Das Adverb jetzt zwischen Zeit- und Gesprächsdeixis

Abstract

Abstract The adverb jetzt is used extremely frequently in everyday spoken language. Usually, jetzt is described as a deictic adverb which activates a concept of temporal proximity (“now”), which is contrasted to some past or future temporal distance (“not now”). Indeed, one can find many instances of such a basic temporal use of jetzt in data of spoken German. Often, however, the functions of jetzt are somewhat more complicated: Sometimes, jetzt is used to refer back in time, in other cases it refers forward, in yet other instances, it refers to some virtual temporal and discourse-structural space within narratives, sometimes, it is a semantically empty discourse marker which is used to structure and partition talk, and finally, there are cases where jetzt can only be described in terms of a conglomerate of several of these meanings and functions. On the basis of a corpus of spoken German (including audio material from the second series of the TV show Big Brother, radio phone-in shows and informal interaction between friends or families) this article aims to give a qualitative and detailed description of the syntactic, prosodic, semantic, functional and sequential features of the different uses of jetzt within this corpus. In a next step, the question is asked which of these features are necessary and sufficient for a full description and finally, an attempt is made to integrate these findings into the descriptive framework of Construction Grammar.