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The study of clause combining has been advanced lately by increasing interest in the study of actual language use in a typologically diverse set of languages. A number of received understandings have been challenged, among these the idea of clause combinations as being divisible into subordination and coordination in a binary fashion. Connected to this idea is the nature of conjunctions, a topic treated in several articles here. Couched within the larger issue of the nature of categoriality in language, several of the papers show that conjunctions are highly polyfunctional items, and that clause combining is only one of the uses to which speakers put them. Other topics treated in the volume are the historical development of conjunctions and the use of formulaic main clause constructions as projective units in conversation. The articles manifest both typological and theoretical breadth. They are based on data from Bulgarian, English, Estonian, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Spanish. The theoretical approaches include discourse-functional, interactional, historical and generative linguistics.
Although there is a large literature on referentiality, going back to at least the nineteenth and early twentieth century, much of this early work is based on constructed data and most of it is on English. The chapters in this volume contribute to a growing body of work that examines referentiality through naturalistic data in context. Taking an interactional approach to (non)referentiality, contributors to this volume ask how participants talk in real time about persons and things as individuals or as categories, and what distinguishes ‘referential’ from ‘nonreferential’, ‘specific’ from ‘nonspecific’, and ‘generic’ from ‘nongeneric’. Crucially, we ask whether these ...
This book extends the traditional research perspective of single sentences and contexts to the textual structure of real discourse materials. Taking discourse functional grammar as its theoretical orientation, the book combines relevant theories with Chinese practice to work on a number of topics, including discourse phenomena and syntactic integration, the information status and discourse function of special syntactic structures, the emergence of discourse functions of metadiscourse components, and stylistic differences and their syntactic manifestations. Syntactic-semantic laws and discourse functions are examined in relation to each other, which better reveals their inner connection; a fo...
This is a general introduction to grammaticalization, the change whereby lexical terms and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions. The authors synthesize work from several areas of linguistics. The second edition has been thoroughly revised with substantial updates on theoretical and methodological issues that have arisen in the decade since the first edition, and includes a significantly expanded bibliography. Particular attention is paid to recent debates over directionality in change and the role of grammaticalization in creolization.
This handbook compares the main analytic frameworks and methods of contemporary linguistics. It offers a unique overview of linguistic theory, revealing the common concerns of competing approaches. By showing their current and potential applications it provides the means by which linguists and others can judge what are the most useful models for the task in hand. Distinguished scholars from all over the world explain the rationale and aims of over thirty explanatory approaches to the description, analysis, and understanding of language. Each chapter considers the main goals of the model; the relation it proposes from between lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology; the way it d...
With respect to the rich and long history of Japanese linguistics, this text is intended to make a modest contribution, intending to provide a useful outline, especially for those who are not familiar with the language.
This book explores a domain of discourse processing referred to as 'interactive grammar', based on an analysis of grammatical descriptions of over 100 languages spoken across the world. While much previous work has treated interactive grammar as a fairly marginal part of language, Bernd Heine describes it here as a distinct category that contrasts with sentence grammar both in its functions and its structural behavior. He identifies ten types of interactives - i.e. extra-clausal expressions of linguistic discourse: attention signals, directives, discourse markers, evaluatives, ideophones, interjections, response elicitors, response signals, social formulae, and vocatives. The analysis reveal...
This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of spatial configurations of language use and of language use in space. It consists of four parts. The first part covers the various practices of describing space through language, including spatial references in spoken interaction or in written texts, the description of motion events as well as the creation of imaginative spaces in storytelling. The second part surveys aspects of the spatial organization of face-to-face communication including not only spatial arrangements of small groups in interaction but also the spatial dimension of sign language and gestures. The third part is devoted to the communicative resources of constructed spaces and the ways in which these facilitate and shape communication. Part four, finally, is devoted to pragmatics across space and cultures, i.e. the ways in which language use differs across language varieties, languages and cultures.
Opening the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the foundations of pragmatics. It covers the central theories as well as concepts and topics characteristic of mainstream pragmatics, i.e. the most widespread approach to the ways and means of using language in authentic social contexts. The articles provide both state of the art reviews and critical evaluations of research in pragmatics. Topics are thus not only considered within their scholarly context but are also critically evaluated from current perspectives.
This collection of previously unpublished, cutting-edge research discusses the conversation analysis (CA) approach to understanding language use. CA is the dominant theory for analyzing the social use of language and is concerned with the description of how speakers engage in conversation and other forms of social interaction involving language. Its proponents are not only linguists but sociologists and anthropologists as well. The unifying theme of these chapters is the intersection of practice and form through the construction of turns and sequences.