Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]

This volume is the first dedicated to the comprehensive, in-depth analysis of constructions with nouns like ‘type’ and ‘sort’. It focuses on type noun constructions in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, integrating the different descriptive traditions that had been developed for each language family. As a result, a greater variety of type noun constructions is revealed than in the hitherto more fragmented literature. But attention is also drawn to the cross-linguistic similarity of the new pragmatic meanings, such as ad hoc and approximative categorization, hedging, focus and filler uses, and the new grammatical functions in NPs (e.g. phoric uses), clauses (e.g. adverbial uses) and complex sentences (e.g. quotatives). The volume offers survey chapters of type noun constructions in each language family as well as contributions focusing on specific aspects in one or two languages, such as their grammar, semantics and pragmatics, diachronic development, discursive and sociolinguistic variety. These complementary methodologies elucidate the unique cross-linguistic field of type noun constructions both descriptively and theoretically. Hence, this volume can also serve as a model for similar surveys in other functional domains.

This book constitutes the first systematic analysis of meta-discourse in the spoken domain, addressing the question of how, why, and when speakers switch from discourse to meta-discourse by means of comment clauses (e.g., ‘I think’). The case of Present-day Italian is considered, exploring the internal properties of comment clauses (e.g., morphosyntax and semantics of the verb), their relations with the surrounding discourse (e.g., position of comment clause), and their prosodic profiles.

This study shows that speakers recur to meta-discourse to convey a non-random set of functions, having mainly to do with the online process of reference construction (e.g., approximation and reformulation) and with the degree of speaker’s commitment (e.g., epistemicity and emphasis). Comment clauses are also used as attention-getting or topic-resuming devices, though less frequently. One of the most interesting results of this study is the identification of a close relation between meta-discourse and stance-taking in spoken domain, with speakers recurring to comment clauses to convey their attitude.

Finally, meta-discourse turns out to be highly influenced, if not constrained, by universal properties of the spoken domain (i.e., non-linearity).