Download or read book Discourse and Pragmatic Constraints on Grammatical Choices written by Maria Manoliu-Manea and published by Brill Academic Pub. This book was released on 1994 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes a quest for discourse and pragmatic features responsible for so-called optional grammatical choices. In an attempt to adduce new evidence for the assumption that, in order to capture adequately the reasons for the choice of various grammatical devices, a multi-variable model is necessary which could account for the development and the functioning of grammaticalized ethno-linguistic features in a variety of languages. The main hypothesis put forward is that, limited as they are by the possibilities of a given language, the choices open to speakers when reconstructing linguistically the state of affairs are determined first and foremost by their foci of attention. Orality is one the most salient features of Romanian, but the profound consequences of such a feature for Romanian grammar have not been fully explored. The most frequently invoked characteristic of this orality has been labeled 'redundancy', as is manifest in the proliferation of clitics. But, as shown by the data analyzed in this book, the impact of orality on Romanian grammar is much more far-reaching, encompassing such phenomena as: (a) the preference for specific syntactic constructions as markers of the central discourse entity around which the event is reconstructed linguistically (b) the grammaticalization of the means for marking differences in the degree of discourse prominence (the degree of discourse-activated knowledge) (c) the extensive use of markers of discourse continuity (d) the means by which the story is 'visualized'; the grammaticalization of various means used for marking stage distance (backgrounding versus foregrounding the event) (e) diversified means for marking differences between speakers' expectations. The book highlights those features of Romanian grammar which can be most satisfactorily explained by the interaction between grammar and various discourse and pragmatic strategies.
Download or read book Control in Grammar and Pragmatics written by Rudolf R?i?ka and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1999-07-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The claim that “…pronominals have phonological features only where they must, for some reason”, is strongly supported by the occurrence of the null pronoun PRO as coined and introduced by Noam Chomsky. How reference of PRO is determined is the main subject of control theory, the subsystem of core grammar to which this study is dedicated. Chomsky has not followed up his “natural suggestion that choice of controller is determined by theta roles or other semantic properties of the verb, perhaps pragmatic conditions of some sort.” But then, a great many students of control have engaged in exploring thematic roles as tools most suitable for investigating control. Shifting analysis of control to the relationship between thematic features carried by PRO and its potential controller respectively, was a turning point in control theory. Control proved to be a by-product of satisfying matching conditions that exist between thematic properties of PRO and its licit controller. The constraints derived from them are not construction-specific. If grammar and pragmatics seem to go hand in hand, their complicity in determining control behavior is elucidated by showing that pragmatic factors can be referred to by grammatical constraints. Data of nine languages are used in the study.
Download or read book Discourse and Pragmatics in Functional Grammar written by John H. Connolly and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 1997 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contents of this volume are a selection from the papers given at the Sixth International Conference on Functional Grammar (ICFG), which was held in York, at the University College of Ripon and York St John, from 18 to 22 August, 1994. Functional Grammar as understood in the ICFGs and in this volume is the linguistic model as proposed by Simon Dik, and to date most extensively described and discussed in Dik (1989). The indebtedness of the FG-community to Simon Dik, who died six months after the conference was held, is great indeed. The editors hope that this volume is a fitting tribute to his work.
Download or read book Grammar Meaning and Pragmatics written by Frank Brisard and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten volumes of "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical, cognitive, cultural, social, variational, interactional, or discursive points of view, this fifth volume looks at the field of linguistic pragmatics from a primarily grammatical angle. That is, it asks in which particular sense a variety of older and more recent functional (rather than generative) models of grammar relate to the study of language in use: how this affects their general outlook on language structure, whether issues of language use inform the very makeup of these models or are merely included as possible research themes, and how far the actual integration of pragmatics ultimately goes (is it a module/layer or is the model truly usage-based ?). Each of the authors presenting these models has taken systematic care to highlight the relevant problems and focus on the implications of considering pragmatic phenomena from the point of view of grammar. Furthermore, a limited number of chapters deal with traditional topics in the grammatical literature, and specifically those which are called pragmatic because they either are not strictly concerned with truth (semantics), or receive their (truth) value only from an interaction with context. In the introduction, these theories and topics are set up against the historical background of a gradually changing attitude, on the part of grammarians, towards questions of linguistic knowledge and behavior, and the role of learning in their relationship."
Download or read book Pragmatics Discourse and Text written by Erich Steiner and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1988 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Corpus and Context written by Svenja Adolphs and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corpus and Context explores the relationship between corpus linguistics and pragmatics by discussing possible frameworks for analysing utterance function on the basis of spoken corpora. The book articulates the challenges and opportunities associated with a change of focus in corpus research, from lexical to functional units, from concordance lines to extended stretches of discourse, and from the purely textual to multi-modal analysis of spoken corpus data. Drawing on a number of spoken corpora including the five million word Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE, funded by CUP (c)), a specific speech act function is being explored using different approaches and different levels of analysis. This involves a close analysis of contextual variables in relation to lexico-grammatical and discoursal patterns that emerge from the corpus data, as well as a wider discussion of the role of context in spoken corpus research.
Download or read book Constraints in Discourse 2 written by Peter Kühnlein and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Text is highly structured, and structured at a variety of levels. But what are the units of text, which levels are at stake, and what establishes the structure that binds the units together? This volume, just as the predecessor a spin off of one of the workshops on constraints in discourse, contains the most recent, thoroughly reviewed papers by specialists in the area that try to give answers to such questions. It helps deepening the understanding of a multiplicity of mechanisms and constraints that are at work during production and comprehension of well-formed discourse. Researchers from linguistics, both formal and psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive sciences will appreciate this book as a valuable resource for information and inspiration.
Download or read book Perspectives on Semantics Pragmatics and Discourse written by Ferenc Kiefer and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Ferenc Kiefer of the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was instrumental in bringing early transformational grammar to Europe. His extensive work contributes substantially to making a connection between the grammatical theory and other areas of linguistics. The 17 essays in this book celebrate his career by continuing to explore inter-area research in linguistics: pragmatics in grammar (de Groot, van Riemsdijk, Dressler & Barbaresi, Comrie), semantic compositionality and pragmatics (Wunderlich, Partee, Borschev, Szabo, Bach), logical structures and universals in semantics and pragmatics (van der Auwera, Bultinck, Burton-Roberts, Harnish, Wierzbicka) dialogue and thematic structure (Jonasson, Doherty, Hajicova, Panevova, Sgall, Allwood, Fraser).
Download or read book Discourse and Grammar written by Günther Grewendorf and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-12-19 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together papers from various subfields of theoretical linguistics, this volume gives a representative glimpse of current research on form and function in grammar. Its overarching topic is as old as it is hot: the relation between the major clause types as determined in syntax, and their canonical or idiosyncratic roles in discourse as characterized in pragmatic terms. Though none of the papers addresses this topic in its full breadth, they can all be seen to make their specific contributions to it, scrutinizing the pertinent aspects of the grammatical interfaces and elaborating detailed case studies. The first part of this collection comprises three papers (by Asher, Portner, and van Rooy & Franke) devoted to the semantics/pragmatics interface. The second part, with contributions by Rizzi, Saito, and Belletti, deals with the question of how the constitution of sentence types can be related to properties of functional categories in the clausal periphery.The last four papers (Bošković, van Riemsdijk, Bauke & Roeper, Williams) concern the interaction of lexical elements and clausal functional categories, revealing unexpected parallels between clause structure and the internal structure, particularly in lexical categories.
Download or read book Potential Questions at the Semantics Pragmatics Interface written by Edgar Onea and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Potential Questions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Edgar Onea proposes a novel component for question under discussion based discourse pragmatic theories thereby combining such theories with new ideas from inquisitive semantics. He shows how potential questions account for an entire range of grammatical phenomena. These phenomena include the semantics of indefinite determiners, the meaning contribution of nominal appositives, specificational constructions and non restrictive relative clauses. This book delivers a comprehensive and empirically rich investigation into the role of questions in natural language interpretation. Drawing on data from German, English, Hungarian and Russian, Edgar Onea's study significantly broadens our understanding of conventional sensitivity to questions through formally rigorous analyses of specificational particles, parentheticals and indefinites. The Potential Questions framework offers a new and exciting perspective on utterance meanings as not just addressing, but also raising questions, with important consequences for integrated analyses of discourse structure and discourse relations. This book is essential reading for anybody interested in the semantics-pragmatics interface. Judith Tonhauser, The Ohio State University
Download or read book Constraints in Discourse written by Anton Benz and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-04-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a commonplace to say that the meaning of text is more than the conjunction of the meaning of its constituents. But what are the rules governing its interpretation, and what are the constraints that define well-formed discourse? Answers to these questions can be given from various perspectives. In this edited volume, leading scientists in the field investigate these questions from structural, cognitive, and computational perspectives. The last decades have seen the development of numerous formal frameworks in which the structure of discourse can be analysed, the most important of them being the Linguistic Discourse Model, Rhetorical Structure Theory and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. This volume contains an introduction to these frameworks and the fundamental topics in research about discourse constraints. Thus it should be accessible to specialists in the field as well as advanced graduate students and researchers from neighbouring areas. The volume is of interest to discourse linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, and computational linguists.
Download or read book Syntax and Pragmatics in Functional Grammar written by A. Machtelt Bolkestein and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Code switching Grammatical pragmatic and psycholinguistic aspects written by Elena Gluth and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2020-04-06 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,5, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: The aim of this paper is to provide a complete overview over the phenomenon of code-switching. In this paper, we will summarize the knowledge currently available on the discourse, linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of code-switching. Such an overview can be used for different purposes: for seminar reports and papers, and for the preparation for exams in linguistics. The first chapter of this paper deals with grammatical/syntactic aspects of code-switching. It is followed by the analysis of the pragmatic/discourse aspects of code-switching. Within the last chapter on psycholinguistic aspects of code-switching we will present some findings of researches on children's acquisition of bilingual speech. Another point of our concern will be the influence of the average bilingual competence on the patterns of code-switching used by bilinguals.
Download or read book Appositive Relative Clauses in English written by Rudy Loock and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds new light on Appositive Relative Clauses (ARCs), a structure that is generally studied from a merely syntactic point of view, in opposition to Determinative (or Restrictive) Relative Clauses (DRCs). In this volume, ARCs are examined from a discourse/pragmatic point of view, independently of DRCs, in order to provide a positive definition of the structure. After a presentation of the morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of ARCs, a taxonomy of their functions in discourse is established for both written and spoken English based on the results of a corpus-based investigation. Constraints are then defined within an information-packaging approach to syntactic structures to show why speakers choose ARCs over other competing allostructures, i.e. syntactic structures that fulfil similar discourse functions (e.g. nominal appositives, independent clauses, adverbials, noun premodifiers, topicalization). The end result is a deeper understanding of the richness of ARCs in their natural contexts of use.
Download or read book Contrastive Rhetoric Revisited and Redefined written by Clayann Gilliam Panetta and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2000-11-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of contrastive rhetoric was first put forth by Robert Kaplan in the mid 1960s to explain the differences in writing and discourse between students who were native speakers of English and their international counterparts. Over the past three decades, contrastive rhetoric theory has been used primarily by linguists in language centers and involved in ESL teaching. As the number of international students in American universities has continued to grow, contrastive rhetoric has become increasingly relevant to all disciplines, and to rhetoric and composition in particular. This volume breaks important new ground in its examination of contrastive rhetoric in the exclusive context of composition. The editor has assembled contributors with varying areas of specialty to demonstrate how the traditional definition of contrastive rhetoric theory can be applied to composition in new and innovative ways and how it can be redefined through the lens of addressing "difference" issues in writing. Thus, the volume as a whole clarifies how the basic principles of contrastive rhetoric theory can help composition instructors to understand writing and rhetorical decisions. With the inclusion of current research on multicultural issues, this collection is appropriate for all instructors in ESL writing, including teachers in rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. It can also be used as an advanced text for students in these areas. Wherever it is employed, it is certain to offer significant new insights into the application of contrastive rhetoric within the composition discipline.
Download or read book Pragmatic Markers in English written by Laurel J. Brinton and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.
Download or read book Preferred Argument Structure written by John W. Du Bois and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003-09-29 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preferred Argument Structure offers a profound insight into the relationship between language use and grammatical structure. In his original publication on Preferred Argument Structure, Du Bois (1987) demonstrated the power of this perspective by using it to explain the origins of ergativity and ergative marking systems. Since this work, the general applicability of Preferred Argument Structure has been demonstrated in studies of language after language. In this collection, the authors move beyond verifying Preferred Argument Structure as a property of a given language. They use the methodology to reveal more subtle aspects of the patterns, for example, to look across languages, diachronically or synchronically, to examine particular grammatical relations, and to examine special populations or particular genres. This volume will appeal to linguists interested in the relationship of pragmatics and grammar generally, in the typology of grammatical relations, and in explanations derived from data- and corpus-based approaches to analysis.
