Download or read book Discourse as Structure and Process written by Teun A. van Dijk and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1997 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the structures of discourse and what are the functions of these structures in the communicative context? This volume explains how and why discourse is organized at various levels. The multidisciplinary contributions illustrate that discourse analysis goes far beyond the linguistic answer of designing grammars and goes hand in hand with the study of their uses and functions in the social context. Comprehensive and accessible, the volume covers a huge variety of discourse genres, including written and spoken, and storytelling and argumentation. The chapters also illustrate the necessity to examine the mental processes of the language users: How do people go about producing, understanding and remembering text or talk? The book stresses that both discourse and its mental processing have a social basis and can only be fully understood in relation to social interaction.

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 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 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 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 Studies written by Teun A Van Dijk and published by SAGE Publications Limited. This book was released on 1997-05-07 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume set is the first international text to provide a comprehensive introduction to discourse studies - the analysis of the linguistic, social, cultural and cognitive properties of text and talk in their various contexts. Designed specifically for students and other newcomers to this fascinating new `cross discipline', these volumes offer a wealth of theoretical, descriptive and methodological information. The contributors, world-renowned scholars from many countries and cultures, have written in an accessible, pedagogical style that combines useful literature reviews and clear illustrations of analysis with the originality of their own theoretical perspectives. These volumes are intended for use

Download or read book The Discourse Potential of Underspecified Structures written by Anita Steube and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-11-03 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume demonstrates the interdependence of man’s language capacity and his other conceptual capacities. This enables linguistic structures to be minimalised, and for extra-linguistic domains to provide much of the interpretations of sound and meaning. Underspecification is demonstrated in the word formation of Indo-European, Late Archaic Chinese and modern Khmer; on the word- and sentence levels by the event structures of German; and in the information structure predominantly of languages with the so-called free word order: German, Slavic languages, Arabic compared with English and the tone language Hausa. The volume is noteworthy due to the close cooperation between theoretical and experimental research. Within grammar, it has especially strengthened prosodic research and the syntax-phonology interrelations and their interpretations, and it has helped to create data bases for the relations within texts and to evaluate the findings.

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 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 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 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 Macrostructures written by Teun A. van Dijk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Macrostructures are higher-level semantic or conceptual structures that organize the ‘local’ microstructures of discourse, interaction, and their cognitive processing. They are distinguished from other global structures of a more schematic nature, which we call superstructures. Originally published in 1980, the theory of macrostructures outlined in this book is the result of research carried out during the previous 10 years in the domains of literary theory, text grammar, the general theory of discourse, pragmatics, and the cognitive psychology of discourse processing. The presentation of the theory is systematic but informal and at this stage was not intended to be fully formalized.

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: This collection presents current work on discourse structuring from a theoretical as well as a processing perspective. The main objectives are the investigation of appropriate levels of analysis for discourse segmentation and criteria for the identification of basic discourse units.

Download or read book Information Structure written by Nomi Erteschik-Shir and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007-01-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction to the role of information structure in grammar discusses a wide range of phenomena on the syntax-information structure interface. It examines theories of information structure and considers their effectiveness in explaining whether and how information structure maps onto syntax in discourse. Professor Erteschik-Shir begins by discussing the basic notions and properties of information structure, such as topic and focus, and considers their properties from differenttheoretical perspectives. She covers definitions of topic and focus, architectures of grammar, information structure, word order, the interface between lexicon and information structure, and cognitive aspects of information structure.In her balanced and readable account, the author critically compares the effectiveness of different theoretical approaches and assesses the value of insights drawn from work in processing and on language acquisition, variation, and universals. This book will appeal to graduate students of syntax and semantics in departments of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

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 Discourse Culture and Organization written by Tomas Marttila and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-22 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume brings together leading international researchers from across the social sciences to examine the theoretical premises, methodological options and critical potentials of the Essex School of discourse analysis, founded on the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. In doing so, it presents a clear picture of a poststructuralist and post-foundational research program to postdisciplinary discourse research. Divided into three parts, it begins by elaborating the ontological, theoretical and methodological foundations of the Essex School’s approach to discourse analysis. The second part provides empirical case studies showing how the Essex School research program informs and instructs empirical discourse research. In the concluding third part authors explain how and with what possible consequences this strand of discourse research contributes to social practices of critique. It offers a crucial contribution to the further methodologization and operationalization of the Essex School’s approach so as to make it a viable alternative to discourse-analytical approaches that take dominant positions in today’s ‘field of discourse studies’. The book's transdisciplinary focus will attract readers who use discourse analysis in all areas of the social sciences and humanities, particularly applied linguistics, cultural anthropology, sociology, philosophy and history.

Download or read book Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse written by Nicholas Asher and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse presents a novel framework and analysis of the ways we refer to abstract objects in natural language discourse. The book begins with a typology of abstract objects and related entities like eventualities. After an introduction to `bottom up, compositional' discourse representation theory (DRT) and to previous work on abstract objects in DRT (notably work on the semantics of the attitudes), the book turns to a semantic analysis of eventuality and abstract object denoting nominals in English. The book then substantially revises and extends the dynamic semantic framework of DRT to develop an analysis of anaphoric reference to abstract objects and eventualities that exploits discourse structure and the discourse relations that obtain between elements of the structure. A dynamic, semantically based theory of discourse structure (SDRT) is proposed, along with many illustrative examples. Two further chapters then provide the analysis of anaphoric reference to propositions VP ellipsis. The abstract entity anaphoric antecedents are elements of the discourse structures that SDRT develops. The final chapter discusses some logical and philosophical difficulties for a semantic analysis of reference to abstract objects. For semanticists, philosophers of language, computer scientists interested in natural language applications and discourse, philosophical logicians, graduate students in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and artificial intelligence.