Pragmatic Particles

Findings from Asian Languages

Jieun Kiaer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350191655
• eBook ISBN: 9781350118485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Grammar & Punctuation
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Pragmatic Particles sheds new light on the linguistic theory and application of Asian languages with a particular focus on the role of particles and their socio-pragmatic nature. Drawing on a range of data that spans Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Turkish and beyond, the multidimensionality of Asian languages is brought to attention. Particles are central in this discourse and their constructive, expressive and attitudinal behaviours are revealed to be neither arbitrary nor peripheral. By branching away from a predominantly Euro-centric discussion and covering the relevant formal and functional foundations of syntax and semantics, this book offers an alternative lens to the appropriate treatment of Asian languages in contemporary linguistics.

1

Introduction

In this chapter, I shall provide a brief overview of the status quo of research into Asian languages (1.1) and particles (1.2) and the challenges that these languages could bring to contemporary theories in linguistics. I shall introduce the target languages under discussion (1.3) and their key features (1.4) which I aim to explain in this book. I also introduce target languages (1.5).

1.1. Researching Asian languages

Modern linguistics was greatly influenced and inspired by the works of Asian linguists’ grammar, such as Pāṇini’s. Aṣṭādhyāyī by Pāṇini (dated c. fourth to fifth centuries BC) is the very earliest extant systematic grammar of human languages. It has inspired many pioneers of the modern linguistic science – Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield and Roman Jakobson, all Sanskrit scholars. Staal (1967) notes that Pāṇini’s grammar provided the formal foundation for contemporary linguistics due to its influence on Saussure and Noam Chomsky.

However, in the course of its development, the Asian touch within linguistics has been lost. Throughout the history of contemporary linguistics, in accordance with the Chomskian tradition of generative grammars, theoretical linguists have aimed to unravel universal grammars that would be applicable to all human languages. However, this search has been conducted with data taken mainly from European languages. That said, in the process of searching out and crystallizing the linguistic categories and features of world languages, mainstream Western linguists often construct their approach through the looking glass of English-like languages, implicitly assuming that the linguistic consistencies found in these languages will be applicable to all other languages with little parametric variation. This often unsaid, yet implicitly assumed, idea is prevalent in every part of contemporary linguistics.

In order to address the aforementioned lack of language diversity in linguistic discourse, this book uses data from a range of Asian languages which are relatively under-represented in theoretical linguistics. From a world languages perspective, Asian languages have never been minority languages, and their foreign speakership is growing rapidly worldwide. For instance, the 2011 UK census showed that the Asian or Asian British ethnic group category experienced one of the largest increases since 2001, comprising a third of the foreign-born population of the UK (2.4 million) (Office for National Statistics 2013). The US Census Bureau (2011) revealed that Asian and Pacific Island languages constitute a major portion of foreign languages spoken in the United States. These languages include Chinese; Korean; Japanese; Vietnamese; Hmong; Khmer; Lao; Thai; Tagalog/Filipino; the Dravidian languages of India, such as Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam; and other languages of Asia and the Pacific, including the Polynesian and Micronesian languages. Among them, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese belong to the country’s top ten most widely spoken languages. The situation is similar in other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada which, to use Kachru’s terminology (1985), belong to the inner circle of English. In Australia, the top four foreign languages are Asian: Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese and Vietnamese. Tagalog/Filipino, Hindi and Punjabi also appear in the top ten most spoken foreign languages. In Canada, Tagalog and Punjabi are the two fastest growing foreign languages. The growth of Asian languages is observable in other parts of the world as well.

Nevertheless, regardless of their global significance, Asian languages have been severely under-represented within contemporary linguistics. Even for mega languages like Mandarin, Standard Arabic, Hindi and Bengali/Bangla (all of which are among Ethnologue’s 2019 top ten most spoken languages in the world), it is not easy to find an accessible descriptive grammar book or any handbook-like linguistic publication written for a global audience, compared to what is available for English and other Western European languages.¹ As I shall discuss later in this chapter (1.4) and in Chapter 2, most of the morphosyntactic characteristics of Asian languages, despite being found in the majority of world languages, have been largely overlooked or considered exceptional within the realm of contemporary linguistics.

General awareness of non-Western European languages is poor across the globe.² Asian languages in the Anglophone or Western European context have often been referred to as ‘heritage’ languages – implying that these are languages for Asian immigrants and their descendants only. Across universities globally, the ‘Modern Languages’ department frequently refers to contemporary Western European languages: French, Italian, Spanish and German, while Asian languages are referred to as ‘East Asian’, ‘South Asian’ or ‘Near Eastern’ (Kiaer 2017a). Asian languages have often been classified as difficult-to-master languages for native speakers of English. According to the Foreign Service Institute, an organ of the US Federal Government, most Asian languages belong to (difficulty) categories III and IV.³

A) Category III languages

‘Hard languages’ – Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English.

E.g. Persian Farsi, Hebrew, Hindi, Russian, Serbian/Croatian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Uzbek, Urdu

B) Category IV languages

‘Super-hard languages’ – Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.

E.g. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Pashto It is noteworthy that most Western European languages – such as French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese – are considered category I languages, which shows relative easiness of learning.

From an English speaker’s perspective, Asian languages tend to have a more complex socio-pragmatic system than Western European languages (see Chapter 5 for a detailed discussion). Asian languages are also often not as straightforward to romanize or gloss as English and most Western European languages. However, mere difference from the English language can justify neither the poor general awareness of, nor the lack of research on, these languages.

In fact, most available linguistic pedagogies are also based on the acquisition of European languages and cannot be applied easily to the study of Asian languages. Consider Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Common European framework for language proficiency

Level	Descriptor
C2	Has a good command of a very broad lexical repertoire including idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms; shows awareness of connotative levels of meaning.
C1	Has a good command of a broad lexical repertoire allowing gaps to be readily overcome with circumlocutions; little obvious searching for expressions or avoidance strategies. Good command of idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms.
B2	Has a good range of vocabulary for matters related to his/her field and most general topics. Can vary formulation to avoid frequent repetition, but lexical gaps can still cause hesitation and circumlocution.
B1	Has a sufficient vocabulary to express himself/herself with some circumlocutions on most topics pertinent to his/her everyday life such as family, hobbies and interests, work, travel and current events. Has sufficient vocabulary to conduct routine, everyday transactions involving familiar situations and topics.
A2	Has a sufficient vocabulary for the expression of basic communicative needs. Has a sufficient vocabulary for coping with simple survival needs.
A1	Has a basic vocabulary repertoire of isolated words and phrases related to particular concrete situations.

Table 1.1 shows the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) vocabulary profiler. Yet, even in this table, command of grammatical relations using particles, or the appropriate usage of sociocultural relation-sensitive speech, such as honorifics or sentence-final particles, is not included. Pragmatic proficiency is included briefly as ‘idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms’ (i.e. C2) but is a more significant concern in Asian languages in which mastering interpersonal relations is a crucial part of linguistic competence. A1-2 refers to the basic level, B1-2 refers to the intermediate level and C1-2 refers to the advanced level.

As I shall turn to in section 1.4 and Chapter 2, many key morphosyntactic features that are shared by a vast number of Asian languages have also been under-represented or overlooked, as they are analysed and understood mainly from an English-language perspective. This book aims to demonstrate the necessity of showcasing the often-overlooked properties of Asian languages that are in need of proper observation, description and explanation. These properties, as it happens, are not exclusively exhibited in Asian languages, but are observed cross-linguistically among world languages.

1.2. Particles on the fringe

The definition of the term ‘particle’ varies greatly, but for the purposes of this discussion, I take ‘particle’ to be an overarching term referring to a single or a sequence of (un)inflected grammatical morphemes which play a role as a single unit with a complexity of syntactic, semantic and (socio-)pragmatic meaning. The term ‘particle’ is used as an umbrella term to refer to endings, markers, suffixes, morphemes and so on in order to bring focus to the common characteristics of all these categories which fall under the wider heading of ‘particle’. Particles cannot be used as standalone words, and their use is sensitive to interlocutory registers and speakers’ perspectives (see Chapters 4 and 5). Particles are normally very light in terms of phonological weight. I assume that so-called dummies or clitic expressions are also kinds of particles.⁴ The term ‘proclitic particle’ refers to a particle whose phonetic value depends on the following word, while an enclitic particle’s phonetic value depends on the preceding word. I expand this discussion further and argue that prosodic breaks in certain languages also play the role of invisible – yet audible – particles.

As particles are agglutinative in nature, they differ from the inflectional morphemes found in most European languages, which require morphosyntactic agreement with the auxiliaries or main verbs. Although particle behaviours are quite relaxed compared to agreement-required morphemes, as we shall explore in this book, particle behaviours are neither arbitrary nor peripheral, but systematic and consistently motivated by socio-pragmatic needs. In particular, in Chapter 5, I show how the speaker’s desire to achieve efficiency, expressivity and empathy in social commu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and conventions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Modelling flexible word orders
• 3 Efficiency grammar
• 4 Multidimensional meanings
• 5 Socio-pragmatic meanings
• 6 Particles as a meaning complex
• 7 Pragmatic syntax
• 8 Constructive particles and syntactic fluidity
• 9 Expressive and attitudinal particles
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright