Dear All,
Is it possible to trace evolution of the manner adverb "literally" from
the relevance-theoretic perspective:
(1) From full adverb as in JRR Tolkien's "The Hobbit":
"Perhaps I took it too literally - I have been told that dwarves are
sometimes politer in word than in deed"
(2) To illocutionary adverbial OR discourse marker?!?:
"This food is so spicy, it will literally blow your head off"
or
"I literally died laughing"
In reply to my question, Dan Sperber wrote:
"Just as "seriously" cannot impose a serious reading (it can be used in jest, or just loosely)
so "literally" cannot impose a literal reading and can be understood as loosely as required
for relevance. In your example 2 ("This food is so spicy, it will literally blow your head off"),
the metaphorical interpretation goes on as usual and, what '"literally" does is encourage the
hearer to look for a marginally richer interpretation".
The thing is that Dickens used literally loosely, and so did Thackeray (who wrote in 1847,
"I literally blazed with wit") as well as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov.
Somehow I have this feeling, that it differs from other illocutionary
adverbials like "seriously" in virtue of literally prescribing
"literal" meaning to metaphoric/hyperbolic utterance.
Can anybody, please, enlighten me regarding the following:
What happens to conceptual/procedural and truth-conditional/non-truth
conditional meanings in the above examples?
Is it becoming a phatic discourse marker/hedge? following the
grammaticalization/subjectification/intersubjectification pattern as
proposed in works of Elizabeth C. Traugott:
THE ROLE OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF DISCOURSE MARKERS
IN A THEORY OF GRAMMATICALIZATION
Elizabeth C. Traugott
Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, CA 94305-2150, U.S.A.
Paper presented at ICHL XII, Manchester 1995
FROM SUBJECTIFICATION TO INTERSUBJECTIFICATION
Stanford University
Paper presented at the Workshop on Historical Pragmatics,
Fourteenth International Conference on Historical Linguistics,
Vancouver, Canada, July 1999
The discourse connective after all:
A historical pragmatic account.
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Stanford University, USA,
Paper prepared for ICL, Paris, July 1997
If so, then how come it was already used in its discourse marker function
long time in the past?
Any comments would be very much appreciated!!!
All the best,
Andre
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