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 An Analysis of Discourse pragmatic and Grammatical Constraints on the Acquisition and Development of Referential Choice in Child English written by Mary E. Hughes and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: This dissertation investigates how discourse-pragmatics informs children's choice of referential forms. Three studies utilizing naturalistic data examine the role that six discourse-pragmatic features play in the acquisition of referential forms in a non-null subject language, English. The influence of child-directed speech on development is also examined. Two accounts of omitted arguments in non-null subject languages (the competence-based account and the discourse-pragmatic account) are compared to discover how each contributes to a complete explanation. Study 1 analyzes the production of overt versus null subjects for four children and their caregivers at two times (T1: 2;0-2;7; T2: 3;0-3;1). This study confirms that children at T1 omit more subjects and produce fewer pronouns than children at T2. Moreover, results of a baseline study indicate that a full range of forms must be analyzed for a clear picture of the acquisition of referential choice to emerge. Study 2 measures the cumulative effect of six accessibility features on whether children and caregivers select null, pronominal, demonstrative, or lexical forms. Caregivers and children use lexical forms when referents are highly inaccessible demonstrating that at T1, children are somewhat sensitive to accessibility, and this sensitivity increases at T2. Multinomial regression analyses demonstrate that three features, PRIOR MENTION, PHYSICAL PRESENCE, and JOINT ATTENTION, are stronger predictors than the others. Study 3 explores explanations from the competence-based account and the discourse-pragmatic-based account for the well-established finding that children omit more subjects in non-finite contexts. Significantly more accessible subjects occur with non-finite verbs, revealing a previously unobserved interplay between discourse-pragmatic and grammatical effects, and providing further insight into the asymmetry of subject realization in finite and non-finite contexts. ANIMACY plays a particularly strong role, together with CONTEXTUAL and LINGUISTIC DISAMBIGUATION. Grammatical competence also plays a role; verb finiteness correlates with the realization of accessible subjects as pronouns (finite) or as null (non-finite). The evidence shows that each account complements rather than competes with the other. The centrality of the interface between syntax and pragmatics to this one aspect of acquisition provides a glimpse into how different theoretical approaches can work together to provide a more accurate picture of language development.
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 Discourse Pragmatics and the Verb written by Suzanne Fleischman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1990, this collection investigates grammatical categories associated with the verb as they are used by speakers and writers in real discourses and texts. Focusing on tense, aspect, mood, and voice in French, Spanish, and Italian, each chapter underscores the importance of context in our understanding of how grammatical categories work. Above and beyond their basic ‘grammatical functions’, categories of the verb are shown to operate in such capacities as structuring information in discourse, establishing point of view in a text, and creating textual cohesion. Importantly, this volume reflects the crucial role discourse-pragmatics factors play in our interpretation of the meanings of categories of grammar.
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 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 Imagination and Convention written by Ernest LePore and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do hearers manage to understand speakers? And how do speakers manage to shape hearers' understanding? Lepore and Stone show that standard views about the workings of semantics and pragmatics are unsatisfactory. They advance an alternative view which better captures what is going on in linguistic communication.
Download or read book Nonsentential Constituents written by Ellen Barton and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguists traditionally have assumed that full sentence sources truncated by ellipsis rules account for the grammatical structure as well as the semantic interpretation of fragments like B below: A: What happened in 1974? B: A scandal in the White House. A sentential structure dominated by the initial node of S is reduced to a fragment by the operation of ellipsis, and it is the full sentential source that provides the semantic interpretation for the remaining fragment.Barton argues against both of these assumptions. She claims that independent major lexical categories like the example above are generated within a grammar as syntactic structures dominated by the initial node of NP, VP, and so on, rather than S. Her second claim is that the major part of the interpretation of these independent constituent utterances takes place within a pragmatic context, rather than in the semantic component of a grammar. A theory of nonsentential constituents is presented consisting of two interacting models: an autonomous competence model of the grammar of nonsentential constituent structures, and a modular pragmatic model of the interpretation of independent constituent utterances in context.
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 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 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.
Download or read book The Nominative Accusative and their counterparts written by Kristin Davidse and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-07-25 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is devoted to the central cases relating to the basic oppositions between subject-object and agent-patient, viz. nominative and accusative, as well as their counterparts such as ergative and absolutive. It aims at contributing to the typological investigation of these cases by providing descriptive studies of ten different languages, not only Romance and Germanic languages, but also Polish and Basque, as well as Cora, Warrwa and Ewe. These studies show that the formal devices used to mark the two nuclear cases may be quite diverse (including non-overt and ‘configurational’ coding), but that all the languages studied crucially display a subject-object asymmetry, even languages such as Basque and Ewe for which this had been questioned. One of the most striking subthemes to emerge from this collection is the complexity of the object-zone, both with regard to formal and functional diversity. Various studies in the volume also contribute reflections, couched mainly in broadly cognitive-functional terms, about the semantic function of the subject-object contrast and why it is so central across languages.
Download or read book Some Aspects of Text Grammars written by Teun A. van Dijk and published by De Gruyter Mouton. This book was released on 1972 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "Some Aspects of Text Grammars".
Download or read book Issues in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Disjunction written by Mandy Simons and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2000, this book is about sentences containing the word or, dealing primarily with sentences in which or conjoins clauses, but also some cases in which it conjoins expressions of other categories. The author aims to give an account of the discourse properties and felicity conditions of disjunction, and to use this account in explaining the behaviour of presupposition projection and of anaphora in disjunctive sentences. The author begins by giving an account of the discourse properties and felicity conditions of disjunction before turning to the presupposition projection problem. The final two chapters discuss anaphora and its interactions with disjunction.
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.
