The Yup’ik language lays claim to the world’s largest demonstrative inventory with 32 demonstrative reflexes (Miyaoka, 2012). My research uses a corpus-based methodology to describe and analyze the contours of these demonstrative forms and their structures and functions in the underdocumented Norton Sound Kotlik Yup’ik dialect (NSKY). Demonstratives prototypically construe spatial frames of reference. However, through conceptual metaphor, the spatial domain naturally extends to temporal and discourse reference, often grammaticalizing into new structural systems such as conjunctions (Diessel, 1999; Kuteva et al., 2019).

In my NSKY corpus of spoken discourse, demonstratives account for 30% of word tokens. Among the most frequent demonstrative tokens in the corpus are four phonologically reduced particles (tayima ‘hopefully,’ tau ‘and then,’ tauguam ‘however,’ kiituani ‘thereafter’) which function principally as conjunctions to establish discourse cohesion. Cohesion differentiates discourse from a string of sentences by establishing referential relationships between clauses. Cohesion includes a variety of strategies, including reference, anaphora, focalization, and conjunctions (Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Berge, 1997). While all NSKY demonstratives perform the former functions, only the discourse particles join clauses to maintain thematic continuity. The cohesive function of pointing to the upcoming clause as an object of attention is heavily influenced by the demonstrative base’s spatial source. This influence on the NSKY conjunctive substance illustrates that while demonstratives readily undergo grammaticalization, the outcome remains grounded in the system’s invariant meaning ‘concentration of attention’ and the forms’ paradigmatic relationships (Contini-Morava et al., 1995). Though reduced, the demonstrative substance persists, shaping new cohesive structures in discourse.

This presentation examines discourse markers, also called pragmatic markers (Fraser 1996, Anderson, G. 2001) in Sanna (Cypriot Maronite Arabic, CMA), focusing on those borrowed from Cypriot Greek. The data reveal the integration of several discourse markers from Cypriot Greek, such as kaló ‘of course’, ómos ‘however, but" and telospanton ‘anyway". This study primarily explores kaló, which has been incorporated recently in Sanna, referring to recent data collected and comparing it to data from the 80's&70’s.
Specifically, I will investigate whether kaló belong to the domain of conventional implicature or not (Grice 1978, Feng 2010, Horn 2004). This includes assessing whether kaló embodies what Feng (2010:184) calls a “conventional implicature potential” – what a speaker conventionally uses of a language to implicate a specific meaning. I will also explore the discourse and interactional context in which kaló occurs, providing examples. I will then discuss the potential reasons for its incorporation in Sanna as a specific discourse marker. Particular attention will be given to their pragmatic functions in (non)-spontaneous speech.
This study is based on data collected through fieldwork in the village of Kormakiti in Cyprus in 2024, supplemented by corpora from Borg (1985) and unpublished corpora from Arlette Roth.
By investigating the role of Sanna discourse markers in their function as part of conventional implicatures, this study could contribute to a broader understanding of the impact of language contact at the pragmatic level. The study forms part of an ongoing doctoral research project at the University of Gothenburg.

References:
Anderson, G. 2001. Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Borg, A. (1985). Cypriot Arabic: A Historical and Comparative Investigation Into the Phonology and Morphology of the Arabic Vernacular Spoken by the Maronites of Kormakiti Village in the Kyrenia District of North-western Cyprus. Deutsche Morgländische Gesellschaft.
Feng, G. (2010). A Theory of Conventional Implicature and Pragmatic Markers in Chinese. In A Theory of Conventional Implicature and Pragmatic Markers in Chinese. Brill.
Fraser, B. 1996. Pragmatic markers. Pragmatics 6:167–190.
Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3: Speech Acts, pp. 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
Grice, H. P. 1978. Further notes on logic and conversation. In P. Cole, ed., Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 9: Pragmatics, pp. 113–128. New York: Academic Press.
Horn, L. R. 2004. Implicature. In L. R. Horn and G. Ward, eds., The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Spoken Finnish has periods during which changes are clearly happening on morphological and phonological levels. We hypothesise that the changes in written Finnish over the past century go beyond stylistic choices of individual authors and study this, focusing on phenomena that can be seen as indicating syntactic change. As data, we use the magazine Kotiliesi, published continuously since 1922, and the corpus of Finnish spoken in Helsinki which includes data collected in the 1970's, 1990's, and 2010's. The computational part of our analysis extracts statistics such as proportions of syntactic word categories and coherence scores, and compares their differences over time.

We found a clear transitional period in written Finnish in the 1960's and 1970's, and also in spoken Finnish from the 1970's to the 1990's. In a prior study, we discovered that a highly standardized form of spoken Finnish disappears after the 1970's. This coincides with the urbanization in the 1960's, and economic depression in the 1990's and the birth of the new millennium’s narrative journalism are also apparent in the data. Thus, cultural context has a significant effect on not only what is written but also how it’s written.

Modern Finnish has traditionally been seen as the latest stage in the development of Finnish, emerging from Early Modern Finnish around 1870. We suggest that it would be better to divide this stage into two, with a transition to Late Modern Finnish in the 1960's and early 1970's.

The topic of our presentation is the use of modulation markers (e.g., modal particles), inference markers, and connectives in requests for confirmation (RfC) in everyday Estonian conversations.
Our research questions are as follows:
RQ1 What modulation markers, inference markers, and connectives are used in Estonian RfCs?
RQ2 What relationships to the previous conversation do these markers highlight in repair and non-repair RfCs (e.g., hedging, contrast, change-of-state, etc.)?
Our study follows the approach presented in the comparative RfC project of ten languages published in Open Linguistics (e.g., König et al., MS; Deppermann et al., 2024; Küttner, and Szczepek Reed, 2024) and the analysis of social actions performed through RfC (e.g., Zinken, and Küttner, 2022).
Our data come from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of the University of Tartu (SEKK). We have randomly selected 200 videotaped extracts of everyday communication from 2012 to 2019. We follow an interactional linguistics approach in the analysis of these excerpts.
Preliminary results show that the most used markers are the softeners/hedges mingi (’some kind’) and vist ('probably, possibly'), the inference markers aa ('oh') and siis/sis ('then, so'), and the connectives a/aga ('but') and ja ’and’. The analysis reveals a difference in the frequency and repertoire of markers in the repair versus non-repair questions.
In our presentation, we will also compare our results with those from German and English, as these languages have influenced Estonian.

References
Deppermann, Arnulf, Alexandra Gubina, Katharina König, and Martin Pfeiffer 2024. Request for confirmation sequences in German. Open Linguistics vol 10.
König, Katharina, Martin Pfeiffer, and Kathrin Weber MS. A coding scheme for request for confirmation sequences across languages.
Küttner Uwe-A., and Beatrice Szczepek Reed 2024. Request for confirmation sequences in British and American English. Open Linguistics vol 10.
Zinken, Jörg, and Uwe-A. Küttner 2022. Offering an Interpretation of Prior Talk in Everyday Interaction: A Semantic Map Approach, Discourse Processes, 59:4, 298-325.

In January 2024, a new Children’s Act, barnets lov, came into force in Denmark. One of the cornerstones of the Act is a fundamental right for children and young adults to be involved in matters that concern them and their lives. This also applies to social casework.
Involvement is a key concept in the Children’s Act and, even more so, in the guidelines developed to support the practical application of the law. In social casework involvement entails, among other things, that it is mandatory that the caseworker speaks with the child or young adult, and that decisions made by the municipality must reflect the child’s or young adult’s perspective and wishes.

In practice, caseworkers can carry out such involvement by writing certain case files together with the child or young adult, or by addressing the text directly to them; that is, writing the case file in a language that enables the child or young adult to recognize themselves and their own voice in the text. However, the text also serves as documentation of institutional procedures and may provide the basis of the authority’s decisions about supportive interventions.
Thus, the caseworker’s text addresses recipients in very different positions within the institutional context, and performs various functions – functions and recipients that do not necessarily call for the same type of language.
In my presentation, I will discuss the particular circumstances surrounding this type of texts and present examples of analysis based on empirical data from my PhD project.