Phraseological Discourse Markers of Reliability: From ...

This is the pre-print version of the following article: Ishikawa, S. (2013). Phraseological discourse Phraseological Discourse of Reliability… 97 markers of reliability: From a viewpoint of Markers world Englishes. In J. Szerszunowicz, B. Nowowiejski, K. Yagi, & T. Kanzaki (Eds.), Research on Phraseology Across Continents Vol.2 (pp. 97-114). Bialystok, Poland: University of Bialystok Publishing House. This file may be updated, replaced, or removed by the author without prior notices. Contact info: Dr. Shin Ishikawa, Kobe University, Japan. [email protected]

Shin’ichiro Ishikawa

Kobe University Japan

Phraseological Discourse Markers of Reliability: From a Viewpoint of World Englishes

abstract: Discourse markers play an important role in making a discourse textually cohesive and contextually interpersonal. In the current study, we will focus on the phraseological discourse markers of reliability (PDMRs) such as “I think” and “I believe”. PDMRs are textual in initiating new sentences, and also meta-textual or interpersonal in adjusting the strength of an addresser’s claim and controlling the relationship between an addresser and an expected addressee. Using a newly compiled international learner corpus, which holds 1.3 million words of the essays written by leaners of English in ten countries and regions in Asia, we will discuss how PDMRs are used in the varieties of Englishes comprising an inner circle, an outer circle, and an expanding circle. key words: discourse markers, expression of reliability, learner corpus, world Englishes

1. Introduction The trend of globalization is drastically changing the status of the English language. English has now become a hybrid of World Englishes (WEs) and its traditional conventions are being modified by a great number of English users emerging in the world. Among varied facets of the language, pragmatics, which often concerns the interpersonal relationship between an addresser and addressee, is particularly sensitive to the recent changes in English language. In this article, we will focus on phraseological discourse markers of reliability (PDMRs) such as “I think” and “I believe”, as an example of

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changing facets in English pragmatics. PDMRs have the important function of showing “the degree of reliability” in a discourse (Aijmer 1997). When studying discourse markers (DMs) from the viewpoint of WEs, two issues need to be considered. First is the definition of DMs to be examined. As often pointed out, DMs are a highly ambiguous category in linguistics. A great variety is observed in terms: clue words (Reichman, 1981), cue phrases (Grosz & Sidner 1986), clue phrases (Cohen 1987), rhetorical markers (Scott & Souza 1990), sentence and clausal connectives (Knott & Mellish, 1996), discourse cues (Di Eugenio et al. 1997), discourse connectives (Webber et al. 1999), discourse particles (Fischer, 2006), and pragmatic markers (Aijmer & Simon-Vandenbergen, 2011). A similar variety is also observed in types and functions: “textual” and “functional” (Moreno 2001), marking “a transition in the evolving progress of the conversation” and “an interactive relationship between speaker, hearer, and messages” (Biber et al. 1999), or “the connection between what a speaker is saying and what has already been said and what is going to be said”, “the structure of what is being said”, and “what speakers think about what they are saying and what others have said” (Fisher 2006). Chalker & Weiner (1996) admits that DMs as a technical term cannot be easily defined. Fischer (2006) suggests that “the approaches [to DMs] vary with regard to very many different aspects: the language(s) under consideration, the items taken into account, the terminology used, the functions considered, the problems focused on, and the methodologies employed” in previous studies. Swan (2005) also writes that it is “impossible to give a complete list [of DMs] in a few pages”. Many studies have been done in the field, but there seems to be little, if at any, agreement in what DMs are, what their functions are, and what are included in them. Therefore, in the current study, we will avoid discussing DMs in general and limit ourselves to analyzing PDMRs. PMDRs attract our attention because they are textual in initiating new sentences, and also metatextual or interpersonal in adjusting the strength of an addresser’s claim and controlling the relationship between an addresser and an expected addressee. The other issue to be discussed is the data used for analysis of WEs. Because of a lack of appropriate data, previous studies have depended on a qualitative analysis of limited samples. One of the possible solutions is using a corpus, but most of the full-scaled corpora ever compiled cover British or American English alone (e.g., British National Corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English). Although several smaller corpora

Phraseological Discourse Markers of Reliability…

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collect data in ESL countries such as India and Singapore (e.g., Kolhapur Corpus, International Corpus of English), EFL countries, where independent English users are newly emerging, have not been covered. Using the terminology by Kachru (1985), the target of existing corpora is primarily the Inner Circle (IC), and sometimes the Outer Circle (OC), but hardly ever the Expanding Circle (EC). In this study, we will therefore use the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE), which has been recently released. The ICNALE covers all of the IC, OC, and EC in Asia. Although it is classified as a “learner” corpus, learners at intermediate or higher levels can also be regarded as “users” of WEs.

2. Literature Review 2.1. DMs in Speech First, we will briefly survey several of the studies focusing on DMs in general used in speech by English native speakers (NSs) and learners as non-native speakers (NNSs). Moreno & Eugenia (2001) reveals that Spanish learners underuse “well” in speech in comparison to native speakers, which the author concludes characterizes non-nativeness of learners’ discourse. Müller (2004) reports that German learners underuse “well”, “like”, and “so” in speech, while a gap between NSs and NNSs is not observed with “you know”. Fuller (2003) shows that German, French, and Spanish learners use “well”, “you know”, “like”, “oh”, and “I mean” less and in a more limited variety. Hellermann & Vergun (2007) shows that proficient learners come to use “like”, “you know”, and “well” in a closer way to NSs. Romero Trillo (2002) reveals that Spanish children cannot use involvement DMs such as “you know”, “you see”, “I mean”, and “well” in a NS-like way, but a gap between NSs and NNSs is not observed with operative DMs such as “look” and “listen”, which means that interpersonal DMs are more difficult to acquire than textual ones. Buysse (2010) shows that Belgian learners overuse “so” and “well”, while they underuse “you know”, “like”, “kind/ sort of”, and “I mean”, which also means that interpersonal DMs are more difficult to acquire. 2.2. DMs in Writing Next, concerning DMs used in writing, Feng (2010) reveals that Chinese learners often use DMs of additives, adversatives, causals, and con-

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tinuatives, but some learners avoid using DMs or use them inappropriately. Martínez (2002) reports that Spanish learners of English use DMs similarly in their L1 and L2, and that they use a greater variety of DMs when expressing logical relationships (e.g., quasi-parallel, concluding, contrasting, and causal) between sentences. Šimčikaitė (2012) illustrates that Lithuanian learners overuse informal or semi-formal DMs such as “then”, “well”, “of course”, “in other words”, and “I mean” in writing, which the author says is caused by lack of explanation on stylistic features of DMs in course books, ambiguous information presented in teaching materials, and an emphasis on a communicative approach in classes. As for DMs in course books and teaching methodology, Fukazawa (2000) illustrates that Japanese high school EFL textbooks include fewer DMs than an ESL course book, most of which are limited to temporal and contrastive types. Dülger (2007) proves that a process view writing, in which learners prewrite, write, and rewrite their essays in a peer discussion facilitated by a teacher, leads to use of a greater number and variety of DMs than a product view writing, in which learners write their essays with reference to a model essay. 2.3. PDMRs Finally, several studies discussing “I think” and other PDMRs will be mentioned. Aijmer (1997) analyzes “I think”, which is called a modal particle, an epistemic adverb, and a speech-act adverbial as well as a DM, from the viewpoint of pragmaticalization or semantic grammaticalization. The analysis of the London-Lund Corpus reveals that the ratio of less pragmaticalized “I think that S+V” forms (“that” forms) to more pragmaticalized “I think S+V” forms (zero forms) is 7% to 93%, which is largely identical to the ratio reported in Thompson & Mulac (1991) focusing on American spoken data. Also, it is shown that the “that” forms are common in discussions, while zero forms in informal conversations, and neither of them are common in formal public speech characterized by little involvement and interaction. Yong, Jingli, & Zhou (2010) analyzes speech corpus and illustrates that Chinese learners overuse “I think” in general; prefer using a zero form; tend to use “I think” in the sentence-initial position, which conveys deliberation and objectivity; and use “I think” in unique collocations such as “first/ secondary, I think”, “in my opinion, I think”, and “ok, I think”, which are not observed in the data of native speakers. Tsuchiya (2012) compares “guess”, “think”, “say”, and “know”, which are all classified as assertive verbs, and insists that when an addresser makes


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a claim with “assertiveness” based on evidence and belief, “that” forms are chosen, while when an addresser makes a claim based on internalized subjective judgment, zero forms are chosen. Although previous studies have discussed DMs and PDMRs from multi-dimensional viewpoints, usage pattern of PDMRs by international users of WEs has remained unclear to date.

3. Research Design 3.1. Target PDMRs PDMRs to be examined here are defined as a micro structure optionally attached to a main sentence structure, which comprises a first person pronoun “I”, a present-tense non-factive verb of thought (NFVT), and a conjunction “that” as an additional item. PDMRs typically take a form of “I think (that)”, but several types of “I think (that)” need to be excluded. (1) (2) (3) (4)

I think (that) smoking should be banned. Smoking should be banned, I think. That’s why I think (that) smoking should be banned. Smoking should be banned. I think so.

Instances of “I think (that)” in (1) – (3), which clearly function as PDMRs, are included in our analysis, while “I think” in (4) is excluded in that it is not optional in the sentence structure (*I think So.). With a reference to thesauri, we have collected varied NFVTs, and have examined the frequencies of “that” forms of PDMRs in a whole set of the ICNALE. I am convinced that (2), I am sure that (17), I believe that (130), I conceive that (0), I consider that (7), I contemplate that (0), I fancy that (0), I feel that (35), I guess that (9), I imagine that (1), I have in mind that (0), I meditate that (0), I muse that (0), I ponder that (0), I presume that (0), I speculate that (0), I suppose that (4), I suspect that (0), I reflect that (0), I think that (650)

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Thus, we have chosen six PDMRs to be analyzed: “I am sure (that)”, “I believe (that)”, “I consider (that)”, “I feel (that)”, “I guess (that)”, and “I think (that)”. 3.2. RQs The aim of the current study is to clarify how varied users of WEs, especially those belonging to different concentric circles, adopt PDMRs in their written essays. Our research questions are how differently international users of WEs use PDMRs in terms of interpersonality (RQ1), pragmaticalization (RQ2), formal variety (RQ3), reliability levels (RQ4), and collocation (RQ5). Also, we will consider how writers in different countries are classified according to their usage pattern of PDMRs (RQ6). 3.3. Data We will use the ICNALE (Beta version 0.3) as data for discussion. The ICNALE collects 1.3 million words of English essays written by 2,600 college students in 10 Asian countries and areas and 200 English native speakers (Ishikawa 2013). The ICNALE has two unique features. One is that writing conditions are strictly controlled. The number of topics is limited to two: “It is important for college students to have a part time job” and “Smoking should be completely banned at all the restaurants in the country”. Writers are required to show whether they agree or disagree with the topics by illustrating reasons for their position. In addition, time for writing (twenty to forty minutes), length of essays (two to three hundred words), dictionary use (prohibited), and spell-checker use (compulsory) are all controlled. Stricter control on writing conditions naturally leads to greater homogeneity in data, which guarantees a reliable contrastive interlanguage analysis between different writer groups. The other is that all NNS writers are classified into five proficiency levels of Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR): A2, B1_01, B1_ 2, B2, and C1 (NB: C1 is merged into “B2+” in the latest version of the corpus). Classification is based on writers’ scores in English proficiency tests such as TOEFL, TOEIC, and IELTS, or in the vocabulary size test (Nation & Begler 2007).

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Table 1. CEFR levels of writers A2

B1_1

B1_2

B2

C1+

Outer

Circle

Hong Kong (HKG)

Country

1.0

30.0

52.0

15.0

2.0

Outer

Pakistan (PAK)

9.0

45.5

44.0

1.5

0.0

Outer

Philippines (PHL)

1.0

5.5

88.0

5.5

0.0

Expanding

China (CHN)

12.5

58.0

26.3

2.8

0.5

Expanding

Indonesia (IDN)

16

41.0

41.5

1.5

0.0

Expanding

Japan (JPN)

38.5

44.8

12.3

4.3

0.3

Expanding

Korea (KOR)

25.0

20.3

29.3

19.3

6.0

Expanding

Thailand (THA)

29.8

44.8

25.0

0.5

0.0

Expanding

Taiwan (TWN)

14.5

43.5

30.5

11.0

0.5

Proficiency distribution greatly varies according to each country and area. Therefore, we will use the data of NNSs only at B1_2 (B1 upper) level as well as that of NSs. By controlling the proficiency level, we can conduct a more reliable international comparison. B1 is defined as a “threshold” level where users can “produce simple connected text on topics which are familiar or of personal interest” and “describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes & ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans”. Learners at B1 level, particularly at B1 upper level, are reasonably regarded as “independent” users of WEs.

3.4. Methodology First, we will examine the total frequencies of the PDMRs, which show degrees of reliability in an addresser’s claim and help to control the relationship between an addresser and an addressee, in order to approach RQ1 (interpersonality). Then, we will compare the ratios of three kinds of PDMRs: a “that” form (I NFVT that S V), a zero form (I NFVT S V), and a sentence final form (S V, I NFVT) for discussing RQ2 (pragmaticalization). According to Aijmer (1997), these three forms represent three degrees of pragmaticalization, from less pragmaticalized to more phatic and pragmaticalized. Also, we will compare the ratios of “I think (that)” and the other PDMRs, concerning RQ 3 (formal variation). Concerning RQ4 (reliability), Aijmer (1997) proposes that a set of PDMRs, “I guess”, “I suppose”, “I think”, “I believe”, and “I am sure”, con-

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struct a cline of “degree of reliability”. For discussing this, we will classify six NFVTs into three groups: strong reliability verbs (“am sure”/ “believe”), neutral reliability verbs (“think”/ “consider”), and weak reliability verbs (“guess”/“feel”). The ratios of three types will be compared. Then, concerning RQ5 (collocation), we will pay exclusive attention to “I think (that)” forms and compare the connectives and adverbials occurring immediately at their left (L1 position) (e.g., But I think…/Finally, I think…/All in all, I think…). Collocating items offer a clue to probe the context in which PDMRs are used by international users of English. Collocating items are classified into six function types: addition (“and”, “moreover”), adversative (“but”, “however”), order (“firstly”, “secondly”), personalization (“for me”, “in my opinion”), cause and effect (“because”, “so”), and summarization (“all in all”, “thus”), and the ratios of six types will be mutually compared. Finally, in order to discuss RQ6 (classification), we will conduct a correspondence analysis, which is a multivariate analytical measure to describe the internal structure of a multi-way frequency table. Dimensions or axes to maximize correspondence between rows and columns are identified and individual item data are scattered on a two-dimensional graph.

4. Results and Discussion 4.1. RQ1 Interpersonality Firstly, our attention is on the total frequency of PDMRs, which concern how interpersonal a discourse can be. In the figures below, the horizontal axes show three concentric circles and ten individual countries including English native speakers (ENS), while the vertical axes represent the means of the frequencies in all countries belonging to the same concentric circles (Fig. 1) and the individual frequencies according to countries (Fig. 2), both of which are adjusted per 100,000 words. Fig. 1 shows that PDMRs occur more often in OC and EC than in IC. Based on a hypothetical testing of the total raw frequencies, the differences between OC and IC (x2=329.74, p