Introduction

Pragmatic markers are typically words or phrases that do not belong to the propositional message of an utterance, and are hence semantically and syntactically optional, but contribute to it in various subtle ways, such as by expressing speakers’ attitudes to their interlocutors or to the message, or by making plain which relations hold between an utterance and its co-text or context. Ever since Schiffrin’s (1987) seminal work on “discourse markers” these linguistic items have featured highly on the agenda of researchers in pragmatics and discourse analysis. One of the most daunting challenges in the description of pragmatic markers is posed by their polyfunctionality, which raises questions as to their functional scope as well as to

L. Buysse (*)

Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

K. Aijmer, D. Lewis (eds.), Contrastive Analysis of Discourse-pragmatic Aspects of Linguistic Genres, Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54556-1_3

the (inter)relatedness of their functions. Translations of pragmatic markers have been suggested as one way towards resolving such issues (see e.g. Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen 2003; Aijmer et al. 2006; Johansson 2006; Degand 2009). Although more and more languages have been involved in the domain, Dutch has largely remained a blind spot (yet see more recent work by Hogeweg (2009) and Niemegeers (2009) on the modal particles wel and maar, and Buysse (in press) on the Dutch equivalents of English question tags). There are, nevertheless, linguistic items in Dutch that closely resemble forms with at first sight similar functions in other languages. One of these is dus, which appears to function in much the same way as so does in English. The current study, therefore, sets out to juxtapose these two forms in a bidirectional parallel corpus with Dutch and English source and target texts as an initial exploration into their functional similarities and differences.

Both so and dus have an ambiguous grammatical status (Biber et al. 1999; E-ANS 2012). Like co-ordinating conjunctions, they can join two main clauses, as in (1). Like linking adverbials, on the other hand, they can occur sentence-initially as well as co-occur with other coordinators, as in (2) and (3) respectively.

(1) Ik ben niet veel geniale mensen tegengekomen in mijn leven, dus ik weet waarover ik praat als ik hem geniaal noem. [‘..., dus I know what I’m talking about when I call him genious.’]

I haven’t met many brilliant people in my life, so I know what I’m talking about when I call him brilliant.¹(Fiction, grue-002593, Dutch-English)

(2) So we expect some understanding from ArcelorMittal in this respect too.

Dus ook op dat vlak verwachten wij enig begrip van ArcelorMittal.

[‘Dus also in that respect we expect some understanding from ArcelorMittal.’]

(External communication, arc-002044, English-Dutch)
(3) That there, there were only the stones in, the walls to hear me - and herself, who they kept dumb as a stone, and so could tell no-one.

Dat daar alleen de stenen in de muren me konden horen - en zijzelf, die moet zwijgen als een steen, en dus niets kan doorvertellen. [‘., en dus can’t pass anything on.’]

(Fiction, wat-002588, English-Dutch)

The main formal difference between so and dus is the position they can occupy in the clause. In all previous examples both take clause-initial position, which is the ^[1]

sole position for so. Dus, however, also takes mid-position, as exemplified in (4), and even occupies clause-final^[2] slots, as in (5).

(4) De hoge positie van Nederland wordt dus verklaard door het lage percentage leerlingen dat onder niveau 2 scoort.

[‘The high position of the Netherlands is dus explained by the low percentage of pupils that score below level 2.’]

(External communication, vla-001191, Dutch-English)
(5) Groot mag dus, als het maar opvalt en origineel is.

[‘Large is okay dus, as long as it stands out and is original.’]

(External communication, wst-000768, Dutch-English)

On a semantic level too the two markers show similarities and differences. They have both been attributed the status of prototypical causal or resultative markers, and have been attested as highly frequent items in spoken as well as written language. So has particularly been studied as a pragmatic marker in discourse-functional approaches (see e.g. Schiffrin 1987; Redeker 1990; Muller 2005; Lam 2009; Buysse 2012), whereas dus has received most attention from cognitive linguists (see e.g. Pander Maat and Sanders 1995, 2000; Pander Maat and Degand 2001; Stukker et al. 2008), who have been particularly interested in mapping coherence relations in the causal domain. One main assumption is clearly shared by both research strands, viz. that causal markers can function in three domains: the ideational, interpersonal, and textual domains.^[3] Ideational relations connect states of affairs in the world described in the discourse, as in sentence (a) in (6), where so relates a state of affairs (he is home) to another state of affairs from which it results (he is sick): John’s being home was caused by his being sick. In the interpersonal domain markers relate “the illocutionary meaning of one of the discourse units with the locutionary meaning of the other” (Degand 2001: 79). In sentence (b), for example, the second proposition is a claim inferred from the state of affairs expressed in the first segment: the speaker claims that John is home on the basis of the observation that his lights are burning. Textual relations, finally, are discourse-organising relations (e.g. a list or a digression), which may also take the form of a speech act, as in sentence (c), where the first proposition sparks a request for information in the second.

(6) a. John is sick, so he is home.

b. John’s lights are burning, so he is home.

c. John’s lights are burning. So is he home?

(Schiffrin 1987: 211)

The distinction between sentences (a) and (b) corresponds to the well-established theoretical division between semantic and pragmatic relations (cf. Van Dijk 1979). Applied to so the distinction can be interpreted as one between so marking a relation of ‘result’ versus marking one of ‘inference’ (Schiffrin 1987; Muller 2005; Buysse 2012).

As for the textual domain, quite a few studies on so have focused on particular discourse functions or highly specific contexts. Johnson (2002), for example, looks at so-prefaced questions in police interviews, whereas Norrick (2008) identifies so as a conversational response token in a story-telling context, and Bolden (2009) examines its potential to mark an utterance as having been on the conversational agenda for some time. More comprehensive functional mappings of so, such as those devised by Muller (2005), Lam (2009), and Buysse (2012), have exposed a wide variety of textual functions, including marking a summary, signalling a return to the main discourse unit (e.g. after a digression), initiating (a part of) a conversation, starting a new sequence in a story, and marking self-correction.

Observations of similar functions for dus have been scarce. Nevertheless, Evers- Vermeul (2010) discusses two “discourse marker” uses of dus (2010: 153), both of which are to do with information status. First, dus may indicate that the information contained in the segment in which it occurs is already somehow available to the interlocutor (Evers-Vermeul 2010: 161); second, it may have a double function of marking a conclusion as well as marking that the conclusion is obvious (since it can be inferred from the prior co-text) or logical (since it is the only sensible conclusion one could draw) (2010: 167). In another study Degand (2011) identifies two metadiscursive functions of clause-final dus in spoken Dutch, viz. reformulation and floor-yielding, both of which have also been noted for so.

Similar to most other pragmatic markers in English, yet unlike dus in Dutch, so does not only appear as a pragmatic marker, but may also appear, as Muller (2005) points out, as an adverb of degree or manner (e.g. she’s so great), a pro-form (e.g. I think so), in fixed expressions (e.g. and so on), and to express purpose (often in the form of so that).^[4]

In short, the different angles from which so and dus have been approached in previous research do not allow for a systematic comparison of these two markers that nonetheless appear to exhibit many formal and functional resemblances, not in the least their status as prototypical markers of ‘result’ or ‘inference’ in their respective languages. The aim of the present study is, therefore, to map functional simi?larities and differences between so and dus by looking into their mutual translatability in a parallel corpus.

Section 2 describes the data used for this investigation. In Sect. 3 the functional translation correspondence of dus and so is discussed by focusing on each of the markers’ functions as attested in the corpus. A quantitative analysis of the correspondence between dus and so is provided in Sect. 4, with conclusions drawn in Sect. 5.

[1] Unless stated otherwise, all examples have been drawn from the Dutch Parallel Corpus (see Sect.2). For these examples the source text fragment appears first and is followed by the target text fragment. An additional Literal translation has been provided in square brackets for the Dutch clause inwhich the relevant marker occurs. Each example ends with the basic metadata in rounded brackets:the text type, the text number in the corpus, and the translation direction).
[2] So too has been observed to occur in a position resembling clause-final slots, such as turn-finalposition. In such cases so indeed does not explicitly preface a segment, but an implied segment canbe retrieved from the context (Schiffrin 1987; Muller 2005; Buysse 2014), which is clearly different from clause-final tokens of dus.
[3] The terminology used here is that of Halliday and Mathiessen’s (2004) metafunctions. Note thatmany studies on dus have followed Sweetser’s (1990) terminology, distinguishing between content, epistemic and speech act domains (e.g. Pander Maat and Sanders 2000; Stukker et al. 2008),and that other proposals have also been put forward such as Redeker’s (2006: 354) “componentsof discourse coherence” (ideational, rhetorical, sequential). For our present purposes the finerdetails of these approaches and their mutual differences are of minor relevance.
[4] Note, though, that diachronic research has shown that dus used to have an anaphoric function witha meaning similar to thus or in this way, which gradually got lost between the 16th and 19th century (Evers-Vermeul 2010).