LA FISIOTERAPIA EN EL ENTORNO DOMICILIARIO

As a discourse marker, so has received attention from a number of researchers (e.g. Aijmer, 2002; Blakemore, 1988; Bolden, 2008; Bolden, 2009; Müller, 2005; Östman, 1981; Redeker, 1990; Schourup, 1985). One of the first studies to focus on so was that conducted by Van Dijk (1979). In his paper Pragmatic Connectives, he points out that so ‘links two speech acts

of which the second functions as a “conclusion” with respect to the first speech act’ (1979, p. 453). Schiffrin (1987) provides a detailed treatment of because (with a causal meaning) and

so (with a result meaning). She argues that both of them ‘have semantic meanings realised on sentence and discourse levels’ (1987, p. 201). Schiffrin (1987) suggests that these meanings occur on three planes of discourse (out of the five planes discussed in her book), primarily functioning in relation to the ideational structure (Redeker, 1990; Redeker, 1991) and secondarily the information state and action structure. She gives a special term to each plane as Table 4.1 illustrates.

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Table 4.1 Semantic realization of so and because in discourse Discourse plane Ideational structure Fact-based Information state Knowledge-based Action structure Action-based

because Cause Warrant Motive

So Result Inference Action

(Schiffrin, 1987, p. 202)

For a fact-based relationship in the ideational structure, Schiffrin (1987) claims that so holds between idea units ‘the events, states, and so on, which they encode’ (p. 202). A knowledge- based causal relationship holds when some pieces of information are used as a warrant by a speaker to be inferred by the speaker him/herself (a speaker inference) or by the hearer (a hearer inference). In the action-based causal relation – the action structure plane – a motive for an action is presented by a speaker. This action could be carried out by the speaker or the interlocutor (Schiffrin, 1987). Schiffrin (1987) provides her own examples to illustrate the functions of so on each plane. Example 1 shows the fact-based result in the ideational structure:

(1) n. I said, ‘When we get home, Joe,’ I says, ‘you’ll carry me in the house!’ o. I say, ‘I ain’t got shoe:s, or no stockin’s on.’

p. He said, ‘Carry yourself in the house! I ain’t carryin’ y’in!’ q. So I went BOOM

(Schiffrin, 1987, p. 203)

The so expressed in (q) is a local fact-based use of so. Schiffrin (1987) states that so is used locally when only one event is causally related to it, whereas ‘so functions globally when it

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covers a wide range of talk’ (p. 203) as in example (2). Example (1) is an account of Henry and his brother walking in the snow and his brother refusing to carry him. The result in (q) is that Henry punched his brother on the nose. In the coda given in example (2), Henry recounts a story about throwing his brother in the snow and evaluates it as funny. Schiffrin (1987) believes that so in this example has a global function because it ‘reports the brother’s laughter as a reaction to the entire experience’ (p. 204).

(2) w. So, he laughed about it for years, x. he says it was worth it!

(Schiffrin, 1987, p. 204)

Example (3) illustrates the knowledge-based inference (warrant inference) on the information state plane.

(3) Zelda: And she says, ‘We have lots of rooms,’ she said, ‘even for- Gary had a big dog,’ she said, ‘even for the dog!’ So, it’s really nice eh: y’know t’ renew friendship.

(Schiffrin, 1987, p. 206)

In this example, Zelda was narrating her son’s reunion with his friends. Schiffrin (1987) argues here that the events in this story do not factually cause the concluded result at the end of the story. In fact, they work as background evidence which warrants the speaker’s general conclusions (p. 206).

The third type of so exemplifies the action-based use which functions on the action structure plane. The following is an example of this use of so:

(4) Irene: d. you take somebody like A1 says, I-he don’t know anything about him. e. Why should he vote for him?

86 Zelda: f. He’ll-

Irene: g. There are alot of people that fell that way= Zelda: h. Wait a minute=

Irene: =Henry!

Zelda: so who would A1 vote for?

(Schiffrin, 1987, p. 208)

At the beginning of this example, Irene was trying to support her position that Catholics will not vote for the candidate. She was describing her Catholic neighbour A1’s reaction, saying that he would say ‘no’ to the candidate. Then, Zelda wanted to know who Irene’s neighbour would vote for. Thus, Zelda’s use of so shows that her request for this information was motivated by Irene’s description of ‘A1’s indecision’ (Schiffrin, 1987, p. 208).

In addition, so functions on other planes of talk. For example, it appears in the participation structure to organize transitions. Transitions occur when speaker and hearer make some adjustments to what each one is responsible for in the achievement of a particular task in the conversation. Examples of such tasks are turn-taking, linking parts of an adjacency pair and organizing discourse topics (Schiffrin, 1987).

Similar to Schiffrin’s treatment of so is Redeker’s (1990; 1991). She points out that so was one of the most frequent connectives in her data, together with and. She states that so was found in her data to occur between successive elements of events to mark ‘summing-up or conclusion’ as examples (5) and (6) illustrate.

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(5) He talks to the girl and says that she has uhm her father has money due, uhm and so she gives him the sixty dollars asking if that would cover it. And so he leaves. (CTfmj)

(6) and he says you're gonna have to leave here. So he/he- kind of uhm kicks the guy out. (TLfdj)

(Redeker, 1990, p. 373)

Similar functions of so are discussed by Fraser (1990; 1999; 2009). He explains that the functions of the discourse marker so are based primarily on the interpretation of the prior context (1990, p. 393). To explain this, Fraser lists several examples:

(7a) Susan is married. So she is no longer single. (7b) John was tired. So he left early.

(7c) Attorney: And how long were you part of the clean-up crew? Witness: Five years.

Arty: So you were employed by G for roughly 5 years? (7d) Son: My clothes are still wet.

Mother: So put the drier on for 30 minutes more.

(7e) Teenage son: The Celtics have an important game today. Disinterested parent: So?

(7f) [A student upon encountering her professor for the first time in two weeks] Hi. So

when are you leaving for Hawaii?

(7g) [Grandmother to granddaughter] So tell me about this wonderful young man you're seeing.

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Fraser (1990) argues that so in the first example is a logical conclusion which could be compared to Schiffrin’s warrant inference. So in the next example (7b) could be interpreted as a reasonable consequence (cf. Schiffrin’s cause result). In (7c), so is interpreted slightly differently from (7a) as this one is considered to represent ‘I conclude’. Similar to Schiffrin’s motive action, Fraser interprets the use of the discourse marker so in the mother’s turn (7d) as ‘you should’. Fraser’s (7e) has so with a questioning intonation as the father was asking his son why anything should follow from this, which could be interpreted as ‘so what?’ In example (7f), so could be interpreted as indicating that the student’s question was based on something known earlier to both the student and the professor, i.e. the speaker/hearer shared knowledge. In the last example, so was interpreted as ‘to continue’ (Fraser, 1990, p. 394). I would like to argue that so in (7d) and (7g) in a sense have the same interpretations/functions. I agree with Müller (2005, p. 81) that they preface directive speech acts. In fact, (7f) is probably no different from the previous two examples. In (7f), so also prefaces a directive speech act.

Discussing the transitional or what he calls ‘stand-alone’ so, Raymond (2004) argues that participants use so in conversations ‘to prompt action by a recipient’ (p. 185). One of the ways in which this function is implemented is by ‘invoking an upshot that is claimed to be available to a recipient’ (Raymond, 2004, p. 211). In this study, the analysis of so suggests that it helps invite hearers to make connections between the preceding turn and the course(s) of action in which they participate. Raymond shows that the stand-alone so is deployed to manage overlapping contingencies imposed by the organization of turn-taking, sequencing, and the overall structural organization of conversation as a unit (cf. Raymond, 2004, p. 212).

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Bolden (2006) analysed actual recorded social interactions between close familiars. Focusing on the deployment of the discourse markers so and oh, her goal in this paper was to describe discursive practices involved in showing engagement with the other party, or other- attentiveness. Bolden (2006) suggests that so was mainly used to preface other-attentive topics, i.e. topics related to other conversational partners/addressees as in the following example:

(8)

1 Leni: [Yeah that’s (what I’m worrying about) 2 Leni: (thinking about).

3 (2.3)

4 ( ): ((sniff)) | 5 ( ): ((grunt)) ——

6 Leni: So yuh haven’t been out tuh Palm Springs fer awhile. 7 (.)

8 Have you, I c’n tell you lost yer ta: n. 9 Sam: Not fer three weeks (now).

10 Leni: Yeah, ( ), 11 Sam: ( [ )

12 Joe: [Gee it’s nice down in Escondido.

13 Sam: I wanna go when [it’s convenient fer me. 14 Jim: Yeh?

15 Leni: Yeah, You [( )

16 Sam: [The weather aint right [I don’ go.

((Leni, Sam, and Edith continue talking about Sam’s tan.))

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Bolden (2006) points out that so which prefaces a topic as in line 6 ‘is initially formulated in the form of a statement about the addressee [...] that requires a confirmation or a disconfirmation’ (p. 671).

Arguing that the indexing inferential and causal connections is not the only function of so, Bolden (2009) applies conversation analysis methodology to examine a large corpus of recorded conversations collected from everyday talk to demonstrate another function of so, i.e. achieving incipient actions. The analysis primarily deals with so as ‘prefacing sequence- initiating actions’. It shows that so is used by speakers to signal an action which is about to take place, calling this status ‘emerging from incipiency’ and is not defined by the preceding context. She concludes that so can also be used by speakers to establish certain actions to shape their ‘interactional agenda’. This use of so as a discourse marker is meant to create discourse coherence to achieve understanding (Bolden, 2009, p. 996).

Some previous studies have compared so as used by NSs of English and by NNSs. Anping (2002) investigated the use and the frequency of so in the English of Chinese learners of English. Her motivation for conducting this study was the overuse of so in Chinese EFL learners’ written English. The data in this study were based on a number of English corpora including the discourse of both native English speakers and learners of English in China. As anticipated, Anping found so was used more frequently by Chinese learners than by the native speakers of English. Anping (2002) believes that the likely reasons for this overuse are the Chinese learners’ lack of awareness of the stylistic differences between written and spoken English, the limited exposure the Chinese have to English, the style of instruction they have at school and L1 negative transfer.

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Regarding the acquisition of the discourse marker so by NNSs, Hays (1992) examined the usage of English discourse markers by Japanese university students. He followed Schiffrin's (1987) model of discourse planes and concludes that Japanese learners of English acquire ideational markers such as and, so, and or earlier than markers on other planes such as you know and well, which require exposure to a speech community (Hays, 1992).

To my mind, one of the most comprehensive studies of so was Müller’s (2005). Her

qualitative and quantitative analysis of so as used by English NSs and German NNSs suggests that learners of English use the functions of so as do native speakers but with noticeably lower frequency (Müller, 2005). The functions of so in her study were organized on two levels, textual and interactional. On the textual level, so is a marker of result or consequence, a marker of a main idea unit, summarizing/rewording/giving an example, a sequential marker (coherently transitioning from one event to another in narrative), and finally so is a marker of a boundary between instructions and the beginning of the narrative (Müller, 2005, pp. 80–81). On the interactional level, so is as a discourse marker that indicates a speech act of questioning or request, a speech act of opinion, a marker of an implied result (i.e. directly addressing the hearer and challenging her/him to establish what the speaker is implying) (Müller, 2005, p. 86). The last function on the interactional level is so as a marker of a transition relevant place. Interestingly, qualitatively, all nine functions occur in the native and in the non-native data. However, the NSs of English use so almost twice as often as German NNSs.

Another comparative study which investigated so in non-native and native speakers of English was conducted by Buysse (2012). The data in this study consisted of informal interviews with 40 undergraduate Belgian native speakers of Dutch, 20 of them majoring in

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Commercial Sciences and 20 majoring in English Linguistics. His data were compared to native English speaker data.21 _{There were 10 functions of so in this study distributed over}

three domains: ideational, interpersonal and textual. All the 10 functions were used by both the language learners and the NSs. The results of this study showed that the language learners used so significantly more than the English NSs and that the students in English Linguistics used so slightly more often than those in Commercial Sciences.

In academic advice sessions conducted in an English as a lingua franca (ELF) context, House (2010) found that the occurrence of the discourse marker so was extraordinarily frequent. So

was found to perform different functions, e.g. signalling causal and inferential connections between clauses and introducing a new topic. So is here employed as a deictic element that speakers use both to support the planning of their upcoming moves and to help them ‘look backwards’, summing up previous stretches of discourse. In another paper, based on the same data, House (2013) states that:

‘ELF speakers have acquired so when they need a self-monitoring filler to prevent conversational breakdown. So thus follows hesitation markers “erm”, “hmm”, or pauses of varying lengths. […] These co-occurrences can be taken as evidence for the use of so

as a self- prompting strategy to monitor a speaker’s output, marking his/her resumption of speech after hesitations and pauses both turn-initially and in mid-turn.’ (p. 62)

In sum, the review of the previous literature convincingly shows that the discourse marker so

is associated with inference or consequence. In addition, the studies show how NNSs of English use it (Anping, 2002; Buysse, 2012; Hays, 1992; Müller, 2005) and when they

21 _{This study used LINDSEI.}

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acquire it (Heys, 1992). In the following sections, the use of so by the Saudi English language learners is explored.