Download or read book Relevance Relations in Discourse written by Regina Blass and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-11-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory to show that connectivity in discourse is a pragmatic rather than a semantic matter: it results from relevance relations between text and context rather than from relations linguistically encoded in the text. In two introductory chapters, Regina Blass argues that relevance theory offers a more explanatory account of discourse connectivity than do alternative approaches based on notions of cohesion, coherence and topic. In subsequent chapters, she introduces data from the language Sissala and shows how relevance theory can play an important role in guiding and constraining semantic and pragmatic analyses of these data. This approach reveals unexpected results - for example the detection of an interpretive use marker in Sissala, with implications for the analysis of so-called 'hearsay phenomena' in other languages - and leads to an alternative basis for particle typology.

Download or read book Relevance and Linguistic Meaning written by Diane Blakemore and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-26 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The importance of discourse markers (words like 'so', 'however', and 'well') lies in the theoretical questions they raise about the nature of discourse and the relationship between linguistic meaning and context. They are regarded as being central to semantics because they raise problems for standard theories of meaning, and to pragmatics because they seem to play a role in the way discourse is understood. In this new and important study, Diane Blakemore argues that attempts to analyse these expressions within standard semantic frameworks raise even more problems, while their analysis as expressions that link segments of discourse has led to an unproductive and confusing exercise in classification. She concludes that the exercise in classification that has dominated discourse marker research should be replaced by the investigation of the way in which linguistic expressions contribute to the inferential processes involved in utterance understanding.

Download or read book Relevance Relations in Discourse written by Regina Blass and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-11-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using data from Sissala, a previously unanalyzed language, this book shows that the analysis of text and discourse is best approached from a cognitive rather than a strictly linguistic point of view. In two introductory chapters, Regina Blass argues that Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory, a general account of communication and cognition, sheds more light on conversational data than do alternative linguistic approaches based on such notions as cohesion, coherence, and topic. In subsequent chapters, she discusses the Sissala equivalents of words such as "indeed," "so," "after all," and "also," and compares them with their English, French, and German counterparts. This book offers convincing evidence that although cultural backgrounds may vary considerably, the principles involved in utterance interpretation are universally the same.

Download or read book Genre Relevance and Global Coherence written by C. Unger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-11-28 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to explain how discourse types influence the addressee's understanding of the communicator's intention. Examining global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, it argues that the key to a solution lies in the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson.

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 The Handbook of Pragmatics written by Laurence Horn and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Pragmatics is a collection of newly commissioned articles that provide an authoritative and accessible introduction to the field, including an overview of the foundations of pragmatic theory and a detailed examination of the rich and varied theoretical and empirical subdomains of pragmatics. Contains 32 newly commissioned articles that outline the central themes and challenges for current research in the field of linguistic pragmatics. Provides authoritative and accessible introduction to the field and a detailed examination of the varied theoretical and empirical subdomains of pragmatics. Includes extensive bibliography that serves as a research tool for those working in pragmatics and allied fields in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. Valuable resource for both students and professional researchers investigating the properties of meaning, reference, and context in natural language.

Download or read book Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method written by Marianne W Jørgensen and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2002-12-26 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A systematic introduction to discourse analysis as a body of theories and methods for social research. Introduces three approaches and explains the distinctive philosophical premises and theoretical perspectives of each approach.

Download or read book Discourse and Knowledge written by Teun A. van Dijk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both 'discourse' and 'knowledge' are fundamental concepts, but they are often treated separately. The first book to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to studying the relationship between these concepts, Discourse and Knowledge introduces the new field of epistemic discourse analysis and uses a wide range of examples to illustrate the theory.

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 Relevance Theory Figuration and Continuity in Pragmatics written by Agnieszka Piskorska and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-05-20 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters in this volume apply the methodology of relevance theory to develop accounts of various pragmatic phenomena which can be associated with the broadly conceived notion of style. Some of them are devoted to central cases of figurative language (metaphor, metonymy, puns, irony) while others deal with issues not readily associated with figurativeness (from multimodal communicative stimuli through strong and weak implicatures to discourse functions of connectives, particles and participles). Other chapters shed light on the use of specific communicative styles, ranging from hate speech to humour and humorous irony. Using the relevance-theoretic toolkit to analyse a spectrum of style-related issues, this volume makes a case for the model of pragmatics founded upon inference and continuity, understood as the non-existence of sharply delineated boundaries between classes of communicative phenomena.

Download or read book Text and Discourse Constitution written by János S. Petöfi and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Text and Discourse Constitution: Empirical Aspects, Theoretical Approaches (Research in Text Theory.

Download or read book Textual Relations in the Qur an written by Salwa M. El-Awa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-06-19 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing a new development in the study of Qur'anic text, this book tackles the issue of Qur'anic text structure by fusing the fields of linguistics and Qur'anic studies. The Qur'an contains many long suras covering diverse topics but with no apparent common context within which such variety can be explained. This book proposes a new explanation of Qur'anic text structure, arguing that the long suras have structure that are explicable within a framework for the mechanisms of human verbal communication. Through a systematic step-by-step analysis of the cognitive process involved in verbal communication and comprehension of text, this work provides interesting and useful insights into methods of analysis, mechanisms and dynamics of the Qur'anic text structure. The unique application of a sophisticated linguistic theory to the Qur'an introduces an entirely new way of reading the Qur'an and with detailed analysis of two Qur'anic passages the book presents a solid working out of the theory that will be accessible to both linguists and scholars of the Qur'an.

Download or read book Current Issues in Relevance Theory written by Villy Rouchota and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998-06-15 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eleven original papers collected in this volume address themselves to some of the central issues in the relevance theoretic research programme since the 1995 publication of the second edition of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Several papers investigate the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning in order to account for the semantics of discourse connectives, for the role of intonation in utterance interpretation, and for focus phenomena. Other papers explore the role of the relevance theoretic notion of metarepresentation in utterance interpretation and prove its usefulness in the study of both linguistic topics such as epistemic modality and conditional clauses, and in the reanalysis of literary issues such as verbal humour. Some of the central pragmatic issues dealt with are the interpretation of semantically underdetermined linguistic forms, the role and nature of pragmatic inference, the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning and the separation between explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning. The theory’s application to sociolinguistic topics is assessed and developed in an inspired account of phatic communication; and the theory’s usefulness in accounting for certain types of “grammatical” constraints is explored in relation to certain restrictions in the interpretation of indefinite descriptions.

Download or read book Analyzing Discourse Revised Edition written by Robert A Dooley and published by SIL International. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than applying a rigid theory or surveying a variety of approaches, Analyzing Discourse provides a methodology that has been refined over years of use. As an introduction to discourse analysis for linguistic field workers, it is practical, addressing issues commonly confronted by field linguists. The material follows a functional and cognitive approach that seems to be a good approximation of how discourse is actually produced and understood. Since the aim of the manual is introductory rather than comprehensive, most chapters are relatively short, and the whole can be covered in fifteen classroom hours. References are provided for further reading on the topics discussed. The manual can be used individually or in group sessions, such as in a formal course or a linguistic seminar. In a group setting, concepts can be illustrated by examining texts beyond those provided in the manual. This revision corrects the errata of the classic first edition, which remains a solid presentation of the basic concepts for analyzing discourse.

Download or read book Context in Language Learning and Language Understanding written by Kirsten Malmkjær and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-08 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume represent varied views on the role of context in language learning.

Download or read book Directions in Relevant Logic written by J. Norman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relevance logics came of age with the one and only International Conference on relevant logics in 1974. They did not however become accepted, or easy to promulgate. In March 1981 we received most of the typescript of IN MEMORIAM: ALAN ROSS ANDERSON Proceedings of the International Conference of Relevant Logic from the original editors, Kenneth W. Collier, Ann Gasper and Robert G. Wolf of Southern Illinois University. 1 They had, most unfortunately, failed to find a publisher - not, it appears, because of overall lack of merit of the essays, but because of the expense of producing the collection, lack of institutional subsidization, and doubts of publishers as to whether an expensive collection of essays on such an esoteric, not to say deviant, subject would sell. We thought that the collection of essays was still (even after more than six years in the publishing trade limbo) well worth publishing, that the subject would remain undeservedly esoteric in North America while work on it could not find publishers (it is not so esoteric in academic circles in Continental Europe, Latin America and the Antipodes) and, quite important, that we could get the collection published, and furthermore, by resorting to local means, published comparatively cheaply. It is indeed no ordinary collection. It contains work by pioneers of the main types of broadly relevant systems, and by several of the most innovative non-classical logicians of the present flourishing logical period. We have slowly re-edited and reorganised the collection and made it camera-ready.

Download or read book The Greek Verb Revisited written by Steven E. Runge and published by Lexham Press. This book was released on 2016-11-02 with total page 799 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past 25 years, debate regarding the nature of tense and aspect in the Koine Greek verb has held New Testament studies at an impasse. The Greek Verb Revisited examines recent developments from the field of linguistics, which may dramatically shift the direction of this discussion. Readers will find an accessible introduction to the foundational issues, and more importantly, they will discover a way forward through the debate. Originally presented during a conference on the Greek verb supported by and held at Tyndale House and sponsored by the Faculty of Divinity of Cambridge University, the papers included in this collection represent the culmination of scholarly collaboration. The outcome is a practical and accessible overview of the Greek verb that moves beyond the current impasse by taking into account the latest scholarship from the fields of linguistics, Classics, and New Testament studies.