East Asian Linguistics Workshop | Phrasal Boundary Marking and the Rise of Pragmatic Markers: Insights from Non-Referential Uses of Nominalized Constructions in Some Asian Languages by Foong Ha Yap

This is an Archive of a Past Event

We would like to invite you to join us for an upcoming talk entitled "Phrasal Boundary Marking and the Rise of Pragmatic Markers: Insights from Non-Referential Uses of Nominalized Constructions in Some Asian Languages" by Foong Ha Yap (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen) as the second session of the 2024–25 East Asian Linguistics Workshop series sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. 

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in understanding how pragmatic markers develop. Some studies adopt a diachronic grammaticalization framework, giving us a panoramic as well as detailed view of how certain lexical items are recruited for textual (grammatical) and socio-interactional (pragmatic) work. Other studies have opted for a synchronic approach, often based on functional-cognitive analyses, to postulate plausible mechanisms of semantic change. Discursive studies have further enriched our understanding of how pragmatic markers can expand their range of functions in different contexts-of-use. These combined efforts have paved the way for two recent theoretical models on the rise of pragmatic markers, namely, Discourse Grammar (DG) and Diachronic Construction Grammar (DCG). In this talk, she will discuss how some Asian languages deploy phrasal boundary markers to signal semantic shifts whereby contentful referential expressions are reanalyzed as more pragmatic constructions. Data for analysis come from East Asian and Austronesian languages. 


 

About the Speaker

Foong Ha Yap is an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD in Applied Linguistics from UCLA in 1999. Her research focuses on the development of speaker stance markers. She has published in Diachronica, Discourse & Society, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, Language & Linguistics, Language Sciences, Lingua, Linguistics, Memory & Cognition, Pragmatics, Studies in Language, and Text & Talk. She co-edited Nominalization in Asian Languages (2011) and three Journal of Pragmatics special issues on “Stancemarking and stancetaking in Asian languages” (2015), “Attitudinal interrogatives in interactive talk” (2022/2023) and “Demonstratives and stance” (2023/2024).