Lecture
Interactionality all through grammar (with examples from Russian and other languages)
- Date
- Thursday 27 October 2022
- Time
- Location
-
- Room
- 001
My talk will consist of three parts (the last part being the largest part):
- What is interactionality? Is there a definition for this concept?
- Some examples of phenomena of interactionality in Russian (forms of backchanneling, interjections and forms with similar functions, imperatives and the role of aspect, etc.)
- A presentation of the ‘zonder + niet’ (‘without + not’) construction in Dutch as in:
Banken/analisten doen niet zomaar iets, zonder daar niet beter van te worden!
‘Banks/analysts won’t do anything just like that, without [lit. without not] benefiting from it.’
I will argue that the form ‘niet’, which is often called expletive, is not used randomly, but occurs in specific contexts, and has a communicative function. This function has to do with emphasizing the negative orientation of the utterance, and going against the (presupposed) expectations of the addressee. This is the abstract of this part of my presentation:
One of the questions within the study of grammar is whether a distinction can be made between competence and performance. A good example of making this distinction is found in the study of negation, where some instances of an “extra” (non-compositional, expletive, pleonastic) negation, in which one negation does not cancel out the other (known as “double negation”), are regarded by some scholars as performance errors. According to this point of view, these errors occur because language users find it difficult to deal with multiple negations. This paper presents a corpus-based study of the use of “extra” negation (niet ‘not’) in a Dutch privative construction with zonder ‘without’. Two basic factors that trigger an extra negation are discussed, and an explanation of why these factors facilitate the use of an extra negation is offered. It is argued that the extra negation has a semantic-pragmatic function, which is reminiscent of similar instances of extra negation (non-compositional negation, expletive negation) in Dutch and other languages.