文档介绍：The Discourse Particle well and its Equivalents in Swedish and Dutch
Karin Aijmer and Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen
Abstract
The aim of the article is to make a contribution to the description of the meaning and functions of well by looking at its translations into Swedish and Dutch. In order to study well cross-linguistically we have used electronic translation corpora. Our account of well is based on Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia as it is integrated within the systems of modality and evidentiality (White 1999, 2000). parison is made with earlier proposals by Carlson (1984), Bolinger (1989), Jucker (1993), Smith and Jucker (2000), and Schourup(2001). Both in Swedish and in Dutch we found a wide range of translations, testifying to the uses of well as a connective and as an interpersonal marker. We want to claim that these different uses can be explained from the general heteroglossic function that well fulfils. The translations also show that positive appraisal is still part of the meaning of well, though in some cases this meaning aspect is more salient than in others.
1. Introduction
Discourse particles are small words which do not contribute to the propositional content of the utterance which they modify. They are frequent in conversation, where they express the speaker's atttitudes to the addressee, negotiate background assumptions, express emotions and contribute to coherence (for an investigation of the attitudinal functions of discourse particles in different languages see Andersen and Fretheim 2000).
Well is particularly frequent in English conversation1 It is among the 100 most frequent words in the conversational part of the London-Lund Corpus, where it occupies rank 14 (Svartvik 1990: 66)
and has probably attracted more attention than any other discourse particle in English. It has been studied from many different perspectives (. Lakoff 1973; Halliday and Hasan 1976; Wierzbicka 1976; Svartvik 1980; Carlson 1984; Schiffrin 1987; Watts 198