discourse-pragmatic elements revolves around the theoretical distinction between content- vs context-level uses of linguistic expression (Hansen 2008). The first label refers to uses having a bearing on a state-of-affairs/proposition, while the second label refers to uses having a bearing on the relation between a state-of-affairs/proposition and contextual entities (the discourse itself, the mental states of the interlocutors). This talk looks at the boundary between content-level and context-level uses of two Romance adverbial elements: It. un po’ ‘a bit’ (Favaro 2021) and Eu. Port. lá ‘there’ (Martins 2012; Marques & Duarte 2015, 2017). Despite the content-level uses of these elements belong to different semantic domains (degree adverbs vs deictive locatives), their context-level uses show a comparable distribution and functional similarities. Relying on corpus data, the talk will give a description of the context-level uses of un po’ and lá in terms of illocutionary contexts of use (directive and assertive speech acts) and pragmatic functions (illocutionary force modification, management of discourse inferences, approximation). By exploring the interplay between different pragmatic functions, the discussion will argue for a distinction between those (mostly) relating to the communicated content and those (mostly) relating to illocutive level (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008), for the former refers to information managing, while illocution directly interfaces to the pragmatics of speech acts.
