Download or read book Discourse Pragmatics and Cleft Sentences in English written by Nancy Ann Hedberg and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Discourse Pragmatics and Cleft Sentences in English written by Nancy Hedberg and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The English it Cleft written by Amanda Patten and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-12-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the structure and function of the English it-cleft configuration from within the framework of construction grammar. It defends a straightforward extraposition-from-NP analysis (on which the cleft clause is a restrictive relative, modifying the initial it) and claims that all types of it-cleft involve nominal predication. Support for this analysis comes from three main areas: (a) the central role of definiteness in the creation of specificational meaning, (b) the existence and makeup of predicational (and proverbial) it-clefts, and (c) the early, historical it-cleft data. In addition, the book contains a sizeable diachronic component, drawing data from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English and from the International Corpus of English - Great Britain. This investigation informs and advances what is an otherwise simple account of the English it-cleft, explaining how and why the configuration has developed an assortment of peculiar, construction-specific properties over time.
Download or read book Cleft and Pseudo cleft Constructions in English written by Peter Collins and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is an investigation of cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in contemporary English. It is the first study of such constructions to fully explore the view, now widespread among linguists, that any attempt to satisfactorily explain their structural and functional characteristics must refer to concepts directly related to their use in communication. Its findings reveal that it is necessary to invoke such discourse-relevant notions as information, topic and theme. By using a standard written corpus and a standard spoken corpus of British English, Peter Collins is able to analyze systematically the discourse-functions of clefts and pseudo-clefts, provide information on the frequency of these construcions in different genres, and prevent the tidying-up found in examples devised by the linguist. It is a useful study of the interrelations of grammar, pragmatics and discourse, and a persuasive illustration of the importance of corpus-based approaches to linguistic description.
Download or read book Main Processes of Thematization and Postponement in English written by Maria Martinez Lirola and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to describe the main formal and functional characteristics of all the syntactic processes of thematization and postponement in English. It describes in detail the main aspects of cleft sentences, reversed-pseudo cleft sentences, topicalization, inversion, left-dislocation, passive, extraposition, existential sentences, pseudo-cleft sentences, postposition and right-dislocation. The main aspects of use will be illustrated with examples from three novels written by the South African writer Alan Paton. The book is divided into three main chapters: the first one is a general introduction which explains some general concepts related to word order, to the corpus of examples and to Alan Paton, the author of the novels chosen as a corpus of examples; the second chapter is devoted to the syntactic processes of thematization in English and the third one to the syntactic processes of postponement.
Download or read book Territory of Information written by Akio Kamio and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1997-07-03 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most higher animals are said to be territorial, as a huge amount of work in ethology has made it clear. Human beings are no exceptions. They tend to occupy a certain space around them where they claim their own presence and exclude others quite naturally. If territory is so prevalent among higher animals including humans, then isn't it possible to observe its manifestations in aspects of human language? Territory of Information starts from this fundamental question and attempts to demonstrate the key function of the concept of territory in the informational structure and syntax of natural language. It offers an analysis of English, Japanese, and Chinese in terms of territory and shows its fundamental importance in the interface of information and syntax in these languages. Moreover, it argues that the concept of territory plays a major role in the evidentiality of a number of languages and in the linguistic structure of politeness. It also makes much reference to discourse and conversational analysis. Thus, this is a book which might interest readers concerned with pragmatics in general, the relationship between informational structure and syntax, evidentiality, politeness, discourse analysis, and conversational analysis.
Download or read book Ancient Texts and Modern Readers written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of articles by an international group of specialists presents original research, new lines of inquiry, and novel insights on subjects related to ancient Hebrew linguistics, Bible translation, and biblical interpretation.
Download or read book Dialogue Games written by L. Carlson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay constitutes yet another approach to the fields of inquiry variously known as discourse analysis, discourse grammar, text grammar, functional 1 syntax, or text linguistics. An attempt is made to develop a fairly abstract unified theoretical frame work for the description of discourse which actually helps explain concrete facts of the discourse grammar of a naturallanguage.2 This plan is reflected in the division of the study into two parts. In the first part, a semiformal framework for describing conversational discourse is developed in some detail. In the second part, this framework is applied to the functional syntax of English. The relation of the discourse grammar of Part II to the descriptive frame work of Part I can be instructively compared to the relation of Tarskian semantics to model theory. Tarski's semantics defmes a concept of truth of a sentence in a model, an independently identified construct. Analogously, my rules of discourse grammar defme a concept of appropriateness of a sentence to a given context. The task of the first Part of the essay is to characterize the relevant notion of context. Although my original statement of the problem was linguistic - how to describe the meaning, or function, of certain aspects of word order and intonation - Part I is largely an application of various methods and results of philosophical logic. The justification of the interdisciplinary approach is the simplicity and naturalness of the eventual answers to specific linguistic problems in Part II.
Download or read book Cleft Structures written by Katharina Hartmann and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of clefts is beyond doubt a golden oldie. It has captivated linguists of different disciplines for decades. The fascination arises from the unique syntax of clefts in interaction with their pragmatic and semantic interpretation. Clefts structure sentences according to the information state of the constituents contained in them. They are special as they exhibit a rather uncommon syntactic form to achieve the separation of the prominent part, either focal or topical, from the background of the clause. Despite the long-lasting interest in clefts, linguists have not yet come to an agreement on many basic questions. The articles contained in this volume address these issues from new theoretical and empirical perspectives. Based on data from about 50 languages from all over the world, this volume presents new arguments for the proper derivation of clefts, and contributes to the ongoing debate on the information-structural impact of cleft structures. Theoretically, it combines modern syntactic theorizing with investigations at the interface between grammar and information-structure.
Download or read book Genericity written by Alda Mari and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the study of generics. It gathers new work from senior and young researchers and is organized along three main areas of study: the generic and individuals; genericity and time; and the sources of genericity and types of judgment.
Download or read book The Grammar Pragmatics Interface written by Nancy Hedberg and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers celebrates the work of Jeanette K. Gundel, who has contributed to the field of the grammar-pragmatics interface through her publications on the syntactic realization of topic and comment and the cognitive status of referring expressions, as well as by inspiring colleagues to make contributions to the overall field of pragmatics. This volume collects together papers from colleagues and former students on pragmatics and syntax, pragmatics and reference, and pragmatics and social variables. The volume includes papers devoted to explicating the grammar-pragmatics interface, with the focus of the papers ranging from Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, construction grammar, and genre theory to formal semantics, as well as papers devoted to expanding on Gundel's own original approach to factors such as the cognitive status decisions underlying speakers' choice of referring expression and the topic and focus decisions underlying speakers' choice of syntactic construction.
Download or read book Discourse Functions of Cleft Sentences written by Monika Doherty and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Topic Antitopic and Verb Agreement in Non standard French written by Knud Lambrecht and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1981-01-01 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author describes and explains the syntactic and pragmatic properties of the nominal and pronominal elements in sentences of the types Ces Romains ils sont fous and Ils sont fous, ces Romains, which, in spite of their frequent occurrence, have so far received little attention among linguists and grammarians. He argues that far from having the marginal status of a linguistic anomaly, the cooccurrence in the same clause of coreferential nouns and pronouns is one formal manifestation of an important functional principle in modern French: the encoding of a topic-comment relationship in the surface structure of the sentence. The pronouns in sentences such as the ones mentioned are interpreted as agreement markers. The syntactic and semantic differences between topics and anti-topics are analyzed.
Download or read book Comparison Between It clefts and WH Clefts Similarities and Differences written by Gabriela Bara and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2010-03 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, Technical University of Braunschweig (Englisches Seminar), course: Introduction to Information Structure, language: English, abstract: From language to language, there are different alternatives in which a speaker can structure information. Information structure deals with the highlighting of pieces of information in sentences. Even though there are a variety of ways in which the same basic informational content can be conveyed, the preference for a particular way reveals how the speaker's semantic representation is transposed into syntactical data. Moreover, the speaker's choice for structuring information into a particular linguistic form shows the coherent way in which utterances are connected in sequences, revealing thus the importance of discourse. There are several syntactic devices that are able to encode the pragmatic information of a preferred alternative. One type of such devices used to mark information structure is cleft constructions. There are two major types of clefts: it-clefts and WH-clefts, also called pseudo-clefts. There has been claimed in the literature for a long time that cleft constructions are interchangeable. Clefts present a series of syntactic similarities, but they behave differently in discourse. The purpose of this paper is to prove that it-clefts and WH-clefts are not interchangeable. In doing so, data will be analyzed by comparing clefts as far as form, structure, and discourse functions are concerned, and eventually, in the light of given and known information, I will show the essential differences between them. Although the grammatical forms are in direct relation and determine to some degree the information structure in a cleft, apart from the syntactical level, of significant importance is the analysis of cleft constructions as integrated components of a discourse. One should take into account the natural flow of la
Download or read book Analytic Syntax written by Otto Jespersen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1984-10-15 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen puts forward his views on grammatical structure in a kind of shorthand formalism, devising symbols that represent various grammatical elements and then analyzing numerous sentences in terms of these symbols. The contemporaneity of these analyses is remarkable, for they allude to concepts that were uncongenial to linguists in 1937 when the book was first published, but which have come to be generally accepted in the linguistics community during the past twenty-five years.
Download or read book Questions in Discourse written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume Questions in Discourse - Semantics contains an overview of the semantic analysis and discourse-structuring role of questions, together with in-depth contributions on individual aspects of question meanings and the function of implicit questions in discourse.
Download or read book Structural functional Studies in English Grammar written by Michael Hannay and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents a number of studies in the lexico-grammar of English which focus on the one hand on close reading of language in context and on the other hand on current functional theoretical concerns. The various contributions represent distinct functionalist models of language, including Functional Grammar and Functional Discourse Grammar, Systemic-Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar, Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar. Taken together, however, they typify current work being conducted from the grammatical perspective within the functionalist enterprise, emphasizing on the relation between structure and usage. A fundamental goal of the enterprise is to identify linguistic structures which are constrained by specific features of use, or which actually encode specific features of use, as many of the contributions here show.
