Egbert2003

Egbert2003
BibType	ARTICLE
Key	Egbert2003
Author(s)	Maria Egbert
Title	Die interaktioneile Relevanz einer gemeinsamen Vorgeschichte: Zur Bedeutung und Funktion von übrigens in deutschen Alltagsgesprächen
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Tag(s)	IL, Modality, Word choice, Semantics
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Year	2003
Language	German
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Journal	Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
Volume	22
Number	2
Pages	189-212
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Howpublished
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Abstract

This study is part of a body of work in Interactional Linguistics focussing on the interface of word semantics and interaction. It analyzes the meaning of the lexical item übrigens (roughly trarislated as English by the way) as it appears in a corpus of 25 hours of naturally occurring everyday German conversation. In its main syntactic position in conversation - in the midfield of a verb-second sentence - it does not seem to contain the meaning previously assumed, i.e. it does not signal an upcoming disjunctive topic shift, diversion or an otherwise non-contiguous turn. An analysis of the preceding and succeeding topical context of the übrigens-sentence shows no regularity in topic development. Instead, a set of observations furnishes arguments that with übrigens, the Speaker indirectly refers to a piece of prior talk in which both the speaker and the recipient(s) were involved. The distance between the übrigens- sentence and the reference utterance varies immensely . It may date back to an episode in the same conversation or even in a previous encounter. Given its formal and functional features, it is proposed that übrigens in mid-sentence may be classified as a modal particle varying in meaning from its homonym in initial sentence position. The analysis concludes that series of conversations need to be considered as a unit of analysis in Interactional Linguistics since interactants orient to events in the history of their relationship by linguistic means such as word choice.

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