No day passes without one hearing speakers of English saying, ‘‘I am so blessed’’ as an answer to the question ‘‘How are you?’’. A spoken form of the English language one may say, but is the use of ‘’so’’ in the utterance acceptable? You will hear ‘‘you are too good’’ as a way of appreciating a good deed by someone. Do you get the impression that the use of ‘‘too’’ in the utterance above negates the positive deed that is expressed? I invite you views.
Grammar, linguistics, English, Language change
Dennis,
I agree with Fernando, that intensifiers can function through implicature, with participants tacitly understanding social, pragmatic ends in discourse (see for example, Low, Graham. "Intensifiers and Hedges in Questionnaire Items and the Lexical Invisibility Hypothesis1." Applied Linguistics 17, no. 1 (1996): 1-37).
In particular, intensifiers can invoke alternatives (including implausible alternatives) through implicature, to meet pragmatic goals in talk (König, Ekkehard, and Peter Siemund. "Intensifiers as targets and sources of semantic change." (1999): 97-109). If I thank someone by saying "You are too good," I evoke the alternative of not having been good to me (done the thing I am thanking you for), because you are "too good" in having done it. "George knows that," has a clear semantic purpose, but "Even George knows that," uses implicature in an additive sense to make clear that everyone knows--the knowledge is so widespread that "even" George knows. This also evokes an alternative world in which knowledge was more closely held--an alternative where dummies like George don't know (König & Seimund, 1999).
I think what Dennis meant is that grammatical items that seem to most of us static with no identity of their own do in fact develop/change ,though very slowly, like lexical items. This slow evolution can be described by the slow invasion of other semantic fields. In the near past ,the intensifier "too" meant always a negative connotative/denotative meaning. Nowadays it can be used for both. This opens the question about the role of the grammarian: is it to describe or prescribe? Another question related to this is the nature of the mechanism of this evolution. In other words how does the most fossilized grammatical items change and expand. The answer, to my mind, is linked with pragmatics and relevance theory. The new meaning needs a context so that the hearer chooses between the positive or negative sides other intensifier 'too' for example. Whereas the established meaning, in this case negativity, does not need a context to be identified. In other words , in order for a language to thrive, there must be a dynamic pragmatic and relevant context around it.
Conclusion: language is partially conventional and partially arbitrary contrary to what De Saussure believed. Conventionality and arbitrariness are inherently dynamic since the pragmatic and relevant context is so. Dynamism in this context necessitates human agency. The human agency of the individual or the group.
Brahim, I think what you're getting at is that grammar, like lexical items is emergent and social:
"This is, then, roughly the context in which the term Emergent Grammar is being proposed. The term ‘emergent’ itself I take from an essay by the cultural anthropologist James Clifford, but I have transferred it from its original context of ‘culture’ to that of ‘grammar’. Clifford remarks that ‘Culture is temporal, emergent, and disputed’ (Clifford 1986:19). I believe the same is true of grammar, which like speech itself must be viewed as a real-time, social phenomenon, and therefore is temporal; its structure is always deferred, always in a process but never arriving, and therefore emergent; and since I can only choose a tiny fraction of data to describe, any decision I make about limiting my field of inquiry (for example in regard to the selection of texts, or the privileging of the usage of a particular ethnic, class, age, or gender group) is very likely to be a political decision, to be against someone else's interests, and therefore disputed." (Hopper. 1987. Berkeley Linguistic Society, vol. 13, 139-157: 141).
I agree that the utterance has to be analyzed as a" real -time,social phenomenon"....suprasegmental features such as intonation and stress as well as visual cues(speakers facial expression and body language) will provide contextual cues needed to help the listener decide if there are positive or negative connotations.For example,sarcasm could be implied and perceived in the utterance "You are too good!"
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