Between lexis and discourse: a cross-register study of connectives of contrast

Dupont, Maïté [UCL]

Most reference grammars of English (e.g. Quirk et al. 1972; Quirk et al. 1985; Leech & Svartvik 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen 2004) tend to make very general statements about adverbial connective placement in English, paying relatively little attention to variables such as lexis or register. For example, in Quirk et al. (1972), we find the claim that “the normal position for most conjuncts is I [initial]. […] M [medial] positions are rare for most conjuncts, and E [end] rarer still” (ibid.: 526-7). Similarly but in a systemic-functional framework, Halliday & Matthiessen describe adverbial connectives as “what we might call characteristically thematic […]. They are natural Themes” (2004: 83). Yet, as Biber et al.’s (1999: 890-2) brief corpus-based description of adverbial connective placement suggests, connective placement may vary according to both lexical and stylistic factors. The present study investigates 10 adverbial connectives of contrast across three language registers, with a view to assessing the impact of lexis and register on their placement and discourse functions. The corpus is made up of three subcomponents: c. 1.4 million words from Europarl, a corpus of transcribed debates from the European parliament ; the English subpart of the Mult-ed corpus of quality paper editorials (c. 1 million words); and the English component of the KIAP corpus, made up of research articles from three different disciplines (c. 1.3 million words; see Fløttum et al. 2006). The corpus search focuses on the most frequent connectives from a list of 28 adverbial connectives, after extraction from the corpus via WordSmith Tools 6 (Scott 2012), and manual disambiguation in context. The study is grounded in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and relies on a classification of position which identifies three rhematic positions in addition to the usual thematic positions identified in SFL (see Halliday & Matthiessen 2004), thus making it possible to provide a detailed account of the placement of connectives occurring after the topical theme (see Dupont, in press). Preliminary results reveal that both the frequency and positioning of the connectives investigated vary significantly across the three registers. Parliamentary debates were found to favour thematic positions for adverbial connectives of contrast, as in (1), as opposed to the editorials, which displayed a marked tendency to use connectives rhematically, as in (2). The research articles were found to stand in between these two tendencies. (1) However, while short-term food aid is vital to respond to emergencies (…), EU food aid policy must work towards long-term security in food supply (Europarl). (2) Tony Blair, however, has been persuaded by the Home Secretary that identity cards might be the answer to the Government's own identity crisis (Mult-ed). A focus on the placement patterns of each individual connective revealed that connectives also seem to display fairly idiosyncratic placement patterns. The results highlighted two main types of placement profiles: while some connectives, such as instead or though, displayed very stable placement profiles across registers, other connectives, such as on the other hand and however, exhibited fairly variable patterns. The study thus provides evidence of both item- and register-related variation. A more qualitative analysis of the results revealed that connective placement frequently goes hand in hand with specific discourse effects, pertaining to information structure. More particularly, connectives in rhematic positions were found to fulfil discourse functions, such as focusing attention on the theme or some element within the rheme and partitioning of given and new information, in addition to their purely connective function (see also Altenberg 2006; Lenker 2011). References Altenberg, Bengt. 2006. The function of adverbial connectors in second initial position in English and Swedish. In Karin Aijmer and Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen (eds.) Pragmatic Markers in Contrast. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 11-37. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finnegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Cartoni, Bruno and Thomas Meyer. 2012. Extracting directional and comparable corpora from a multilingual corpus for translation studies. Proceedings of the eighth international conference of Language and Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Istanbul, May 2012. Dupont, Maïté. In press. 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