The development of generic maDur/man for the construction of discourse stance in Icelandic and Swedish
Författare
Summary, in English
The paper compares two lexical items, Icelandic ma@?ur and Swedish man, for the construction of a detached, general discourse stance (Berman, Ragnarsdottir and Stromqvist, 2002). Both forms mean 'man', but they can also be used in a generic sense. In that usage, Icelandic ma@?ur is associated with several semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic constraints, whereas Swedish man is more freely applicable across contexts and genres. Data derived from 632 discourse tokens produced by 158 subjects were analyzed, focusing on frequency distributions of generic usages of ma@?ur/man with respect to age (10-11, 13-14, 16-17 years, adults), genre (narrative, expository), modality (speaking, writing), and language (Icelandic, Swedish). Both Icelandic and Swedish revealed a clear preference for using maDur/man in expository discourse, a finding which validates the assumption that these terms play a role in the construction of a depersonalized, general discourse stance. Further, Swedish man was used considerably more frequently than Icelandic ma@?ur, a finding which is explained as due to the difference in the constraints restricting the domain of use of the apparently equivalent term in the two languages. By and large, two main factors were found to underlie the distributions of maDur/man: general socio-cognitive development and culturally specific stylistic constraints.
Avdelning/ar
Publiceringsår
2005
Språk
Engelska
Sidor
143-155
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
Journal of Pragmatics
Volym
37
Issue
2
Dokumenttyp
Artikel i tidskrift
Förlag
Elsevier
Ämne
- General Language Studies and Linguistics
Nyckelord
- Expository
- Generic pronouns
- Discourse stance
- Narrative
- Later language development
- Scandinavian languages
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISSN: 0378-2166