Papers by Scott A Schwenter
Journal of Pragmatics, 2025
English wait and Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese espera/pera/peraí 'wait (there)' are derived fr... more English wait and Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese espera/pera/peraí 'wait (there)' are derived from imperatives that signal physical waiting. Using examples from tweets, text messages, and spoken interactions, we offer an exploratory investigation of the metadiscursive functions of these wait-forms as discourse markers that signal the need to pause and adjust interlocutors' mental discourse models of the common ground (CG) before proceeding. We show that wait-forms appear in dialogues and monologues, to signal misalignment with an interlocutor or with one's own expectations, and can be triggered by both linguistic and non-linguistic material in the CG or a speaker's own mental model. Wait-forms introduce expressions of surprisal, challenge presuppositions, refer back to unresolved discursive material, and convey sarcasm-all of which share the core pragmatic effect of initiating repair of a perceived misalignment in speakers' mental models of the ongoing discourse. Tests of pragmatic function show that these wait-forms are constrained to refer to content assumed to be part of the CG (Wait, didn't you hear the news?) and that their removal results in loss of an important pragmatic cue that relates the upcoming modification to existing CG content. Our analysis contributes to the body of pragmatic-typological literature on the crosslinguistic uniformity of discursive repair strategies. It goes beyond this research, however, in highlighting the role that discourse markers can play in CG management in dialogues, and furthermore demonstrating their capacity to indicate self-initiated misalignment of a speaker's mental model in monologues, despite the origins of these forms as addresseeoriented imperatives.
Many languages have two types of adversative sentence conjunctions (e.g. Spanish, German). These ... more Many languages have two types of adversative sentence conjunctions (e.g. Spanish, German). These are normally referred to as PA and SN conjunctions. However, while PA conjunctions can be used as discourse markers (DMs) in dialogal discourse, SN conjunctions such as those found in Spanish and German cannot be used in dialogues. Thus the PA}SN distinction does not extend fully to the dialogal realm. Using data from another Spanish DM, I argue that the PA}SN distinction can be extended beyond the monologal realm of sentence conjunction to the realm of adversative discourse markers employed in dialogal discourse. The findings have implications for the question of functional equivalence across different types of discourse.
TBA, 2025
English wait and Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese espera/pera/peraí 'wait (there),' are derived f... more English wait and Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese espera/pera/peraí 'wait (there),' are derived from imperatives that signal physical waiting. Using examples from tweets, text messages, and spoken interactions, we investigate the metadiscursive functions of these waitforms as discourse markers that signal the need to pause and repair interlocutors' mental discourse models of the common ground (CG) before proceeding. We show that wait-forms appear in dialogues and monologues, to signal misalignment with an interlocutor or with one's own expectations, and can be triggered by both linguistic and non-linguistic material in the CG or a speaker's own mental model. Wait-forms introduce expressions of surprisal, challenge presuppositions, refer back to unresolved discursive material, and convey sarcasm-all of which share the core pragmatic effect of initiating repair of a perceived misalignment in speakers' mental models of the ongoing discourse. Tests of pragmatic function show that these wait-forms are constrained to refer to content assumed to be part of the CG (Wait, didn't you hear the news?) and that their removal results in loss of an important pragmatic cue that relates the upcoming modification to existing CG content. Our analysis contributes to the body of pragmatic-typological literature on the crosslinguistic uniformity of discursive repair strategies. It goes beyond this research, however, in highlighting the role that discourse markers can play in CG management in dialogues, and furthermore demonstrating their capacity to indicate self-initiated misalignment of a speaker's mental model in monologues, despite the origins of these forms as addresseeoriented imperatives.
To appear in a volume on Western Ibero-Romance languages, ed. by Manuel Delicado-Cantero, Fernando Tejedo-Herrero, and Patrícia Matos Amaral, 2025
Alternate ways of expressing sentential negation and variation among these expressions have been ... more Alternate ways of expressing sentential negation and variation among these expressions have been a well-known phenomenon ever since Jespersen's (1917) identification and description of a "negative cycle" in languages such as French and English. However, more in-depth, usage-based study of non-canonical forms of sentence negation has only exploded in the past 20 years or so, as researchers have dug deeper into the discourse-pragmatic motivations for choosing different ways to express sentential negation, negative polarity, negative concord, metalinguistic negation, etc. This chapter surveys some of the main research on this phenomenon in Western Ibero-Romance, with a focus on varieties (including Latin American varieties) of Spanish and Portuguese. The overarching goal is to encourage future research on the range of non-canonical forms and meanings expressed by languages in this part of the world.
Gradience and Contrast in 2SG Direct Object Pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese
We examine the alternation in Brazilian Portuguese 2SG DO pronoun expression between clitic te an... more We examine the alternation in Brazilian Portuguese 2SG DO pronoun expression between clitic te and tonic você using data from an online forced-choice survey completed by 146 native-speaker respondents. Results of mixed-effects logistic regressions show that dialectal subject pronoun preference (tu vs. você) and contrast both play a significant role in conditioning this choice. While te is preferred overall- a preference stronger among users of tu- você is the variant preferred in contrastive contexts. In double contrast contexts, where both the DO and the predicate are contrastive, você is even more strongly preferred. Thus contrast, despite its traditional treatment as binary, shows gradient effects on pronoun choice- the stronger the contrast, the greater the likelihood of você selection. Ultimately, we argue that what counts as the “unmarked” 2SG DO pronoun in BP is context-dependent and can only be determined taking type of contrast and speakers’ subject pronoun preferences into account.
Languages, May 28, 2024
We reanalyze the phenomenon of verbal (non)agreement with the 2SG tu in a megacorpus of Brazilian... more We reanalyze the phenomenon of verbal (non)agreement with the 2SG tu in a megacorpus of Brazilian Portuguese compiled from the web. Unlike previous research, which has analyzed sociolinguistic interview data and regional differences, we examine these data with a focus on the internal linguistic factors that constrain the variability. Our analysis of 4860 tokens of tu + verb reveals that non-agreement with the 3SG verb form is by far the most common pattern, 2SG agreement being relatively infrequent. Individual verb lexemes show highly distinct rates of (non)agreement. In addition, the specific tense/aspect/mood forms and main/auxiliary status are likewise significant factors affecting the variation. We conclude that future studies of this phenomenon should not ignore these internal linguistic factors. We situate our study within a group of other recent studies in Romance linguistics, which have found that individual verbal and constructional patterns can have diverse effects on morphosyntactic variation.
Languages, 2024
We reanalyze the phenomenon of verbal (non)agreement with 2SG tu in a megacorpus of Brazilian Por... more We reanalyze the phenomenon of verbal (non)agreement with 2SG tu in a megacorpus of Brazilian Portuguese compiled from the web. Unlike previous research, which has analyzed sociolinguistic interview data and regional differences, we examine these data with a focus on the internal linguistic factors that constrain the variability. Our analysis of 4860 tokens of tu + verb reveals that non-agreement with the 3SG verb form is by far the most common pattern, 2SG agreement being relatively infrequent. Individual verb lexemes show highly distinct rates of (non)agreement. In addition, the specific tense/aspect/mood forms and main/auxiliary status are likewise significant factors affecting the variation. We conclude that future studies of this phenomenon should not ignore these internal linguistic factors. We situate our study within a group of other recent studies in Romance linguistics which have found that individual verbal and constructional patterns can have diverse effects on morphosyntactic variation.
Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2024
Both Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) permit definite third-person null dir... more Both Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) permit definite third-person null direct objects (DOs) in anaphoric contexts, but differ with regard to the overt DO variant, with the former variety favoring tonic pronouns, the latter clitics. Previous research on language production has shown that the choice between variants in both varieties is constrained by semantic-pragmatic features such as animacy and specificity. We analyze speaker evaluation of these forms in EP and BP, using an experimental acceptability judgement task in which stimuli varied according to DO variant, animacy, and specificity. Data are drawn from the evaluative responses (n= 1752) of 215 Portuguese-speaking participants. Our results demonstrate that the null variant is evaluated most positively overall in both varieties. For EP and BP respectively, the clitic and tonic variants were evaluated most positively with animate specific referents. Our findings show that the patterns of variation previously found in production are reflected in gradient evaluations of anaphoric DOs in EP and BP. This provides support for the hypothesis that the potential shifts in Brazilian Portuguese regarding the transition from clitic to tonic direct object (DO) pronouns, suggest that the overt variant may have adopted characteristics similar to the clitic DOs in EP.
Chapter 4. Variable negative concord in Brazilian Portuguese
Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics
Propositional NPIs and the Scalar Nature of Polarity
From Words to Discourse, 2002
The study of polarity sensitivity has been one of the topics that has sparked greater interest in... more The study of polarity sensitivity has been one of the topics that has sparked greater interest in semantics/pragmatics in recent decades, its popularity due in large part to Klima's (1964) groundbreaking study of negation in English. The current state of the art on this topic most ...
Chapter 5. Null objects with and without bilingualism in the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking world
Multidisciplinary Approaches to Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone World, 2017
Chapter 1. Cross-dialectal productivity of the Spanish subjunctive in nominal clause complements
Variation and Evolution, 2020
Variable constraints on Spanish clitics
The Routledge Handbook of Variationist Approaches to Spanish, 2021
Chapter 3. Variable constraints on se lo(s) in Mexican Spanish
This article examines a case of syntactic variation that has not been previously noted and studie... more This article examines a case of syntactic variation that has not been previously noted and studied: the Spanish neuter clitic lo and the null direct object (DO) in two dialects of the language, Mexican and Peninsular. The phenomenon of null DOs (a.k.a. “object drop” or “null direct object pronominalization”) in Spanish has been traditionally considered to be highly restricted: null DOs are only permissible when the noun in question is non-referential and non-countable, i.e. mass nouns as in (1a) and bare plurals (1b) (Campos 1986; Clements 1994, 2006):
Journal of Pragmatics, 2019
We describe the system of confirming affirmative responses in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) on the ba... more We describe the system of confirming affirmative responses in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) on the basis of a corpus of natural spoken dialogues between interlocutors that share a high degree of familiarity. While the BP response system has been characterized as an echo system (Sadock and Zwicky 1985), the unmarked option being a verb that echoes the verb in the antecedent utterance, our analysis reveals that this characterization only applies to polar question antecedents. Using inferential statistical modeling, we demonstrate that the echoicity of a verbal response crucially depends on the speech act of the antecedent. The use of echoic responses is more likely for antecedents in which the speaker displays a low degree of commitment to the truth of the utterance than for antecedents with a high degree of commitment. Our analysis also reveals that it is necessary to distinguish two specific verbal response types e e 'is' and t a 'is' e from other verbal responses. Whereas e has been conventionalized as a multipurpose affirmation particle, t a is typically used to respond to orders or proposals, which is why e and t a are significantly less probable to be used as echoes than other verbal responses.
Insubordination, 2016
When I wrote a dissertation that focused (mainly) on the Spanish conditional marker si 'if' and i... more When I wrote a dissertation that focused (mainly) on the Spanish conditional marker si 'if' and its myriad contexts of use (Schwenter 1999), I didn't realize that I'd stumbled upon what (now years later) people would end up calling "insubordination" (e.g. Evans 2007; Verstraete et al. 2012). While there were already a number of papers on somewhat similar phenomena in other languages in the mid-to late-1990s the term "insubordination" was not being used in the widespread way it is now and there was certainly no vision for a symposium dedicated to the broader phenomenon. In this presentation I will trace the work that preceded mine on insubordination in Spanish conditionals, from the very old, yet extremely insightful comments, of the Venezuelan grammarian Andrés Bello in 1847 to the more modern precursor of my work (Almela Pérez 1985). I will also provide a general sketch of what my findings were on the use of subordinate-marked si clauses as independent declaratives, with an emphasis on their very particular discourse function in dialogue contexts. I will go on to examine in more depth the prosodic properties of "independent si-clauses" (Schwenter 1996), which were not a focus of my prior work. Finally, I will also explicate the consequences of the (supposed) insubordination process for the creation of a new adversative connective si identical in form but very different in function from the conditional marker (Schwenter 2000). The development of this adversative function has led to other, related uses of si that ultimately can be related back to the insubordination process. The more general question for discussion to emerge from my talk will be this: What happens to subordination markers once they begin to appear in contexts of insubordination?
Some Issues in Negation in Portuguese
The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics, 2016
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2008
A scalar propositional negative polarity item in Spanish
A Romance Perspective on Language Knowledge and Use, 2003
A scalar propositional negative polarity item in Spanish Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and Scott A. Sch... more A scalar propositional negative polarity item in Spanish Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and Scott A. Schwenter The Ohio State University . Introduction: Propositional NPIs In this paper, we study the semantics and pragmatics of a negative polarity item (NPI) in Spanish that has ...
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Papers by Scott A Schwenter