TY - CHAP

T1 - To Link or Not to Link?

T2 - Variation in Using Discourse Markers in Hindi

AU - Kostina, Ekaterina

N1 - Kostina, Ekaterina: To Link or Not to Link? , in: Oranskaia, Tatiana und Abbi, Anvita (Hrsg.): The Heart of Change - Issues on Variation in Hindi, Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2022. https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.919.c12622

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - The paper attempts to understand some specific features and variability of discourse markers in Hindi through a linguistic experiment. Adopting the approach suggested by Vadim Kasevič (2014) to Hindi data, I will distinguish the following discourse markers (DMs): bhī ‘also’, ‘even’ and lekin/par ‘but’ as connectives, hī ‘only’, ‘particularly’, ‘just’, ‘exactly’ and to ‘indeed’, ‘sure’ as emphatic particles, and to ‘but’, ‘as for’ as the contrastive topic marker. Interjections, modal and parenthetical words, often treated in the literature as DMs, will not be discussed here.In the experiment, the respondents received a fragment of a short story in Hindi with the DMs extracted. The hypothesis was that the absence of DMs might stimulate the native speakers to reconstruct them. At the same time, substantial variability in reconstruction was also expected. The results demonstrated that Hindi DMs were highly variable in terms of their frequency, location, and selection from the set of lexical items, occasionally resulting in a change to the initial message or text structuring.We may conclude that although the DMs are not autosemantic words, their role is not that of mere fillers and they truly provide text integrity and coherence.

AB - The paper attempts to understand some specific features and variability of discourse markers in Hindi through a linguistic experiment. Adopting the approach suggested by Vadim Kasevič (2014) to Hindi data, I will distinguish the following discourse markers (DMs): bhī ‘also’, ‘even’ and lekin/par ‘but’ as connectives, hī ‘only’, ‘particularly’, ‘just’, ‘exactly’ and to ‘indeed’, ‘sure’ as emphatic particles, and to ‘but’, ‘as for’ as the contrastive topic marker. Interjections, modal and parenthetical words, often treated in the literature as DMs, will not be discussed here.In the experiment, the respondents received a fragment of a short story in Hindi with the DMs extracted. The hypothesis was that the absence of DMs might stimulate the native speakers to reconstruct them. At the same time, substantial variability in reconstruction was also expected. The results demonstrated that Hindi DMs were highly variable in terms of their frequency, location, and selection from the set of lexical items, occasionally resulting in a change to the initial message or text structuring.We may conclude that although the DMs are not autosemantic words, their role is not that of mere fillers and they truly provide text integrity and coherence.

KW - discourse markers

KW - text coherence

KW - Hindi

KW - linguistic experiment

KW - variability

U2 - https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.919

DO - https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.919

M3 - Article in an anthology

SN - 978-3-948791-26-1

SP - 155

EP - 185

BT - The Heart of Change

A2 - Abbi, Anvita

A2 - Oranskaia, Tatiana

PB - Heidelberg University

CY - Heidelberg

ER -