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References and further reading (short list)

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References and further reading (short list)

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As said, it's just the start of a larger study (or two). I'm curious about your reactions - please let me know in the comments, in person, or by email! stefan.frazier@sjsu.edu

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Not sure! That's my next step: looking at a representative sample of interviews and reading them carefully, manually noting the instances of present perfect - especially near the beginnings - and determining a purpose for their relatively high frequencies there.

One possible reason may be apparent in prior work (Suh, 1992) which suggested that present perfect is often used to lead off narratives. (But see Frazier & Koo, 2019a, for a complication of that result.)

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So next: present perfect. An interesting discovery

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So next: present perfect. An interesting discovery

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While my colleague Hahn Koo and I were analyzing our corpus for functions of the present perfect (Frazier & Koo, 2019a), Hahn ran a computer program on a large range of individual interview transcripts and noticed something.

Present perfect seems to occur much more commonly near the beginnings of transcripts (on average) than in the middle or the end. In other words, people involved in interviews (interviewers and interviewees) use the present perfect more at the beginning of conversations than anywhere else.

Here's a chart representation (thanks Hahn!):

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I haven't finished looking at all the modals. More to come.

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I haven't finished looking at all the modals. More to come.

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2. To extend a turn at talk. The following is a combative context, during an argument, and the modal "can" (connoting permission) is deployed with an orientation toward a portion of the previous talk in which the speakers were "competing" for talking space (and in which “dwelling” hadn’t been permitted) and an upcoming extension of the turn.

(Fox)

O’Reilly: All right but you didn’t answer my question. I know it’s a little bit of an esoteric question. How can the nation change in less than 30 years where we’re––Ronald Reagan becomes an icon into what we have now which is 180 degrees opposite of Reagan? What changed?

Woodward: I think part of this I mean, looking at presidents you realize that their personal appeal and popularity is often what people vote on. And that happened to Reagan and Obama as you point out is personally popular. I think this 19-minute speech, quite frankly is going to be quickly forgotten. I mean as the old John Mitchell who is the attorney general for Nixon who said quite rightly “Don’t watch what we say, watch what we do.” And I think we have to see what Obama is really going to do. And of course, what the Republicans are doing. I think the other thing if I can dwell on it for a moment, he didn’t talk about the world.

O’Reilly: No.

Woodward: The world is a very dangerous place and there are a lot of dangerous things going on.

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1. For mitigation purposes. In the following, the interviewer’s choice of modal "might" within her request shows an orientation to not imposing excessively on her guest.

(NPR)

Gross: So let me ask you to name a few of your favorite films. And you could go as far into the past as you want to––films that you might want to recommend to us to see, if we haven’t already seen them.

Sarri: Yeah. Well, my favorite film of all time is probably “Madame de…”,  the Max Ophuls film with Danielle Darrieux.

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While they are rare, it's worth looking at two contexts in which speaker-oriented modals did appear in the corpus.

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Speaker-oriented modals are very rare in these interview contexts

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Speaker-oriented modals are very rare in these interview contexts

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Contrary to my hypothesis, people only very rarely use modals to "move an addressee to action." Here's a bar chart:

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The study is ongoing, but here are my first results.

I looked at 241 instances of the modals "can," "could," "may," "might," "must," and "should," reading them carefully for their pragmatic function in their contexts.

(241 is not many, compared to the hundreds of thousands that a computer can read quickly. But a computer can't read horizontally well enough to determine whether the modal is agent-oriented or speaker-oriented.)

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12.2 million words

multi-party interaction (as opposed to single-person news-reading, individual commentary, or other monologic discourse)

CNN, Fox News, and National Public Radio (NPR)

2011-2015

For more information about the corpus, see Frazier & Koo (2019a, 2019b)

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Second, I wanted to follow up on a discovery that my colleague Hahn Koo made about present perfect.

More on that below.

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It just seemed (my hypothesis) that speaker-oriented modals would appear, at least occasionally, in conversational situations like interviews; for example, when the host requests that the guest provide a response to a question.

Also, Hahn and I already had the corpus from previous work on verb tenses. Interview data from major U.S. networks are relatively easy to collect for analysis.

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“speech acts through which a speaker attempts to move an addressee to action”

(distinction from Bybee and Fleischman, 1992, p. 6)

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“all modal meanings that predicate conditions on an agent with regard to the completion of an action referred to by the main predicate, e.g. obligation, desire, ability, permission, and root possibility”

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This project is the start of a bigger study of English modal verbs. Specifically: first, I wanted to determine whether modal verbs used in authentic radio and TV interviews were "agent-oriented" or "speaker-oriented." And how many of each.

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More precisely: computers can do a lot of things very fast, especially with vertical-reading tasks. But they still can't read horizontally for many pragmatic uses of language.

(How can a computer tell, for example when a speaker is being polite, or sarcastic? That's a future study.)

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But for some aspects of language use, we need to see much more context to get a clearer sense of what a word or grammatical structure is doing.

For that we need to read horizontally, that is, forward and backward many clauses / sentences (or turns at talk, in conversation). When we do that, we see that the "could" in that first sentence above is the past tense of "can":

HUME: Well, he's [President Obama] had a pretty good week in the sense that the things that he supported have been vindicated. He had a good week on the trade measure that he wanted to give him this negotiating authority and which meant the - it would have to be voted up or down, no amendments, by Congress. Of course, he couldn't get that with the support of his own party. It required the massive amounts of support for the Republicans for him to do it.

Reading horizontally is especially important for determining pragmatic functions. (You have to read vertically also, to get a good sample.)

(Horizontal and vertical reading concept taken from Aijmer & Rüehlemann 2015)

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... seventeen sentences. But a computer could look at hundreds, or hundreds of millions, and figure out  patterns. Like, how often is "might" followed by the BE-verb? What adverbs commonly come right before it? Etc.

The collection of "might" items above is a vertical column.

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(from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA)

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OK. In corpus linguistics, researchers have traditionally looked at huge numbers of sentences, one above each other, to compare a single feature and look at their collocations (i.e. the words that commonly come before or after it). For example, see the next pane:

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Yes. The opposite of "vertical reading."

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If you chose #3, you are correct. That's because there isn't enough temporal context. For example, in the first sentence, the speaker could be talking about

a current "he," and it would mean something like "even if he tried!"

a past "he" in history, meaning that he tried but wasn't able to get support, sometime in the past.

But we don't know because we can't see the sentences before or after to show the time frame. In other words, we can't "read horizontally."

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QUESTION: What is the function of "could" in each sentence?

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QUESTION: What is the function of "could" in each sentence?

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1. past tense of "can"

2. unreal conditional in present time

3. impossible to know in the given context

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OK. Look at these sentences, focusing on the modal "could":

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OK. Look at these sentences, focusing on the modal "could":

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Of course, he couldn’t get that with the support of his own party.

So, I guess the president could say he reduced his own deficit if that’s where we want to go.

They couldn’t get to the shooter.