Download or read book Information Structuring in Discourse written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A text usually provides more information than a random sequence of clauses: It combines sentence-level information to larger units which are glued together by coherence relations that may induce a hierarchical discourse structure. Since linguists have begun to investigate texts as more complex units of linguistic communication, it has been controversially discussed what the appropriate level of analysis of discourse structure ought to be and what the criteria to identify (minimal) discourse units are. Linguistic structure–and more precisely, the extraction and integration of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information–is shown to be at the center of text processing and discourse comprehension. However, its role in the establishment of basic building blocks for a coherent discourse is still a subject of debate. This collection addresses these issues using various methodological approaches. It presents current results in theoretical, diachronic, experimental as well as computational research on structuring information in discourse.
Download or read book Information Structure and Sentence Form written by Knud Lambrecht and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-13 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which it is used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumption about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus.
Download or read book On Information Structure Meaning and Form written by Kerstin Schwabe and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of articles offers a new and compelling perspective on the interface connecting syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. At the core of this volume is the hypothesis that information structure represents the common interface of these grammatical components. Information structure is investigated here from different theoretical viewpoints yielding typologically relevant information and structural generalizations. In the volume's introductory chapter, the editors identify two central approaches to information structure: the formal and the interpretive view. The remainder of the book is organized accordingly. The first part examines information structure and grammar, concentrating on generalizations across languages. The second part investigates information structure and pragmatics, concentrating on clause structure and context. Through concrete analyses of topic, focus, and related phenomena across different languages, the contributors add new and convincing evidence to the research on information structure.
Download or read book The Structure of Discourse Pragmatic Variation written by Heike Pichler and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-04-08 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday language use overflows with discourse-pragmatic features. Their frequency, form and function can vary greatly across social groups and change dramatically over time. And yet these features have not figured prominently in studies of language variation and change. The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation demonstrates the theoretical insights that can be gained into both the structure of synchronic language variation and the interactional mechanisms creating it by subjecting discourse-pragmatic features to systematic variationist analysis. Introducing an innovative methodology that combines principles of variationist linguistics, grammaticalisation studies and conversation analysis, it explores patterns of variation in the formal encoding of I DON’T KNOW, I DON’T THINK and negative polarity tags in a north-east England interview corpus. Speakers strategically exploit the formal variability of these constructions to signal subtle meaning differences and to index social identities closely linked to the variables’ and their variants’ functional compartmentalisation in the variety. The methodology, results and implications of this study will be of great interest to scholars working throughout variationist sociolinguistics, grammaticalisation and discourse analysis.
Download or read book Conceptual Structure Discourse and Language written by Adele E. Goldberg and published by Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications. This book was released on 1996-06-13 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers is the result of the first Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language conference (CSDL) held at the University of California, San Diego. The conference brought together researchers from both 'Cognitive' and 'Functional' approaches to linguistics. The papers in this volume span a variety of topics, but the common thread running through them is the claim that semantics and discourse properties are fundamental to the understanding of language. The themes presented in the volume include an emphasis on the dynamic nature of language, the relevance of a notion of viewpoint in grammatical analysis, the role and nature of metaphor and cognitive blend, the possibility of non-derivational ways to capture relationships among constructions and the importance of lexical semantics. This volume will appeal to a wide range of linguists, echoing the theme of the conference - bringing together two diverse approaches to linguistics.
Download or read book Discourse on the Move written by Douglas Biber and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-09-19 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discourse on the Move is the first book-length exploration of how corpus-based methods can be used for discourse analysis, applied to the description of discourse organization. The primary goal is to bring these two analytical perspectives together: undertaking a detailed discourse analysis of each individual text, but doing so in terms that can be generalized across all texts of a corpus. The book explores two major approaches to this task: ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. In the ‘top-down’ approach, the functional components of a genre are determined first, and then all texts in a corpus are analyzed in terms of those components. In contrast, textual components emerge from the corpus analysis in the bottom-up approach, and the discourse organization of individual texts is then analyzed in terms of linguistically-defined textual categories. Both approaches are illustrated through case studies of discourse structure in particular genres: fund-raising letters, biology/biochemistry research articles, and university classroom teaching.
Download or read book Sentence and Discourse written by Jacqueline Guéron and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-29 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.
Download or read book Discourse Structure and Anaphora written by Barbara A. Fox and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-02-11 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara Fox's thoughtful study examines the use of anaphora in both written and spoken discourse. Any treatment of anaphora must consider the hierarchical of its source texts-type. Texts may be produced and heard or read linearly, but they are designed and understood hierarchically. Discourse Structure and Anaphora goes beyond the information processing concerns of cognitive science to assess the critical role played in all text-types by social, interactional and affective factors. It also considers the fact that texts are organised by socially accepted conventions. Using conversation analysis and rhetorical structure analysis, this book looks at the distribution of pronouns and full noun phrases in three different genres of English, taking data from naturally occurring face-to-face and telephone conversations, small newspaper and magazine articles and a psychoanalytic biography.
Download or read book Discourse Analysis written by Gillian Brown and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1983-07-28 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of how any language produced by man, spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose and within a context.
Download or read book Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian Discourse written by Lenore A. Grenoble and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role deixis plays in structuring language and its relation to the context of utterance provides the focus for an examination of information packaging in Russian discourse. The analysis is based on a model which interprets discourse as constituted by four interrelated frameworks the linguistic text, the text setting, the text content, and the participant framework. Deixis is divided into three primary dimensions of time, space, and person, which are metaphorically extended to secondary dimensions of information status (knowledge, focus, and theme). The linguistic devices which function in these dimensions encode information status by serving one or more communicative functions, including the presentative, directive, identifying, informing, acknowledging, and expressive functions. Discourse markers and deictics provide links between the content of the message, the linguistic text itself, and the context in which the message is produced. They introduce new participants, signal changes in thematic structure, bracket topical units, and mark the relative status of information. The book is written with both descriptive and theoretical goals. It aims to synthesize and revise current approaches to deixis and information packaging to account for the Russian data. The analysis extends beyond primary deixis to include knowledge structures and sources of knowledge, as well as the metalinguistic devices which signal changes in information flow, and grounding and saliency relations.
Download or read book Comparative and Contrastive Studies of Information Structure written by Carsten Breul and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010-09-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents original comparative and contrastive research into various aspects of information structure (topic, focus, contrastivity, givenness, anaphoricity) as well as into forms and structures whose realisation depends on information-structural factors (clefts, dislocations, reflexives, null subjects, prosodic features, interrogatives) in a number of different languages (Catalan, English, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian). Each contribution emphasises differences or commonalities between the languages under investigation with respect to the realisation of information structural categories or with respect to the information structural implications of a given form or structure. The specific comparative-contrastive perspective of the volume makes a substantial contribution towards a better understanding of language specific and universal aspects of information structure. It raises significant questions and provides solutions for the formal representation and the functional properties of information structural categories.
Download or read book Modes of Discourse written by Carlota S. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In studying discourse, the problem for the linguist is to find a fruitful level of analysis. Carlota Smith offers a new approach with this study of discourse passages, units of several sentences or more. She introduces the key idea of the 'Discourse Mode', identifying five modes: Narrative, Description, Report, Information, Argument. These are realized at the level of the passage, and cut across genre lines. Smith shows that the modes, intuitively recognizable as distinct, have linguistic correlates that differentiate them. She analyzes the properties that distinguish each mode, focusing on grammatical rather than lexical information. The book also examines linguistically based features that appear in passages of all five modes: topic and focus, variation in syntactic structure, and subjectivity, or point of view. Operating at the interface of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, the book will appeal to researchers and graduate students in linguistics, stylistics and rhetoric.
Download or read book The Grammar of Discourse written by Robert E. Longacre and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In that The Anatomy of Speech Notions (1976) was the precursor to The Grammar of Discourse (1983), this revision embodies a third "edition" of some of the material that is found here. The original intent of the 1976 volume was to construct a hierarchical arrangement of notional categories, which find surface realization in the grammatical constructions of the various languages of the world. The idea was to marshal the categories that every analyst-regardless of theoretical bent-had to take account of as cognitive entities. The volume began with a couple of chapters on what was then popularly known as "case grammar," then expanded upward and downward to include other notional categories on other levels. Chapters on dis course, monologue, and dialogue were buried in the center of the volume. In the 1983 volume, the chapters on monologue and dialogue discourse were moved to the fore of the book and the chapters on case grammar were made less prominent; the volume was then renamed The Grammar of Discourse. The current revision features more clearly than its predecessors the intersection of discourse and pragmatic concerns with grammatical structures on various levels. It retains and expands much of the former material but includes new material reflecting current advances in such topics as salience clines for discourse, rhetorical relations, paragraph structures, transitivity, ergativity, agency hierarchy, and word order typologies.
Download or read book Dislocated Elements in Discourse written by Benjamin Shaer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is about 'dislocation' – the removal of phrases from their canonical positions in a sentence to its left or right edge. Dislocation encompasses a wide range of linguistic phenomena, related to nominal and adverbial expressions and to the information structuring notions of topic and focus; and takes intriguingly different forms across languages. This book reveals some of the empirical richness of dislocation and some key puzzles related to its syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis.
Download or read book Language Structure Discourse and the Access to Consciousness written by Maksim Stamenov and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure, discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions address the following problems, among others: the history of the interpretation of conscious and unconscious mind in the theoretical discourse of modern linguistics; the determination of the structure of consciousness by the grammatical structure; the levels of access of grammatical and lexical information to consciousness; the development of cognitive complexity and control in ontogeny; pathologies of consciousness access in discourse comprehension and production; the cognitive contextual prerequisites for the representation of meaning in consciousness; the relationships between language structure and qualia in the phenomenology of experience; the dialogical structure of intentionality and meaning representation, etc. (Series B)
Download or read book The Theory and Practice of Discourse Parsing and Summarization written by Daniel Marcu and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most discourse researchers assume that full semantic understanding is necessary to derive the discourse structure of texts. This book documents an attempt to construct and use automatic and non-semantic computational structures for text summarization.
Download or read book The Composition of Meaning written by Alice G. B. ter Meulen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the modular design of generative theory the syntaxsemantics interface has accounted all along for meanings at the level of Logical Form. The syntaxpragmatics interface, on the other hand, is the result of what one may call the 'pragmatic turn' in the linguistic theory, where content is partitioned into given and new information. In other words, the structural division of the clause has been subjected to criteria of information, or discourse structure. Both interfaces require a structurally descriptive inventory whose specific shapes can be motivated on theory-internal grounds only. The present collection of original articles develops the concept of these interfaces further. The papers in the first section focus on the syntaxsemantics interface, those in the second section on the syntaxpragmatics interface.
