Daniël Van Olmen & Jolanta Šinkūnienė (eds.), Pragmatic markers and peripheries (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2021. Pp. 452.

Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries is the result of the collaboration between participants of a 2019 workshop on pragmatic markers and clause peripheries organized by Daniël Van Olmen and Jolanta Šinkūnienė in Leipzig ¹. The volume pays special attention to a heated debate in the past decade: the relation between pragmatic markers (PMs) and the left and right peripheries. Centering on some controversial issues about this relation, for instance, the notion of the periphery, the functional differences of PMs in the left periphery (LP) compared with the right periphery (RP), and the left-to-right movement tendency of PMs, etc., this book provides new insights on the proper resolution of such issues by investigating empirically a variety of PMs in different languages.

In the Introduction, the editors make clear the definition and delimitation of the term pragmatic markers. Based on Fraser’s view, they adopt an inclusive definition of PMs as an umbrella term. Then, they summarize how the following chapters contribute to the current debates on some influential hypotheses. The fifteen chapters following the Introduction are divided into five thematic parts.

Part I deals with the concept of the periphery. Faced with the challenge of ‘the diverse types of entity vis-à-vis which the periphery can be defined’ (3), in Chapter 1, ‘Discourse markers at the peripheries of syntax, intonation and turns: Towards a cognitive-functional unit of segmentation’, Degand and Crible investigate empirically the distribution of French discourse marker (DM) functions at clause, intonation, and turn peripheries to identify which unit is most functionally and cognitively motivated. They reveal that clauses as a unit of segmentation can best account for the functional spectrum of DMs, whereas turn is not fine-grained enough, and intonations perform other functions not captured in the positional distribution of PMs. Chapter 2, ‘Dutch pragmatic markers in the left periphery’, by Van der Wouden and Foolen explores the positions for Dutch LP PMs and their functions in more detail. The corpus-based study localizes four positions for LP PMs: P1, post-P1, pre-P2, and post-P2, and confirms the position-function correlation. It demonstrates that ‘a naïve implementation of clause periphery fails to capture everything that happens at the left end of the clause/sentence’ (5).

Part II, ‘Left and right periphery on their own’, deals with a single periphery. Chapter 3, ‘Presentation followed by negotiation: Final pragmatic particle sequencing in Ainu’, reveals the sequences of Ainu RP pragmatic particles: the particles of unilateral presentation followed by those of bilateral negotiation, which is motivated by the speech event conception and has cross-linguistic similarity to that of some other East Asian languages. Chapter 4, ‘Another “look!”: The Latvian particle lūk in parliamentary discourse’, elaborates on the use of Latvian particle lūk in units of syntax, discourse, and prosody based on parliamentary discourse. It shows that the functions of lūk mainly lie in textual deixis, discourse organization, and viewpoint marking. By comparing the use of lūk with that of its equivalents in various European languages, it suggests that they share most of the functions, but lūk is different in appearing only turn-medially and lacking dialogic functions.

Part III, ‘Left versus right periphery’, compares the LP and RP PMs. According to the Subjectivity Intersubjectivity Peripheries Hypothesis (SIPH), expressions at the left periphery are likely to be subjective, and those at the right periphery intersubjective (Beeching et al. 2009). This hypothesis has been extended by Beeching and Detges (2014: 11) to include the functions in Table 1. However, SIPH is not followed by all PMs and ‘the hypothesized correlation between subjectivity and LP, intersubjectivity and RP is robust, but not deterministic’ (Traugott 2012:8). Part III contributes some case studies to this debate, providing both positive and negative evidence for the hypothesis in Table 1.

Table 1 Hypothesized usages of linguistic items on the left and right periphery

Chapter 5, ‘Verb-based discourse markers in Italian: Guarda, vedi, guarda te, vedi te,’ analyzes the relation between position and function of four Italian verb-based DMs based on a grammaticality judgement task. It shows that all the functions of guarda(te)/vedi(te) can appear in the LP, while their phatic and adversative functions are found in both peripheries, which challenges a clear-cut dichotomy between functions realized only in the LP or RP. Chapter 6, ‘Interactions between distribution and functional uses in Italian adversative pragmatic markers: A corpus-based and multilevel approach’, adopts a corpus-based and multilevel perspective to explore the interaction between the distribution and functions of Italian adversative PMs ma and però. While the findings are broadly consistent with Table 1, the author claims that the polyfunctionality of these markers is ‘not only related to their distribution but also to their information status and to contextual factors’ (195). Chapter 7, ‘The Lithuanian focus particles net “even” and tik “only” and clause peripheries’, discusses the potential of Lithuanian focus particles net and tik to occur in the LP and RP and their functional variation. It shows that they occur in both peripheries to fulfill discourse-structuring and illocutionary force-modifying functions. Their (inter)subjective functions in both peripheries reveal that SIPH is only a tendency. Chapter 8, ‘Žinai “you know” in Lithuanian discourse: Distributional features and functional profile’, provides a corpus-based case study of the Lithuanian PM žinai. It is found that the functions of žinai correlate with its position, with the LP žinai introducing new information and RP žinai seeking understanding or agreement, which is largely in line with Table 1. Chapter 9, ‘Second person parentheticals of unintentional visual perception in British English’, compares the positions and functions of second-person parenthetical markers see and (do) you see by using the British National Corpus. It shows that the LP (e.g. attention-getting) and RP (e.g. turn-yielding) uses of these markers confirm some of the hypothesized position-function association. Yet, the findings, for instance, that the markers can convey the subjective sense of triumph in both the LP and RP, challenge the supposed correlation. Chapter 10, ‘Emoji as graphic discourse markers: Functional and positional associations in German WhatsApp^® messages’, is devoted to the periphery uses of some commonly used emojis in German WhatsApp messages. A corpus-linguistic investigation and an experiment are conducted. It shows that the overall advantage for a subjective reading becomes smaller for the RP emoji than the LP emoji, and three patterns for different groups of emoji are proposed, indicating a dominance continuum in terms of (inter)subjective meanings and LP- and RP-positions. This study on graphic DMs offers novel evidence for SIPH. However, whether emoji is one type of DM is still open to debate, leading us to rethink where the boundaries of DMs are.

Part IV, ‘Peripheries across time’, turns to diachronic issues. Chapters 11, ‘Functional asymmetry and left-to-right movement: Speaking of peripheries’, and 13, ‘Pragmatic markers at the periphery and discourse prominence: The case of English of course’, offer counterexamples to the left-to-right movement hypothesis arising from Traugott & Dasher (2002). The hypothesis holds that the PMs develop in the LP with subjective functions before moving to the RP with intersubjective functions. Chapter 11 explores the development of the DM uses of speaking of from 1990 to 2015 by using the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The diachronic analysis does not reveal any significant changes in the peripheral preferences over different functions or an intersubjectification process. Chapter 13 looks at the trajectory of of course from the prepositional phrase to the PM and discusses how its position interacts with discourse prominence through the Old Bailey Corpus of legal proceedings and the Spoken British National Corpus. It shows that of course can appear in all positions, especially the LP and the RP, and its positional distribution has hardly changed from 1730 to now. In addition to these chapters casting doubt on the left-to-right movement hypothesis, Chapter 12, ‘The diachronic origin of English I mean and German ich meine’, traces back the diachronic origin of two similar PMs, the English I mean and German ich meine, by using the earliest written texts from corpora and dictionaries. The historical data provide no evidence for the matrix clause ‘I mean /ich meine + that-clause’ to be the origin of I mean/ich meine. Rather, it explains the development of I mean /ich meine as a process of constructionalization rather than grammaticalization.

Part V, ‘Peripheries across languages’, adopts a contrastive perspective. Based on a translation study, Chapter 14, ‘The Norwegian tag da in comparison to English then’, demonstrates that the Norwegian tag da and English then are not equivalent. Then, a pragmatic analysis is conducted distinguishing two tags, da ₁ and da ₂, showing that the functions of then only partially overlap with da ₁. It holds that the differences between these two tags may be partly attributed to the productive right-dislocation operation in Norwegian. The final chapter compares the RP uses of two sets of English, Spanish, and Lithuanian PMs based on three spoken corpora. The data show that in all three languages, PMs with temporal origin appear more in the RP than PMs of evidential origin, and the markers contribute more to speaker-hearer interaction and facework in the RP than the LP. The authors claim that the higher frequency of RP PMs correlates with their semantic domains and their distribution in speech acts.

Overall, the most prominent strength of this volume is the richness of data from an impressively wide range of languages and on various types of PMs. As well as English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and Norwegian, some underresearched languages, such as Ainu, Lithuanian, and Latvian, are involved in the book. The linguistic items investigated range from verbal PMs (such as adverbs ‘of course’, focus particles ‘even’, conjunction ‘but’, clause ‘I mean’) to graphic PMs (emoji). This substantial body of data not only provides sufficient evidence to support and challenge some influential theories such as SIPH and the left-to-right movement hypothesis in different ways, but also helps readers better understand the pragmatic contribution of periphery PMs and their positional-functional association.

Another noteworthy contribution lies in its empirical methodologies and integrated approaches. This volume provides step-by-step methodological guidance on how to employ corpus data (all except Chapter 5) or experimentally verified data (Chapters 5 and 10) to reveal the relation between the PMs and peripheries. Moreover, it combines a large body of studies adopting synchronic (Parts I–III), diachronic (Part IV), and comparative (Part V) approaches to address controversial issues related with the PMs and peripheries.

Despite the merits listed above, this volume has a few shortcomings. Firstly, the balance of data should have been taken into account. Although a wide variety of languages are covered, the languages of Asia have only one representative (Ainu). To my knowledge, a few studies investigating Japanese and Chinese periphery PMs (Onodera 2014, Chen 2018) have provided negative evidence for SIPH and left-to-right movement hypothesis. Secondly, the readers who read in full may be confronted with certain degree of redundancy, since some hypotheses like SIPH are repeated by different chapters.

There is one aspect where a future edition could be improved. While the role of prosody in interaction is uncontestable (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018) and the differences in prosody correlate with PM functions at LP and RP (Sohn & Kim 2014), prosody does not receive the attention it deserves, being only occasionally explored in Chapters 1, 4, and 6. We believe that more insights will be achieved if the future edition may consider taking prosody more into account.

All in all, this instructive book offers detailed methodological guidance, considerable cross-linguistic data, plus thorough analysis from synchronic, diachronic, and contrastive perspectives, which shed light on the relationship between the PMs and the peripheries. It will no doubt benefit readers interested in exploring periphery PMs from the perspectives of pragmatics, interactional linguistics, corpus linguistics, and beyond.