Topic Continuity In Discourse

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Topic Continuity in Discourse

Author : Talmy Givón
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027228671
Total Pages : 499 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Topic Continuity in Discourse by : Talmy Givón

Download or read book Topic Continuity in Discourse written by Talmy Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The functional notion of topic or topicality has suffered, traditionally, from two distinct drawbacks. First, it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second, quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major departure from past practices, without rejecting both their intuitive appeal and the many good results yielded by them. First, topic and topicality are re-analyzed as a scalar property, rather than as an either/or discrete prime. Second, the graded property of topicality is firmly connected with sensible cognitive notions culled from gestalt psychology, such as predictability or continuity. Third, we develop and utilize precise measures and quantified methods by which the property of topicality of clausal arguments can be studied in connected discourse, and thus be properly hinged in its rightful context, that of topic identification, maintenance and recoverability in discourse. Fourth, we show that many grammatical phenomena which used to be studied by linguists in isolation, all partake in one functional domain of grammar, that of topic identification. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of this new approach to the study of topic and topicality by applying the same text-based quantifying method to a number of typologically-diverse languages, in studying actual texts. Languages studied here are: Written and spoken English, spoken Spanish, Biblical Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa, Japanese, Chamorro and Ute.

Implicatures in Discourse

Author : Sarah E. Blackwell
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9781588112798
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (127 download)

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Book Synopsis Implicatures in Discourse by : Sarah E. Blackwell

Download or read book Implicatures in Discourse written by Sarah E. Blackwell and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Implicatures in Discourse" examines Spanish conversations and oral narratives in order to seek support for a pragmatic theory of anaphora. Blackwell argues that the use of anaphoric expressions may be considered conversational implicatures that give rise to inferences of coreference and non-coreference. Her analysis shows how speakers abide by Levinson's 'neo-Gricean' principles of Quantity, Informativeness, and Manner, but that grammatical, semantic, cognitive, and pragmatic constraints interact with the neo-Gricean principles, influencing anaphora use and interpretation. The study also reveals how mutual knowledge, including familiarity with Spanish social and cultural norms, enables interlocutors to use and comprehend minimal referring expressions, which cultural outsiders may not be able to interpret. While drawing on earlier work on anaphora and reference, this book offers a fresh look at discourse anaphora, and sheds light on the ways in which speakers felicitously use and interpret anaphoric expressions in a variety of communicative contexts.

Intonation Units in Japanese Conversation

Author : Kazuko Matsumoto
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9789027230751
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (37 download)

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Book Synopsis Intonation Units in Japanese Conversation by : Kazuko Matsumoto

Download or read book Intonation Units in Japanese Conversation written by Kazuko Matsumoto and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how speakers of Japanese organize their messages into coherent units as they jointly and interactively construct conversational discourse. Specifically, it investigates the syntactic, informational, and functional structures of intonation units (IUs) as basic units of discourse production and information flow in spoken communication. It addresses various research topics: clause vs. phrase centrality, relationship between IUs and clauses, functions of independent NPs, preferred argument/clause structure and transitivity, interrelationship among functional components, and the role of new and interactional information in the shaping of IU syntax. Overall, it tries to elucidate not only the preferred IU structures that are typical of the way Japanese speakers talk in connected discourse, but also possible relationships between the structures and their implications. Besides three main chapters discussing the results of quantitative and qualitative analyses, it also includes an introductory chapter comprehensively covering key issues in research on information flow in spoken discourse in general. Thus the book will be useful to all students and researchers of functional linguistics and discourse analysis.

Discourse Topics

Author : Richard Watson Todd
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027266220
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Discourse Topics by : Richard Watson Todd

Download or read book Discourse Topics written by Richard Watson Todd and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-11-24 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discourse topics are a frequently mentioned but rarely operationalised concept in linguistics. Taking a text linguistic approach and defining discourse topics as clusterings of concepts, this book examines and compares methods for investigating topic boundaries, topic identification and topic development. The first book to be devoted to topics in extended discourse, Discourse Topics examines topics in several genres and generates new insights into the nature of discourse topics that challenge the status quo. It is essential reading for researchers in linguistics, discourse analysis, natural language processing and psychology whose work concerns topics.

Reference in Discourse

Author : A. A. Kibrik
Publisher : Oxford Studies in Typology and
ISBN 13 : 0199215804
Total Pages : 683 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (992 download)

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Book Synopsis Reference in Discourse by : A. A. Kibrik

Download or read book Reference in Discourse written by A. A. Kibrik and published by Oxford Studies in Typology and. This book was released on 2011-09 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full study of how people refer to entities in natural discourse. It contributes to the understanding of both linguistic diversity and the cognitive underpinnings of language and it provides a framework for further research in both fields. Andrej Kibrik focuses on the way specific entities are mentioned in natural discourse, during which about every third word usually depends on referential choice. He considers reference as an overt representation of underlying cognitive processes and combines a theoretically-oriented cognitive approach with empirically-based cross-linguistic analysis. He begins by introducing the cognitive approach to discourse analysis and by examining the relationship between discourse studies and linguistic typology. He discusses reference as a linguistic phenomenon, in connection with the traditional notions of deixis, anaphora, givenness, and topicality, and describes the way his theoretical approach is centered on notions of referent activation in working memory. He argues that the speaker is responsible for the shape of discourse and that referential expressions should be understood as choices made by speakers rather than as puzzles to be solved by addressees. Kibrik examines the cross-linguistic aspects of reference and the typology of referential devices, including referring expressions per se, such as free and bound pronouns, and referential aids that help to tell apart the concurrently activated entities. This discussion is based on the data from about 200 languages from around the world. He then proposes a comprehensive model of referential choice, in which he draws on concepts from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, and applies this to Russian and English. He also draws together his empirical analyses in order to examine what light his analysis of discourse can shed on the way information is processed in working memory. In the final part of the book Andrej Kibrik offers a wider perspective, including deixis, referential aspects of gesticulation and signed languages. This pioneering work will interest linguists and cognitive scientists interested in discourse, reference, typology, and the operations of working memory in linguistic communication.

Coherence and Grounding in Discourse

Author : Russell S. Tomlin
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027228817
Total Pages : 524 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Coherence and Grounding in Discourse by : Russell S. Tomlin

Download or read book Coherence and Grounding in Discourse written by Russell S. Tomlin and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume seeks to expand our understanding of the relation holding between discourse relations, cognitive units, and linguistic coding. The twenty contributions in this collection explore one or more of the following themes: How point of view, or the salience of information in discourse, affects the organizational coherence of text and discourse; the concept of cognitive and linguistic event and how events are reflected in text and discourse organization; the nature of linguistic coding of events and other kinds of significant information; and the cognitive bases or cognitive correlates of the linguistic organization of discourse.

Word Order in Discourse

Author : Pamela Downing
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 902722921X
Total Pages : 606 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Word Order in Discourse by : Pamela Downing

Download or read book Word Order in Discourse written by Pamela Downing and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon, a matter of selecting randomly one of the set of possible orders generated by the grammar. However, as the papers in this collection show, word order variation is not random, but rather governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages.The papers in this volume discuss word order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives, including experimental and quantitative text based studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which order is 'basic' among the alternatives. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in problems of word order variation, and to those interested in discourse syntax.

Introduction to Discourse Studies

Author : Jan Renkema
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027263108
Total Pages : 471 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Introduction to Discourse Studies by : Jan Renkema

Download or read book Introduction to Discourse Studies written by Jan Renkema and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Introduction to Discourse Studies (IDS) is a thoroughly revised and updated version of this successful textbook, which has been published in four languages and has become a must-read for anyone interested in the analysis of texts and discourses. Supported by an international advisory board of 14 leading experts, it deals with all main subdomains in discourse studies, from pragmatics to cognitive linguistics, from critical discourse analysis to stylistics, and many more. The book approaches major issues in this field from the Anglo-American and European as well as the Asian traditions. It provides an ‘academic toolkit’ for future courses on discourse studies and serves as a stepping stone to the independent study of professional literature. The chapters are subdivided in modular sections that can be studied separately. The pedagogical objectives are further supported by over 500 index entries covering frequently used concepts that are accurately defined with examples throughout the text; more than 150 test-yourself questions, all elaborately answered, which are ideal for self-study; nearly 100 assignments that provide ample material for lecturers to focus on specific topics in their courses. Jan Renkema is Emeritus Professor of Discourse Quality at the Department of Communication and Information Sciences at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He is also editor of Discourse, of Course (2009) and author of The Texture of Discourse (2009). In 2009, a Chinese edition of Introduction to Discourse Studies was published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Christoph Schubert is Full Professor of English Linguistics at Vechta University, Germany. He is author of an Introduction to English text linguistics (2nd ed. 2012) and co-editor of Pragmatic Perspectives on Postcolonial Discourse (2016) and Variational Text Linguistics (2016).

Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility

Author : Doris L. Payne
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027229058
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility by : Doris L. Payne

Download or read book Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility written by Doris L. Payne and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some time the assumption has been widely held that for a majority of the world's languages, one can identify a "basic" order of subject and object relative to the verb, and that when combined with other facts of the language, the "basic" order constitutes a useful way of typologizing languages. New debate has arisen over varying definitions of "basic," with investigators encountering languages where branding a particular order of grammatical relations as basic yielded no particular insightfulness. This work asserts that explanatory factors behind word order variation go beyond the syntactic and are to be found in studies of how the mind grammaticizes forms, processes information, and speech act theory considerations of speakers' attempts to get their hearers to build one, rather than another, mental representation of incoming information. Thus three domains must be distinguished in understanding order variation: syntactic, cognitive and pragmatic. The works in this volume explore various aspects of this assertion.

Corpora and Cross-linguistic Research

Author : Stig Johansson
Publisher : Rodopi
ISBN 13 : 9789042002814
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (28 download)

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Book Synopsis Corpora and Cross-linguistic Research by : Stig Johansson

Download or read book Corpora and Cross-linguistic Research written by Stig Johansson and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1998 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years there has been increasing interest in the development and use of bilingual and multilingual corpora. As Karin Aijmer writes in this book, 'The contrastive or comparative perspective ... makes it possible to dig deeper and to ask new questions about the relationship between languages with the aim of sharpening our conceptions of cross-linguistic correspondences and adding to our knowledge of the languages compared.' The papers in this volume are a showcase of the great variety of purposes to which bilingual and multilingual corpora can be put. They do not only lend themselves to descriptive and applied approaches, but are also suitable for theory-oriented studies. The range of linguistic phenomena covered by the various approaches is very wide; the papers focus on fields of research like syntax, discourse, semantics, information structure, lexis, and translation studies. The range of languages studied comprises English, Norwegian, Swedish, German, Dutch, and Portuguese. In addition to purely linguistic papers, there are contributions on computer programs developed for the compilation and use of bilingual and multilingual corpora.

The GrammarPragmatics Interface

Author : Nancy Hedberg
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027292434
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis The GrammarPragmatics Interface by : Nancy Hedberg

Download or read book The GrammarPragmatics 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.

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics

Author : Mushira Eid
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027276463
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics by : Mushira Eid

Download or read book Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics written by Mushira Eid and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1995-06-22 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes ten papers selected from the Seventh Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. For the first time in this series, three of the papers represent experimental studies dealing with Arabic syllable and morphological structure. Four are focused on aspects of agreement in Arabic. The remaining three deal with certain problems in Arabic phonology and discourse.

Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible

Author : Ellen van Wolde
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004497528
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (44 download)

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Book Synopsis Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible by : Ellen van Wolde

Download or read book Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible written by Ellen van Wolde and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biblical Hebrew grammar was until recently concentrated on the morpho-syntax within sentence boundaries. In the past few decades text-syntactic theories have been developed. At the conference Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible (Tilburg 1996) six eminent scholars presented both a paper on Hebrew syntax and a workshop in which Exodus 19-24 or 1 Samuel 1 was studied. Both kinds of contributions are collected in this volume. They tend to lead towards one conclusion: traditional sentence-grammar and text-syntactic studies should not exclude, but include each other. The verb forms, word-order and other syntactic features need to be studied as functioning at more than one level. A combination of a morpho-syntactic study at the sentence level and a text-syntactic approach is thus defended. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections

Author : Silvio Cruschina
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019975960X
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections by : Silvio Cruschina

Download or read book Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections written by Silvio Cruschina and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume Silvio Cruschina uses a comparative analysis to determine the syntax of the functional projections associated with discourse-related features, and to account for the marked word orders found in Romance - particularly in the fronting phenomena. Several language-specific analyses of discourse-related phenomena have been proposed in the literature, including studies on the notions of topic and focus in Romance, but the lack of a uniform definition of these notions, together with different assumptions in relation to the triggering features, has led to the perception that the Romance languages show many distinct and heterogeneous properties with respect to dislocation and fronting constructions. This volume is intended to complement the existing literature by integrating recent work on the topic and by emphasizing original and unifying reflections that combine and coordinate diverse elements. Cruschina's investigations clarify fundamental notions such as topic, focus, and contrast, drawing on new data from Sicilian, Sardinian, and other Romance varieties.

Japanese Politeness

Author : Yasuko Obana
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000210898
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Japanese Politeness by : Yasuko Obana

Download or read book Japanese Politeness written by Yasuko Obana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the Japanese language is one of the most quoted examples in politeness research, extant publications focus on particular areas of politeness, and very few of them enquire into the varied aspects of Japanese politeness. In this book, Yasuko Obana provides an integrated account of what signifies Japanese politeness. By examining how far previous assumptions can apply to Japanese, Obana exposes a variety of characteristics of Japanese politeness. By taking a diachronic approach, she probes into what constitutes politeness, extracts key elements of the term ‘polite’ in Japanese, and demonstrates how modern honorifics’ apparent diverse, divergent uses and effects can be integrated into a systematic matrix. Furthermore, by quoting traditional Japanese language scholars’ (kokugo gakusha) studies, Obana brings different views into the open. She also carves out politeness strategies in Japanese that have not been adequately explored to date, and which often conform to the way in which honorifi cs behave because they refl ect social indexicality. This book is a good reference for scholars in pragmatics, particularly for those who are working on politeness. It is useful for Japanese language teachers who want to know how to teach Japanese politeness to non-native learners. Postgraduate students of Japanese or pragmatics may also find this book useful for self-study.

GECCo - German-English Contrasts in Cohesion

Author : Kerstin Kunz
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110711095
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis GECCo - German-English Contrasts in Cohesion by : Kerstin Kunz

Download or read book GECCo - German-English Contrasts in Cohesion written by Kerstin Kunz and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In contrastive linguistics of English and German, there is a tradition of accounting for contrasts with respect to grammar and, to a lesser extent, for lexis and phonetics. Moving on to discourse and text, there is a sizeable body of literature on cohesive patterns in English and German respectively - but very little in terms of a comparison. The latter, though, is of particular interest for language learners, translators and, of course, linguists and researchers in language technology. This book attempts to close this gap, based on a number of years of corpus-based study into variation and cohesion in the two languages. While there is an overall focus on language contrasts, it also investigates variation between different registers language-internally, and between written and spoken mode in particular. For each of the five major types of cohesion (co-reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunctive relations and lexical cohesion), overviews are given of contrasts in the system and of contrastive frequencies in texts. Results and methods presented in this book are thus relevant for language teaching, translation, language technology and corpus-based work on English and German generally.

Constraints in Discourse 2

Author : Peter Kühnlein
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027254389
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Constraints in Discourse 2 by : Peter Kühnlein

Download or read book Constraints in Discourse 2 written by Peter Kühnlein and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Text is highly structured, and structured at a variety of levels. But what are the units of text, which levels are at stake, and what establishes the structure that binds the units together? This volume, just as the predecessor a spin off of one of the workshops on constraints in discourse, contains the most recent, thoroughly reviewed papers by specialists in the area that try to give answers to such questions. It helps deepening the understanding of a multiplicity of mechanisms and constraints that are at work during production and comprehension of well-formed discourse. Researchers from linguistics, both formal and psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive sciences will appreciate this book as a valuable resource for information and inspiration.