On the semantic and pragmatic properties of discourse markers in different varieties:

taha in Standard and Cypriot Greek

Stavroula Tsiplakou¹ & Costas Papapetrou²

Open University of Cyprus^{1, 2}

The aim of this paper is to examine and compare the semantic and pragmatic properties of the Standard Greek and Cypriot Greek particle taha (/táxa/, ‘supposedly’ / ‘allegedly’) and to account for the differences in the properties of taha and its uses in the two varieties of Greek in question, implementing insights from relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995).

The evidential / hearsay function of taha is shared by Standard and Cypriot Greek:

(1) en/ine taxa epitiçimenos

‘Supposedly / allegedly he is successful’

Cypriot Greek taha has an array of additional functions (Papapetrou 2017; Tsiplakou & Papapetrou, forthc.):

(2) pirazo tin tʃe taxa en mu mila tora

‘I keep teasing her and taha she’s not speaking to me now’

In (2) taha does not suggest hearsay, not does it cast doubt on the veridicality of the second proposition; the person mentioned is indeed not talking to the speaker and the speaker obviously has direct knowledge of the fact.

There is some evidence that in the last decade or so a new taha has emerged in the informal speech of adolescents:

(3) taxa ciria en eθcavasa

‘Miss, I haven’t, like, done my homework’

At first blush, it would appear that young taha is a mere filler, as like in English is often claimed to be, and that it is used as a hedge (see, e.g., Andersen 2001; Jucker & Smith 1998).

To account for the data, we capitalize on the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning (Blakemore 2001; Wilson 2016) and the idea that pragmatic markers such as the evidential in question may contribute to truth-conditional content but they also contribute to the construction of higher-order explicatures, such as propositional attitudes (cf. Unger 2012). Ifantidou (2001) has shown convincingly that the evidential / hearsay function of Standard Greek taha can be best captured by assuming that it carries procedural meaning, marking the use of the proposition in its scope as interpretive / attributive / metarepresentational; weakened speaker commitment and consequently a dissociative attitude towards the truth of the proposition in the scope of taha arises as an implicature of the metarepresentational use of the proposition. We take this analysis on board and we argue that the dialectal differences between the two varieties ultimately boil down to whether taha expresses speaker attitudes towards what is being said or towards what is being implicated, the latter being the case with Cypriot Greek taha in examples such as (2) (cf. Blass 1990; Tsiplakou 2005). We also argue that the use of taha as a filler by younger Cypriot speakers does not fall outside the continuum of the expected uses of taha, but can also be accounted for on the basis of the assumption that tahamarks the use of the proposition in its scope as metarepresentational, thereby helping infer a propositional attitude of non-commitment to the associated content, which may make it suitable as a hedging device mitigating potentially face-threatening acts. This study can be seen as an exploration of the nature of pragmatic variation among related geographical varieties and the varieties and speech-styles of different age groups, as well as of the theoretical underpinnings that allow us to best describe and interpret aspects of such variation.

References

Andersen, G. 2001. Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Blakemore, D. 2002. Relevance and linguistic meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blass, R. 1990. Relevance relations in discourse. A study with special reference to Sissala. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ifantidou, E. 2001. Evidentials and relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Papapetrou, C. 2017. The Cypriot Greek particle taha. M.A. Dissertation, Open University of Cyprus.

Sperber, D. & D. Wilson. 1986. Relevance: communication and cognition. 2^nd ed. 1995. Oxford: Blackwell.


Tsiplakou, S. 2005. The Greek connective ke: towards a unitary radical pragmatic account. In: D. Hall, J. Laury, M. Pak, M. Ravindranath, T. Scheffler, C. Valdes, Z. Song, S. Wagner & J. D. Wright (eds.), Proceedings of the 28^th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, 293–304. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Tsiplakou, S. & C. Papapetrou. Forthc. Two dialects, one particle- taha? Journal of Pragmatics.

Unger, C. 2012. Procedural semantics, metarepresentation, and some particles in Behdini Kurdish. Lingua 122, 1613-1635.


Wilson, D. 2016. Reassessing the conceptual–procedural distinction. Lingua 175: 5–19.