Lecture | Interactionality seminars
Time for something different: interactional uses of temporal adverbs in Dutch?
- Date
- Monday 13 March 2023
- Time
- Series
- Interactionality seminars
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 123
Abstract
Since temporal adverbs are typically used to locate a situation in time, they seem to provide rather objective or descriptive information as compared to ‘speaker oriented’ adverbs such as epistemic modifiers. Still (!), temporal adverbs also have more subjective and argumentative (interactional?) uses in which their temporal semantics may be absent or bleached. Examples are the use of straks (‘soon’, ‘next thing’) in (1) and the relatively new use of alsnog in (2).
- Straks gaat zo’n Koopmans nog verkondigen dat we anders moeten omgaan met de natuur om nieuwe pandemieën te voorkomen. (Volkskrant, 21 december 2021)
‘Next thing this Koopmans will be announcing that we should interact differently with nature in order to prevent new pandemics’
- Prikkelend, provocatief en ongemakkelijk maar alsnog een voorstelling vol met humor en muziek. (https://mobile.twitter.com/vpro/status/1388198969742856192)
‘Stimulating, provocative and uncomfortable, but still a performance full of humour and music’
In (1), the writer is not predicting that in the near future Koopmans will be making this announcement. Rather, straks (nog) is part of a speech act construction that may be used to express apprehension, slippery slope arguments and ‘reductio ad absurdum’. In (2), the temporal dimension of alsnog (originally used only for events that were supposed to happen earlier and then ‘still’ happened at a later moment) is no longer there, making alsnog into a more general discourse connector in contrastive contexts. Both in (1) and (2) the non-temporal function of the adverb corresponds with a different structural position; they are no longer predicate modifiers but they ‘move’ to positions earlier in the clause (or ‘higher up’, on a different metaphor).
In this talk I will focus on straks but also give a more general overview of temporal adverbs in Dutch that have developed such pragmatic uses in addition to (or instead of) semantic ones, including alsnog but also tegelijk/tegelijkertijd, vervolgens en intussen/ondertussen (cf. for English at the same time and at the end of the day). I will address the question how the temporal and contrastive uses are related, and to what extent the latter uses may be considered ‘interactional’.