Swedish modal particles as markers of engagement: Evidence from distribution and frequency

Abstract

The paper analyses the Swedish modal particles ju and väl as markers of engagement. This analysis finds support in the distribution and frequency of ju and väl in a corpus of spoken Swedish along with an examination of existing accounts concerning the semantics of the investigated forms. Engagement encodes differences in the distribution of knowledge and/or attention between the speaker and the addressee, where the basic semantic contrast consists of the speaker asserting an assumption about the addressee’s knowledge of/attention to an event as either shared, or non-shared with the speaker. Ju and väl are paradigmatically contrastive in signaling shared access to an event from the point of view of the speaker, or the addressee: ju signals shared access to an event and at the same time places the epistemic authority with the speaker, and väl signals shared access to an event, placing the epistemic authority with the addressee. Analytical support for ju and väl as markers of engagement comes from the distribution of both forms with first person (jag), second person (du), and generic (man) subject pronouns.

Egophoricity and Perspective: A View From Spoken Swedish

“…The private character of tro does not permit genericity to be a prominent feature of utterances containing this verb (cf. Bergqvist, 2020). In fact, all mental predicates are infrequent with man, but to varying degrees.…”

“…Dahl tagged his subcorpus of 65,000 words in order to be able to classify all arguments and predicates therein, whereas the full word corpus with half a million words used in the present investigation is not tagged and therefore does not permit a comparable precision search for relevant forms. The choice to use the "Conversations in Gothenburg" corpus was motivated not only by the ease of accessibility and previous familiarity but also by the naturalistic character of the spoken language data (see also Bergqvist, 2020).…”

“…Gast, 2008, p. 5). Bergqvist (2020) picks up on the pragmatic analysis of ju and väl as signaling the epistemic authority of the speaker (ju) and the addressee (väl) in marking a proposition that is regarded as accessible to both speech-act participants (i.e., shared access/knowledge). The formal and distributional characteristics of ju and väl motivate an analysis of these forms as a closed paradigm within the (slightly) larger group of modal particles, which also includes nog and nu (see Bergqvist, 2020;cf.…”

“…This means that speakers explicitly mention themselves more often than their addressees and that assertions containing the modal particle ju align with this predominance of speaker perspective. Bergqvist (2020) argues that ju encodes shared access to events along with the epistemic authority of the speaker, and väl encodes shared access and the epistemic authority of the addressee. The allocation of epistemic authority to reside with the addressee is predominantly with reference to events that involve the addressee as an actor, or affected party.…”

“…An original contribution of the present paper lies in demonstrating the distribution and frequency of epistemic forms (i.e., modal particles and mental verbs) as dependent on perspectivizing, indexical forms like egophoric pronouns and sentence-type distinctions (see section Perspectivizing Constructs and Their Distribution, below). Such patterns of distribution and frequency are analyzed from the functionality and meaning of the investigated forms, as portrayed in the literature (see Dahl, 2000;Bergqvist, 2020). The presentation of the results is qualitatively formulated and void of any advanced statistical modeling since the corpus data and the ensuing analysis must be regarded as explorative and preliminary with respect to the role of the observed patterns for a more detailed analysis of the studied forms.…”