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Infinitives in the 1820 Settler Letters of Denunciation: What can a Contextualised Application of Corpus-Based Results Tell us About the Expression of Persuasion?

100%

Włodarczyk M.

Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics

2010

vol. 46

issue 4

533-564

This paper takes issue with Biber's (1988) findings concerning the significance of infinitives for what he calls the "overt expression of persuasion" (Biber 1988: 115). It aims to demonstrate that statistically generated results of research on large electronic corpora of contemporary English may not be verifiable in small, well-contextualised, single-genre collections, such as the one representing 19th century English used in this study. The collection comprises denunciation letters addressed to the colonial authorities (the Colonial Office) by the first British settlers in the Cape Colony (the 1820 Settlers). The letters follow the generic model of petition (Włodarczyk 2010) understood as an official written request. An act of denunciation, as we may assume, contributes to the inherent persuasiveness of petitions by increasing the illocutionary force (in the sense of Searle 1969, 1979) of the letter. Therefore, patterns of distribution of infinitives as markers of persuasion (Biber 1988) are particularly interesting to trace in the 1820 Settler denunciation letters. The paper shows that some of Biber's statements may not be taken as valid generalizations, as the persuasive potential of infinitives may not be corroborated unless each and every token is thoroughly contextualized. Furthermore, an analysis of requests in denunciations conducted within Speech Act Theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969; Blum-Kulka 1984; Culpeper and Archer 2008) shows that it is first and foremost politeness concerns (cf. Brown and Levinson 1987), not the increased need for persuasiveness, that determine the degree of the illocutionary force of requests.

Interpretation of possessive pronouns in Czech infinitive constructions

59%

Perevozchikova T.

Slovo a slovesnost: časopis pro otázky teorie a kultury jazyka (Slovo a slovesnost: A journal for the theory of language and language cultivation)

2024

vol. 85

issue 2

83-111

Existing research has not yielded clear conclusions regarding the status of the Czech reflexive possessive svůj as a long-distance anaphora. Some researchers claim that svůj in infinitival complements strongly favours the local interpretation. Other scholars argue that the reference of svůj is ambiguous between the local and the long-distance reading, and that the choice between them is partly influenced by the matrix verb. In this article, we report on an experimental study investigating how reflexive and non-reflexive possessives in Czech object control infinitives are interpreted and whether the interpretation is constrained by the matrix verb. A written interpretation task was carried out with 96 Czech native speakers. The results show that for a reflexive possessive, the local interpretation is preferred, but the long-distance interpretation is also common, and its probability depends partly on the matrix verb. A non-reflexive possessive does not show a non-locality bias and its interpretation depends strongly on the matrix verb. Our results support form-specific multiple-constraints models of anaphora processing, suggesting that the interpretation of reflexives is influenced not only by the structural constraint of locality but also by pragmatic inferences based on the semantics of the matrix verb, although to a lesser extent than the interpretation of pronouns.

Dosavadní výzkum nepřinesl jasné závěry, pokud jde o status reflexivního posesiva svůj jako dálkové anafory. Někteří badatelé tvrdí, že svůj v infinitivních doplněních silně upřednostňuje lokální interpretaci. Jiní badatelé tvrdí, že reference posesiva svůj je vzhledem k možnosti lokálního a distančního čtení nejednoznačná a že volba mezi těmito možnostmi je částečně ovlivněna maticovým slovesem. V tomto článku podáváme zprávu o experimentálním výzkumu, který se zaměřil na otázku, jak jsou reflexivní a nereflexivní posesiva v českých infinitivech řídících objekt interpretována a zda je tato interpretace omezena maticovým slovesem. Písemná interpretační úloha byla zadána 96 rodilým mluvčím češtiny. Výsledky ukázaly, že u reflexivního posesiva je preferována lokální interpretace, ale častá je i interpretace distanční, jejíž pravděpodobnost částečně závisí na maticovém slovese. Nereflexivní posesivum nemá přednost před nelokálním antecedentem a jeho reference silně závisí na maticovém slovese. Naše výsledky podporují tvarově specifické modely zpracování anafory s více omezeními, které naznačují, že interpretace reflexiv je ovlivněna nejen strukturním omezením lokálnosti, ale v menší míře také pragmatickými inferencemi založenými na sémantice maticového slovesa.

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1 Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics

1 Slovo a slovesnost: časopis pro otázky teorie a kultury jazyka (Slovo a slovesnost: A journal for the theory of language and language cultivation)

1 Perevozchikova T.

1 Włodarczyk M.

1 2024

1 2010

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Infinitives in the 1820 Settler Letters of Denunciation: What can a Contextualised Application of Corpus-Based Results Tell us About the Expression of Persuasion?

Interpretation of possessive pronouns in Czech infinitive constructions