The Semantics of Free Indirect Discourse

The Semantics of Free Indirect Discourse
Author: Regine Eckardt
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2014-11-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004266739

Free indirect discourse presents us with the inner world of protagonists of a story. We seem to see the world through their eyes, and listen to their inner thoughts. The present study analyses the logic of free indirect discourse and offers a framework to represent multiple ways in which words betray the speaker's feelings and attitude. The theory covers tense, aspect, temporal indexicals, modal particles, exclamatives and other expressive elements and their dependence on shifting utterance contexts. It traces the subtle ways in which story texts can offer information about protagonists. The study of free indirect discourse has been a topic of great interest in recent years in semantics and pragmatics. In this book, Regine Eckardt proposes a new theory of this domain and applies it to a wide variety of phenomena -- discourse particles, exclamatives, and mood -- in addition to the traditional indexical pronouns and tenses. She situates this project within a larger attempt to extend the tools of semantic analysis to fiction. Most formally oriented semanticists have not paid serious attention to this domain, which has resulted in a major gap in semantic theory; this book is thus a pioneering effort and raises many intriguing points. The total result is an empirically rich and exciting work which will be a profitable read for researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, and formal approaches to literature. Eric McCready, Aoyama Gakuin University

Speech and Thought Representation in English

Speech and Thought Representation in English
Author: Lieven Vandelanotte
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2009
Genre: English language
ISBN: 3110205890

Main description: The author argues for a new, linguistically grounded typology of speech and thought representation in English from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Apart from direct and indirect speech/thought, the types described include the character-oriented free indirect and the narrator-oriented distancing indirect type, and two subjectified types in which reporting clauses such as I think function as hedges.

Linguistic Foundations of Narration in Spoken and Sign Languages

Linguistic Foundations of Narration in Spoken and Sign Languages
Author: Annika Hübl
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027263981

In recent years, the focus of linguistic research has shifted from sentence to larger units such as text and discourse and accordingly from syntax to semantics and pragmatics. This has led to the development and application of corresponding discourse semantic and pragmatic theories such as, for instance, (S)DRT, Centering Theory, Accessibility Theory, QUD, Generalized Conversational Implicatures, Super Monsters and Gesture Semantics and new empirical approaches in the framework of experimental semantics and pragmatics or corpus linguistic discourse analysis. The contributions to this collected volume build on these developments and investigate the linguistic foundations of narration from various perspectives. The contributions address topics such as speech and thought representation, free indirect speech, information structure, anaphora resolution, co-speech gestures, classifier constructions as well as role shift and constructed action. The volume provides new insights in the linguistic structures underlying narration in written, spoken, and sign languages from an experimental, developmental, historical, typological, and theoretical perspective. The contributions will appeal to theoretical linguists, sign language linguists, typologists, literary scholars, psycholinguists, and philosophers.

Reported Discourse

Reported Discourse
Author: Tom Güldemann
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2002-09-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027297193

The present volume unites 15 papers on reported discourse from a wide genetic and geographical variety of languages. Besides the treatment of traditional problems of reported discourse like the classification of its intermediate categories, the book reflects in particular how its grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic properties have repercussions in other linguistic domains like tense-aspect-modality, evidentiality, reference tracking and pronominal categories, and the grammaticalization history of quotative constructions. Almost all papers present a major shift away from analyzing reported discourse with the help of abstract transformational principles toward embedding it in functional and pragmatic aspects of language. Another central methodological approach pervading this collection consists in the discourse-oriented examination of reported discourse based on large corpora of spoken or written texts which is increasingly replacing analyses of constructed de-contextualized utterances prevalent in many earlier treatments. The book closes with a comprehensive bibliography on reported discourse of about 1.000 entries.

The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction

The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction
Author: Monika Fludernik
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2003-12-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134872879

Monika Fludernik presents a detailed analysis of free indirect discourse as it relates to narrative theory, and the crucial problematic of how speech and thought are represented in fiction. Building on the insights of Ann Banfield's Unspeakable Sentences, Fludernik radically extends Banfield's model to accommodate evidence from conversational narrative, non-fictional prose and literary works from Chaucer to the present. Fludernik's model subsumes earlier insights into the forms and functions of quotation and aligns them with discourse strategies observable in the oral language. Drawing on a vast range of literature, she provides an invaluable resource for researchers in the field and introduces English readers to extensive work on the subject in German as well as comparing the free indirect discourse features of German, French and English. This study effectively repositions the whole area between literature and linguistics, opening up a new set of questions in narrative theory.

Indirect Speech Acts

Indirect Speech Acts
Author: Nicolas Ruytenbeek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2021-06-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108483178

Explores the fascinating phenomenon of indirect speech acts, highlighting the situations they are used in, and how they are understood.

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation
Author: Paul Saka
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2017-12-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3319687476

The chapters in this volume address a variety of issues surrounding quotation, such as whether it is a pragmatic or semantic phenomenon, what varieties of quotation exist, and what speech acts are involved in quoting. Quotation poses problems for many prevailing theories of language. One fundamental principle is that for a language to be learnable, speakers must be able to derive the truth-conditions of sentences from the meanings of their parts. Another popular view is that indexical expressions like "I" display a certain fixity -- that they always refer to the speaker using them. Both of these tenets appear to be violated by quotation. This volume is suitable for scholars in philosophy of language, semantics, and pragmatics, and for graduate students in philosophy and linguistics. The book will also be useful for researchers in other fields that study quotation, including psychology and computer science.

About the Speaker

About the Speaker
Author: Alessandra Giorgi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199571899

Alessandra Giorgi considers the semantic and syntactic nature of indexicals: linguistic expressions whose reference shifts from utterance to utterance.