Sentence Grammar was the subject of Section 3. It is based on propositional logic and is organized in terms of constructions taking the form of sentences, clauses, phrases, words, and morphemes plus the syntactic and morphological machinery to relate constructions to one another.
But in spite of its nearly unlimited conceptual and compositional potential, some of which was summarized in Section 3, Sentence Grammar is severely limited when it comes to establishing a meta-linguistic “umbrella” for discourse, by linking grammar to the extra-linguistic world, in particular to the socio-cultural setting, the interpersonal and emotional needs of interlocutors, and the organization of texts beyond the level of a sentence. This is the domain of Thetical Grammar. Its building blocks are theticals, consisting on the one hand of thetical formulae and constructions and on the other hand of the ability to coopt information units of Sentence Grammar and deploy them for structuring discourse.32 The main categories of theticals distinguished so far are listed in (1).33 As we will see below, many theticals are more or less non-compositional and fixed, being used recurrently, but this need not be so (see Heine et al. 2013: 207).
31 Discourse, in the sense of the term used here, consists of all the linguistic resources that are available for constructing spoken or written texts.
32 “Information unit” is a cover term for any pairing of form-meaning units that can be separated from the remainder of an utterance by means of semantic, syntactic, and/or prosodic criteria -- ideally by all three of them. An information unit can be a word, but it can consist as well of a complex collocation of words (Heine et al. 2013). The term
“information unit” thus is similar to, but is not the same as that of a discourse act in the tradition of Discourse Functional Grammar, defined as “the smallest identifiable unit of communicative behaviour” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 308).
33 Throughout this chapter, theticals are printed in bold.
(1) The main categories of Thetical Grammar (Kaltenböck et al. 2011; Heine et al. 2013) a Conceptual theticals (including discourse markers)
b Formulae of social exchange c Vocatives
d Imperatives e Interjections
Theticals differ in a number of ways from constituents of Sentence Grammar. Prototypical properties of theticals are listed in (2)34 (see also Kaltenböck et al. 2011, Section 2). As we will see below, not all theticals behave in every respect in accordance with (2).
(2) Properties of theticals (Kaltenböck et al. 2011: 853) a They are syntactically independent.
b They are typically set off prosodically from the rest of an utterance.
c Their meaning is non-restrictive.
d They tend to be positionally mobile.
e Their internal structure is built on principles of Sentence Grammar but can be elliptic Unlike theticals, the units of Sentence Grammar are syntactically dependent (they can, e.g., be embedded; cf. (2a)), prosodically integrated (they are as a rule part of the intonation contour of the clause; cf. (2b)), their meaning is restrictive (that is, it is grounded in the semantic structure of a sentence or its constituents; cf. (2c)), there are limits as to where they can be placed in a sentence, cf. (2d), and as to which parts of them can be “ellipsed”, cf. (2e).
“Non-restrictive” meaning (Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 1352) concerns reasoning processes grounded in the situation of discourse, whose main components are listed in (3).
Rather than being neatly separated from one another, these components form a network of interlocking functions (Heine and Kaltenböck 2013) and, as we will see in the sections to follow, theticals may, and frequently do combine elements of more than one of the components.
The theticals to be discussed below can exhibit contrasting functions depending on the context in which they are used. This may mean that one and the same unit will be discussed with reference to more than one component.
(3) Components of the situation of discourse (Kaltenböck et al. 2011: 861) a Speaker-hearer interaction
b Attitudes of the speaker c Text organization
34 The term thetical must not be confused with that of "thetic" statement (see Kaltenböck et al. 2011, Fn. 6). Note that the definition in (2) is prototypical rather than being based on necessary and sufficient criteria.
d Discourse setting e Source of information f World knowledge
We may illustrate the contribution that theticals make to the presentation of linguistic discourse with the following utterance taken from the Blessing the Hunting Weapons ceremony, where the elders address the public and the ancestors:
(4) ɛɛláá tɛ́nkɛsa ɛɛláá í mut- u í hḿ í mut- u dé folks Tenkesa folks 2.SG bring.S-VEN DM DM 2.SG bring.S-VEN DM
‘People of Tenkesa, folks, you should bring (your people) here, just bring them here!’
(1/70)
This utterance consists entirely of theticals: There are two vocatives (ɛɛláá tɛ́nkɛsa
‘people of Tenkesa’ and ɛɛláá ‘folks’), three discourse markers (í, hḿ, and dé), and two imperatives (í mut-u ‘you should bring here’, twice). Most of these theticals, that is, the two vocatives and the two imperatives, serve the component of speaker-hearer interaction in (3a) by directly relating the audience (namely the Tenkesa family and other people) to the content of the utterance. The three discourse markers, by contrast, serve to achieve text cohesion, that is, they relate to the component of text organization (3c).
Discourse markers, such as the ones in (4), are the most frequently used information units in Akie, and they may illustrate the definitional criteria of theticals listed in (2):35 Discourse markers are syntactically independent, that is, they are not a part of sentence structure, they cannot be subordinated, and they tend to be set off prosodically by means of distinct intonation or other features. Their meaning is non-restrictive: It is not part of and does not contribute to the semantics of the sentence and, in fact, while they are important for structuring the text, omitting them is as a rule possible without significantly changing the semantic content of an utterance (Schiffrin 1987; Hansen 1998a; 1998b;
Schourup 1999; Heine 2013). And discourse markers are also positionally mobile, that is, many of them can be placed virtually anywhere in an utterance. For example, in the text piece of (4) above we saw that the discourse marker hḿ occurs in the middle of a complex verb phrase. In the following text piece (5), by contrast, where the Akie elders recall their first meeting with two German linguists who visited them in 2013, the same discourse marker hḿ appears utterance-initial and also twice at the end of the utterance, interrupted by another discourse marker (icháide).
35 Since most discourse markers of Akie are etymologically opaque, feature (2e) is not applicable to them and will not be considered below.
(5) hḿ a kéé táá ko pa ko ng’âm DM and RP still.be.doing NAR go.P NAR receive akiê chaa hḿ icháide hḿ.
Akie.N D.PR.PL DM DM DM
‘And they (the white people) went and the Akie welcomed them, so be it.’ (1/55) We observed above that the definition in (2) is prototypical rather than based on necessary and sufficient criteria. What this means is that a given feature of the ones listed in (2) is likely to but need not be present in a given case. This applies most of all to prosody (2b): In fluent speech, theticals may lose their prosodic distinctiveness, being integrated in the intonation contour of a larger unit of Sentence Grammar. This applies in particular to phonetically short (monosyllabic) theticals, such as the discourse marker í in (4), which is always treated as a suffix-like prosodic appendix of the preceding word, separated from the latter neither by a pause nor by intonational features.
Providing a comprehensive structure of Thetical Grammar in Akie is a task for the future; we can do here no more other than presenting an outline of it by way of illustration. To this end, we will be restricted to four of the six components listed in (3), namely speaker-hearer interaction (4.2), attitudes of the speaker (4.3), text organization (4.4), and discourse setting (4.5), which account for most of the functions of theticals.
Each of these components will be treated separately, even if many theticals are notoriously “polysemous” and their meanings may simultaneously activate two or even more of these components.
Due to its anchoring in the situation of discourse, Thetical Grammar aims at understanding language use as it is embedded in the society and culture of its speakers. To this extent, it relates to the rich work written in the tradition of linguistic anthropology, anthropological linguistics, and in particular of the ethnography of speaking as established by Hymes (1962). But the perspective of Thetical Grammar is a linguistic one, that is, one that aims at an extended view of grammar, focusing on linguistic phenomena that were either described as marginal or ignored altogether in most grammatical accounts. And this also means that Thetical Grammar is restricted to the analysis of linguistic resources, that is, paralinguistic communication is not within its scope.