Connectives as Discourse Landmarks

Connectives as Discourse Landmarks
Author: Agnès Celle
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2007
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027254047

This set of eleven articles, by linguists from four different European countries and a variety of theoretical backgrounds, takes a new look at the discourse functions of a number of English connectives, from simple coordinators (and, but) to phrases of varying complexity (after all, the fact is that). Using authentic spoken and written data from varied sources, the authors explore the ways in which current uses of connectives result from the interaction of syntax, semantics and prosody, both over time and through diversity of discourse situations. Most adopt an integrative approach in which speaker-listener or writer-reader relationships are viewed as part and parcel of the linguistic properties of each marker. Because it combines functional, generative and enunciative approaches into a coherent whole with a common explanatory aim, this book will be of interest to linguists, corpus-linguists and all those who investigate the semantics-pragmatics interface.

Connectives and Discourse Relations

Connectives and Discourse Relations
Author: Sandrine Zufferey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2024-02-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108832997

Provides a cutting-edge yet accessible introduction to connectives and discourse relations, with examples from a range of languages.

Pandemic and Crisis Discourse

Pandemic and Crisis Discourse
Author: Andreas Musolff
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2022-02-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 135023270X

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a host of critical reflections about discourse practises dealing with public health issues. Situating crisis communication at the centre of societal and political debates about responses to the pandemic, this volume analyses the discursive strategies used in a variety of settings. Exploring how crisis discourse has become a part of managing the public health crisis itself, this book focuses on the communicative tasks and challenges for both speakers and their public audiences in seven areas: - establishment of discursive and political authority - official governmental and expert communication to the public - public understanding of government communication - legitimation of public health management as a 'war' - judging and blaming a collective other - cross-national comparison and rivalry - empathy and encouragement Covering global discourses from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and New Zealand, chapters use corpus-based data to cast light on these issues from a variety of languages. With crisis discourse already the object of fierce national and international debates about the appropriateness of specific communicative styles, information management and 'verbal hygiene', Pandemic and Crisis Discourse offers an authoritative intervention from language experts.

South Slavic Discourse Particles

South Slavic Discourse Particles
Author: Mirjana N. Dedai?
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027256012

"Discourse particles, discourse markers "and" pragmatic markers" refer to phenomena that linguists have begun to probe only since the mid-1980s. Long-ignored in traditional linguistics and textbook grammars, and still relegated to marginal status in South Slavic, these linguistic phenomena have emerged as invaluable devices for cutting-edge theories of the semantics/pragmatics interface. This book, which is a pioneering study in such linguistic phenomena in South Slavic languages, is also among the first of its kind for a related group of languages. It builds on the recent findings of some of the most influential linguistically-oriented theories, such as Relevance Theory, Argumentation Theory and coherence-based approaches to explain the meaning and use of certain discourse/pragmatic particles/markers in Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Slovene. These particles/markers are part of the contemporary and historical lexicons of the South Slavic languages, varying across regions and time, but also differing in origin. This book, which draws from naturally occurring data, written media and constructed examples, aims at a wider audience including scholars working in semantics/pragmatics and Slavic languages, and applied specialists interested in this area of research. The authors hope that this book will be conceived as a starting point for a structured inquiry into the flourishing field of discourse particles in South Slavic.

Constraints in Discourse 2

Constraints in Discourse 2
Author: Peter Kühnlein
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027254389

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.

Political Discourse in the Media

Political Discourse in the Media
Author: Anita Fetzer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2007-06-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027292272

This book departs from the premise that political discourse is intrinsically connected with media discourse, as shaped by its cultural and transcultural characteristics. It presents a collection of papers which examine political discourse in the media from a cross-culturally comparative perspective in Arab, Dutch, British, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Israeli, Swedish, US-American and international contexts. By using different theoretical frameworks, such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis, pragmatics and systemic functional linguistics, the papers reflect current moves in political discourse analysis to cross-disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating semiotics, particularly multimodality, cognition, context, genre and recipient design.

Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Perspectives on Academic Discourse

Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Perspectives on Academic Discourse
Author: Eija Suomela-Salmi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2009
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027254370

The goal of this volume is to examine academic discourse (AD) from cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives. The adjective "Cross-cultural" in the volume title is not just limited to national contexts but also includes a cross-disciplinary perspective. Twelve scientific fields are under scrutiny in the articles. One of the unique aspects of the volume is the inclusion of a variety of foreign languages (English (as a lingua franca), Spanish, French, Swedish, Russian, German, Italian, and Norwegian). Besides, in several articles dealing with oral AD, comparisons and parallels are also established with written AD. The research methodologies used in the studies are varied and they offer an overview of the diversity and richness of approaches to AD. All in all, it is hoped that the volume appeals not only to young researchers but also to confirmed scholars interested in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural aspects of AD. It will also be of interest to language teachers or teachers who are involved with e.g. international students and academic mobility.

Linguistic Creativity in Japanese Discourse

Linguistic Creativity in Japanese Discourse
Author: Senko K. Maynard
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2007
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027254023

Using theoretical concepts of self, perspective, and voice as an interpretive guide, and based on the Place of Negotiation theory, this volume explores the phenomenon of linguistic creativity in Japanese discourse, i.e., the use of language in specific ways for foregrounding personalized expressive meanings. Personalized expressive meanings include psychological, emotive, interpersonal, and rhetorical aspects of communication, encompassing broad meanings such as feelings of intimacy or distance, emotion, empathy, humor, playfulness, persona, sense of self, identity, rhetorical effects, and so on. Nine analysis chapters explore the meanings, functions, and effects observable in the indices of linguistic creativity, focusing on discourse creativity (style mixture, borrowing others' styles, genre mixture), rhetorical creativity (puns, metaphors, metaphors in multimodal discourse), and grammatical creativity (negatives, demonstratives, first-person references). Based on the analysis of verbal and visual data drawn from multiple genres of contemporary cultural discourse, this work reveals that by creatively expressing in language we share our worlds from multiple perspectives, we speak in self's and others' many voices, and we endlessly create personalized expressive meanings as testimony to our own sense of being.

Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse

Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2015-06-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9042029102

This volume presents current state-of-the-art discussions in corpus-based linguistic research of the English language. The papers deal with Present-day English, worldwide varieties of English and the history of the English language. A special focus of the volume are studies in the broad field of corpus pragmatics and corpus-based discourse analysis. It includes corpus-based studies of speech acts, conversational routines, referential expressions and thought styles, as well as studies on the lexis, grammar and semantics of English. And it also includes several studies on technical aspects of corpus compilation, fieldwork and parsing.

Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction

Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction
Author: Todd Oakley
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2008-03-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027291454

The cognitive theory of mental spaces and conceptual integration (MSCI) is a twenty-year-old, cross-disciplinary enterprise that presently unfolds in academic circles on many levels of reflection and research. One important area of inquiry where MSCI can be of immediate use is in the pragmatics of written and spoken discourse and interaction. At the same time, empirical insights from the fields of interaction and discourse provide a necessary fundament for the development of the cognitive theories of discourse. This collection of seven chapters and three commentaries aims at evaluating and developing MSCI as a theory of meaning construction in discourse and interaction. MSCI will benefit greatly not only from empirical support but also from clearer refinement of its methodology and philosophical foundations. This volume presents the latest work on discourse and interaction from a mental spaces perspective, surely to be of interest to a broad range of researchers in discourse analysis.