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Lists show a great degree of structural and functional variation. First of all, lists have been used to represent not only coordination but also other types of strategies (cf. Blanche-Benveniste et al. 1990), such as repetitions (1) and reformulations (2). Moreover, lists are not only attested at the syntactic level, but also at the morphological (3) / lexical level (4) and at the discourse level (5), where we can see that lists are frequently co-constructed by different speakers:
1) Erm although we we haven’t really really discussed this (BNC)
2) Although Golding uses boys to illustrate the fact that man is evil, his point is about mankind, or in other words , human beings (BNC)
3) Chuvash sĕt-śu (milk-butter) ‘dairy products’
4) English kiss and goodbye (Airport sign)
5) ROY: saving the whale,
or saving uh … the .. polar bea[r,
PETE: [Right… Pandas],
ROY: or making sure there’s enough] grizzly bears,
that’s fine. (SBC: 003)
List constructions are characterized by the occurrence of list markers, such as connectives, general extenders (Masini, Mauri, Pietrandrea 2012), and more or less specific listing prosodic patterns (Du Bois 2016), which contribute to the semantic interpretation of lists.
From a semantic-pragmatic perspective, speakers recur to lists for many different reasons: (1) is an instance of intensifying list, while in (2) we are faced with reference specification through reformulation; (3) exemplifies a co-compound of the “collective” type (Wälchli 2005), whereas (4) contains a “binomial” (Malkiel 1959) labelling a specific frame (cf. Masini & Thornton 2009); finally, (5) shows a list of examples aimed at building the ad hoc category ‘saving endangered animals’ (Ariel and Mauri, to appear). Lists can be further examined on the basis of a number of semantic parameters: exhaustivity vs. non-exhaustivity of the set, compositionality vs. non-compositionality of the meaning, existing relations between the linked items (conjunctive, disjunctive, etc.). Up to now, list constructions have been recognized as tools to:
- build sets, categories and frames
- intensify meaning
- reformulate, modulate, approximate meaning
However, no systematic account of the attested dimensions of variation has been provided yet.
We aim to:
- provide a systematic analysis of lists at different levels of analysis
- identify recurrent associations between specific structural properties of lists and specific functions (e.g. particular prosodic patterns, connectives, general extenders systematically associated to particular functions)
- Explore the semantics/pragmatics interface of lists in discourse