Cooptation (grammar)

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Cooptation is a cognitive-communicative operation whereby a piece of text, such as a clause, a phrase, a word, or any other unit, is inserted in a sentence. In the framework of Discourse Grammar, cooptation is understood as leading to the transfer of linguistic material from the domain of Sentence Grammar to that of Thetical Grammar. [1] [2]

Discourse Grammar (DG) is a grammatical framework that grew out of the analysis of spoken and written linguistic discourse on the one hand, and of work on parenthetical expressions, including Simon C. Dik's study of extra-clausal constituents, on the other. Initiated by Gunther Kaltenböck, Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva, the framework is based on the distinction between two organizing principles of grammar where one concerns the structure of sentences and the other the linguistic organization beyond the sentence.

Contents

An example

The operation of cooptation can be illustrated with the following utterance taken from the British component of the International Corpus of English:. [3]

In this example, the utterance is obviously composed of two pieces: On the one hand, there is the well-formed and self-contained sentence What I’ve done here is try and limit the time taken on this item by putting it in writing, which provides the host construction. On the other hand, there is the piece I hope you don’t entirely disapprove, which is inserted in the host construction but neither syntactically nor semantically, nor prosodically integrated in the host construction, and rather than contributing to the meaning of the sentence, it relates to the situation of discourse. Such inserts are commonly known as parentheticals or extra-clausal constituents. [4] [5] In the framework of Discourse Grammar they are referred to as theticals, and cooptation is the operation that enables speakers to transfer them from one domain of grammar to the other, and to place them in various slots of the host construction. [1] [6] [7]

Principles and concepts

Sentence Grammar is organized in terms of propositional concepts and clauses and their combination while Thetical Grammar concerns the linguistic discourse beyond the sentence. While being in principle separate domains, the two interact in various ways in organizing linguistic discourse, and the main way of interaction is via cooptation. [8] Cooptation is fully productive, that is, it can be employed by speakers any time to structure speech. As long as the hearer can be expected to construct a reasonable hypothesis on the relevance of the coopted unit to the utterance concerned there are few restrictions on what form the coopted unit may take and where it can be placed in its host construction. [9] [10]

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Thetical grammar forms one of the two domains of discourse grammar, the other domain being sentence grammar. The building blocks of thetical grammar are theticals, that is, linguistic expressions which are interpolated in, or juxtaposed to, clauses or sentences but syntactically, semantically and, typically, prosodically independent from theses structures. The two domains are associated with contrasting principles of designing texts: Whereas sentence grammar is essentially restricted to the structure of sentences in a propositional format, thetical grammar concerns the overall contours of discourse beyond the sentence, thereby being responsible for a higher level of discourse production.

References

  1. 1 2 Kaltenböck, Gunther, Bernd Heine, and Tania Kuteva. 2011. On thetical grammar. Studies in Language 35, 4: 848-893.
  2. ↑ Heine, Bernd, Gunther Kaltenböck, Tania Kuteva, and Haiping Long. 2013. An outline of discourse grammar. In Shannon Bischoff and Carmen Jany (eds.), Functional Approaches to Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 175-233.
  3. ↑ Nelson, Gerald, Sean Wallis, and Bas Aarts. 2002. Exploring Natural Language. Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  4. ↑ Dehé, Nicole and Yordanka Kavalova. 2007. Parentheticals. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
  5. ↑ Dik, Simon C. 1997. The Theory of Functional Grammar, Part 2: Complex and Derived Constructions. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
  6. ↑ Heine, Bernd. 2013. On discourse markers: Grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, or something else? Linguistics 51, 6: 1205-1247.
  7. ↑ Heine, Bernd, Gunther Kaltenböck, and Tania Kuteva. Forthcoming. On insubordination and cooptation. In Nicholas Evans and Honoré Watanabe (eds.), Dynamics of Insubordination. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
  8. ↑ Kaltenböck, Gunther and Bernd Heine. 2014. Sentence grammar vs. thetical grammar: two competing domains. In Brian MacWhinney, Andrej Malchukov, and Edith Moravcsik (eds.), Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 348-363.
  9. ↑ Kavalova, Yordanka. 2007. And-parenthetical clauses. In Dehé, Nicole and Yordanka Kavalova 2007a. Parentheticals. (Linguistics Today, 106.) Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins. Pp. 145-72.
  10. ↑ Dehé, Nicole. 2014. Parentheticals in Spoken English: The Syntax-Prosody Relation. (Studies in English Language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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