The semantics and pragmatics of Norwegian sentence-internal jo

Abstract

The paper proposes a refined analysis of the semantics and pragmatics of the Norwegian non-truth-conditional adverb jo ‘after all, of course’. According to the literature, jo indicates that the proposition is ‘given’ in some sense or other. Based on new empirical investigations, we argue that the Relevance-theoretic notion mutual manifestness (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995, Blass 2000) accurately captures the givenness aspect of jo, and we demonstrate through authentic examples what it means for a proposition to be mutually manifest. In addition to mutual manifestness, jo signals that the proposition is a premise for deriving a conclusion. The conclusion often – but not always – opposes someone’s view. We argue that the frequent opposition interpretations are a consequence of the nature of the procedures encoded by jo. In addition to clarifying the semantic and pragmatic properties of jo, the paper sheds light on the Relevance-theoretic notion procedural semantics as well as illustrating its usefulness in the study of pragmatic particles.

A Contrastive Approach to the Types of Hedging Strategies Used in Norwegian and English Informal Spoken Conversations

“…Since the 1980s, Norwegian hedging research has overlapped with research on pragmatic particles (e.g. Andvik, 1992;Hasund, 2003;Berthelin and Borthen, 2019). Such studies have been important in understanding how hedging is realised in Norwegian, but more research is needed to understand how hedging is expressed in Norwegian beyond the use of pragmatic particles.…”

“…Jo occurs frequently in informal spoken language (Berthelin and Borthen, 2019: 1) and has traditionally been considered to indicate some sort of 'givenness' . It can be interpreted as a way of establishing a mutual manifest between the speaker and the hearer (Berthelin and Borthen, 2019). The jo in example (15) may be interpreted as an assertion of common ground between the speakers.…”

“…Vold, 2006), or study hedging as one of several pragmatic functions of various pragmatic markers (e.g. Andvik, 1992;Berthelin and Borthen, 2019). In English, hedging has been studied from various perspectives and in various types of discourse (see Section 2 for further discussion); nevertheless, the majority of these studies are devoted to hedging in written discourse (e.g.…”

A cross-linguistic puzzle and its theoretical implications: Norwegianjo, Germandochandja, and an advertisement

“…Thus, a linguistic explanation appears to be called for, and in this paper, I explore a linguistic explanation. More specifically, I want to show how the procedural semantics that Berthelin & Borthen (submitted) develop for Norwegian jo , and the one that Unger (2016a, 2016b, 2016c) proposes for German ja and doch support a pragmatic-semantic account of the argumentational effects of these three particles. The quoted procedural semantic accounts are particularly suitable for this purpose because they are closely tied to the same cognitive pragmatic framework, that of relevance theory.…”

“…To make this argument, I will proceed as follows: in Section 3, I will discuss pertinent theoretical background assumptions on the relation between comprehension and argumentation in ostensive communication and the way in which procedural meaning affects these processes. Section 4 reviews the analyses of Norwegian jo (Berthelin & Borthen submitted) and German ja and do ch (Unger 2016b, 2016c, 2016a) that form the basis for the comparative considerations in Section 5.…”