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Aspects of a Cognitive-pragmatic Theory of Language
This book is about a theory of language that combines two observations (1) that language is based on an extensive cognitive infrastructure (cognitivism) and (2) that it is functional for its user (functionalism). These observations are regarded as two dimensions of one phenomenon that both need to be accounted for, simultaneously and coherently, in accounting for language. Chapter 1 presents the cognitivist and functionalist points of view and their interrelation and discusses the integration of language research under a cognitive umbrella; the issue of defining 'functions of language', and the formalism-functionalism debate. Chapter 2 criticizes the Chomskyan formalist conception of languag...
Style Shifting in Japanese
This innovative and interdisciplinary book on style shifting in Japanese brings together a wide range of perspectives and methodologiesincluding discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and functional linguisticsto look at a variety of types of style shifting in both spoken and written Japanese discourse. Though diverse in approach, the contributions all reflect the belief that language use is inextricably linked to both context and language structure in mutually constitutive relationships. Topics covered include shifting between "polite" and "plain" styles, the emergence of a "semi-polite" style, speakers' strategic use of gendered styles or regional dialects, shifting between different deictic expressions, and prosodic shifting. This careful and detailed examination advances our understanding of the complex phenomenon of style shifting not only in Japanese, but also more generally, and will be of interest to researchers and students in fields such as linguistics, linguistic anthropology, communication studies, and second language acquisition and teaching.
Toddler and Parent Interaction
"This book provides a microanalysis of the interactions between four children and their parents starting when the children were aged 9 to 13 months and ending when they were 18 months old. It tracks development as an issue for and of interaction. In so doing, it uncovers the details of the organisation of the sequence structure of the interactions, and exposes the workings of language and social development as they unfold in everyday activities. The study begins with a description of pre-verbal children's sequences of action and then tracks those sequences as linguistic ability increases. The analysis reveals a developing richness and complexity of the sequence structure and exposes a gap in...
Communicating Gender in Context
The contributions to the book Communicating Gender in Context deal not only with grammatical gender, but also with discursive procedures for constructing gender as a relevant social category in text and context. Attention is directed to European cultures which till now have come up short in linguistic and discourse analytic gender studies, e.g., Austria, Spain, Turkey, Germany, Poland and Sweden. But also English speech communities and questions of English grammatical gender are dealt with.In accordance with recent sociolinguistic research the contributors refrain from generalizing theses about how men and women normally speak; no conversational style feature adheres so firmly to one sex as was thought in early feminism. The studies, however, show that even today the feminine gender is often staged in a way that leads to situative asymmetry to the advantage of men. The broader societal context of patriarchy does not determine all communicative encounters, but demands particular efforts from women and men to be subverted.
The Japanese Sentence-final Particles in Talk-in-interaction
The Japanese sentence-final particles, "ne," "yo" and "yone" have proved notoriously difficult to explain and are especially challenging for second language users. This book investigates the role of the particles in talk-in-interaction with the aim of providing a comprehensive understanding that accounts for their pragmatic properties and sequential functions and that provides a sound basis for second language pedagogy. This study starts by setting up an original particle function hypothesis based on the figure/ground "gestalt," and then tests its validity empirically with unmarked, marked and native/non-native talk-in-interaction data. The analysis illustrates not only expectable but also unexpected or strategic use of particles, as well as the problems posed for native speakers by non-native speakers whose use of particles is idiosyncratic. The study demonstrates that the proposed hypothesis is capable of accounting for all the uses of particles in the extensive and varied data set examined. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in pragmatics and CA and to teachers of Japanese as a foreign language.
English Speech Rhythm
This monograph reconsiders the question of speech isochrony, the regular recurrence of (stressed) syllables in time, from an empirical point of view. It proposes a methodology for discovering isochrony auditorily in speech and for verifying it instrumentally in the acoustic laboratory. In a small-scale study of an English conversational extract, the gestalt-like rhythmic structures which isochrony creates are shown to have a hierarchical organization. Then in a large-scale study of a corpus of British and American radio phone-in programs and family table conversations, the function of speech rhythm at turn transitions is investigated. It is argued that speech rhythm serves as a metric for th...
The Language of Daily Life in England (1400-1800)
The Language of Daily Life in England (14001800) is an important state-of-the art account of historical sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic research. The volume contains nine studies and an introductory essay which discuss linguistic and social variation and change over four centuries. Each study tackles a linguistic or social phenomenon, and approaches it with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, always embedded in the socio-historical context. The volume presents new information on linguistic variation and change, while evaluating and developing the relevant theoretical and methodological tools. The writers form one of the leading research teams in the field, and, as compilers of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, have an informed understanding of the data in all its depth. This volume will be of interest to scholars in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and socio-pragmatics, but also e.g. social history. The approachable style of writing makes it also inviting for advanced students.
South Slavic Discourse Particles
"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 Theor...
Information Highlighting in Advanced Learner English
This book presents the first detailed and comprehensive study of information highlighting in advanced learner language, echoing the increasing interest in questions of near-native competence in SLA research and contributing to the description of advanced interlanguages. It examines the production and comprehension of specific means of information highlighting in English by native speakers and German learners of English as a foreign language, presenting triangulated experimental and learner corpus data as corroborating evidence. The study focuses on learners' use of discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, preposing, and it- and wh-clefts, an und...
On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures
This book investigates how speakers of English, Polish and Russian deal with offensive situations. It reveals culture-specific perceptions of what counts as an apology and what constitutes politeness. It offers a critical discussion of Brown and Levinson's theory and provides counterevidence to the correlation between indirectness and politeness underlying their theory. Their theory is applied to two languages that rely less heavily on indirectness in conveying politeness than does English, and to a speech act that does not become more polite through indirectness. An analysis of the face considerations involved in apologising shows that in contrast to disarming apologies, remedial apologies are mainly directed towards positive face needs, which are crucial for the restoration of social equilibrium and maintenance of relationships. The data show that while English apologies are characterised by a relatively strong focus on both interlocutors negative face, Polish apologies display a particular concern for positive face. For Russian speakers, in contrast, apologies seem to involve a lower degree of face threat than they do in the other two languages."
