Book review

Discourse Markers In Colombian Spanish

Catherine E. Travis. 2005. Discourse Markers In Colombian Spanish: A Study In Polysemy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Reviewed by Émilie Devriendt, U.F.R. des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université du Sud Toulon Var.

This book presents a corpus-based study of four discourse markers (DM) commonly used in conversational Colombian Spanish (bueno, o sea, entonces, pues).

It aims at demonstrating that a semantic approach of DM can be fruitful, thus contradicting previous analyses of DM as "fillers" which considered their multifunctionality as a major obstacle to their definitions. While determining and explicating the meanings of the four chosen markers, the author wishes to show "that each plays an important textual role in discourse organization, as well as an interactional role in speaker-hearer negotiation" (2). These definitions, as "semantic account[s] of the multifunctional nature of discourse markers", are elaborated following the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach (NSM) developed by Wierzbicka and colleagues. The applicability of this cognitive theory to discourse data proves to be one of the book's challenges, as will be explained below. The issue of DM polysemy is addressed through the search for a "semantic core" (NSM's "partial semantic invariant") shared by all meanings of the polysemous markers, such a semantic core being clearly differentiated from what is derived from the marker context of use and what is derived from the functions it plays. The challenge pointed out here is thus to differentiate DM semantic features from their pragmatic ones.

One of the most insightful achievements of this book is actually related to this particular methodological issue, being the key to a reliable semantic study. Through her detailed analysis of the DM mentioned above, Travis demonstrates what the literature had often overlooked as far as DM multifunctionality is concerned: their different pragmatic functions do not systematically represent distinct meanings. Though the structure of the four chapters dedicated to the DM analysis could lead the reader to think otherwise - each ends with a list of all functions identified in the corpus - the semantic definitions proposed throughout each chapter explicitly overlap with these pragmatic functions. Travis thus makes it straightforward that her semantic analyses can account for different uses of the DM corresponding to various contexts. Her study in polysemy undoubtedly proves the applicability of a semantic approach to discourse markers.

Although the cogent definitions presented in the book make it clear that the NSM approach is of great methodological value when applied to discourse data, it should be emphasized that Travis' work also relies on various other analytical tools, as her theoretical framework is not limited to NSM. This aspect of her work illustrates the vitality of discourse studies and related pragmatic approaches. It reaffirms the central part semantics has to play in discourse-based analysis. For example, the use of prosodic features brings a lot to her formal description of the DM, as does her use of Conversation Analysis to their functional description, or her comments on Grammaticalization, which elucidate the diachronic development of DM semantic features. From a methodological point of view, the usefulness of quantitative data, which is provided in each chapter, should also be pointed out: Travis' comments make us aware of what could appear to be corpus-biased results, encouraging further comparisons with other data.

From these comments regarding methodology and theory it should follow that this work is also very well documented, as a look at the reference section confirms. One major reference to add, however, (among other books cited in French), would be Dostie (2004), which is closely related to Travis' approach. Dostie's book indeed presents a semantic analysis of a set of DM in Canadian French with reference to the NSM approach (although no reference is made to "semantic primes"). Like Travis, she demonstrates that DM can be thoroughly defined and, probably more explicitly, she shows that their shared semantic features tend to make them a rather homogenous category. In fact, it appears that a more systematic comparison between markers in Travis' work could have led the author to emphasize this particular issue, which is dealt with ocasionally throughout the chapters. Nevertheless, the results of these two closely related studies make one of Travis' suggestion very insightful: that cross-linguistic comparisons are to reveal invariant features shared by DM as a class. Such a research program is obviously of great interest to Cognitive Linguistics, and Travis' monograph appears to be a major contribution to it.

Reference

Dostie, Gaétane. 2004. Pragmaticalisation et marqueurs discursifs. Analyse sémantique et traitement lexicographique. Bruxelles: De Boeck-Duculot.

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