The Grammar of the Utterance How to Do Things with Ibero-Romance

by Corr, Alice

• ISBN13: 9780198856597
• ISBN10: 0198856598
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2022-05-22
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with i) vocatives, interjections, and particles; and ii) illocutionary complementizers, items that look like subordinators but behave differently. Alice Corr argues that the behaviour of these conversation-oriented items provides insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. The approach identifies the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer - i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside - and the empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the configurational architecture of grammar also configures the architecture of the mind. The book thus builds on existing work on the syntax of discourse not only by contributing new empirical and theoretical insights, but also by pursuing explanatory adequacy via a so-called 'un-Cartesian' grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalizes the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. Drawing on a wealth of naturalistic data from social media and online corpora, augmented by elicited introspective judgements, The Grammar of the Utterance offers new insights into the colloquial grammar and morphosyntactic variation of (Ibero-)Romance, and showcases the utility of comparative work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organization of grammar.

Author Biography

Alice Corr, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham

Alice Corr is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, where she specializes in the comparative morphosyntax, dialectology, and history of the Romance languages. She was previously Drapers' Company Research Fellow at Pembroke College, and Lumley Bye-Fellow
in Linguistics at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. Focusing on non-standard synchronic and historical variation in varieties originating in the (Western) Iberian Peninsula, her research seeks to reconcile theoretical and empirical work in this area with conceptual insight drawn from
outside conventional disciplinary boundaries. She is co-editor, with Anna Pineda, of Theoretical Linguistics in the Pre-University Classroom (OUP, forthcoming).

Table of Contents

General preface
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. A grammar for the utterance
Part I: The internal and external syntax of the utterance
3. Vocatives
4. Interjections and particles
5. Doing things with utterance grammar
Part II: Illocutionary complementizer constructions
6. The expression of affect
7. Utterances without commitment
8. The grammar of dialogue
9. Conclusions
References
Index