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This book approaches cohesion and coherence from a perspective of interaction and collaboration. After a detailed account of various models of cohesion and coherence, the book suggests that it is fruitful to regard cohesion as contributing to coherence, as a strategy used by communicators to help their fellow communicators create coherence from a text. Throughout the book, the context-sensitive and discourse-specific nature of cohesion is stressed: cohesive relations are created and interpreted in particular texts in particular contexts. By investigating the use of cohesion in four different types of discourse, the study shows that cohesion is not uniform across discourse types. The analysis reveals that written dialogue (computer-mediated discussions) and spoken monologue (prepared speech) make use of similar cohesive strategies as spoken dialogue (conversations): in these contexts the communicators' interaction with their fellow communicators leads to a similar outcome. The book suggests that this is an indication of the communicators' attempt to collaborate towards successful communication.
The contributions in this book discuss letter-writing from 1400 to 1800, and the material studied ranges from the late medieval Paston Letters and the correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse to Early Modern English family letters and correspondence in natural history between England and North America in the eighteenth century. By bringing a set of corpus linguistic, discourse analytic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to bear on historical letter-writing activity, the articles both extend and complement the traditional letter-writing research in the history of European languages, which approaches the topic from a largely rhetorical perspective. The articles in this book were first published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5:2 (2004), share a contextualised view of letters: whether approached from the perspective of language contact, social and discursive practices, intertextuality, audience design or linguistic politeness, letters are analysed as part of their specific familial, business or scientific network. Writing letters thus emerges as highly context-sensitive social interaction.
The fourteen contributions in this collection come from different approaches in pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and dialogue analysis; the name given to what is studied ranges from spoken language and conversation to interaction, dialogue, discourse and communication. What the articles have in common is a similar starting point: they are informed by a form of linguistic understanding which has emerged within what could be called the interactional turn. The materials investigated come from several different languages, representing a variety of interactions: private and public, written and spoken, historical and present-day. While studies of such diverse materials naturally differ in their starting points, goals and aims, engaging them in a dialogue can help reveal where old beliefs may be challenged and new understandings may emerge. The interactional approaches to discourse presented in this volume show that there are several discourses on interaction: interconnected, parallel, but also varying and even divergent.
As a first attempt to date, this book addresses the notion of hypocrisy from a pragmatic perspective and devises a comprehensive model of verbal hypocrisy. The studies included adopt emic and etic approaches in order to contribute jointly towards an understanding of what appears to be a ubiquitous and multifaceted phenomenon. Going beyond hypocrisy as a mere moral vice, this volume establishes its pragmatic space and confronts it with adjacent notions which, unlike hypocrisy, have been subject to pragmatic examination. The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy is of interest to students and scholars in pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, rhetoric, communication and media studies, as well as corpus linguistics, and by its transdisciplinary nature, to researchers in philosophy, sociology, and political science. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in the interplay between language, culture and society, across varieties and registers of English.
Covering nearly one thousand years, this volume explores medieval and modern English texts from fresh perspectives. Within the relatively new field of historical discourse linguistics, the synchronic analysis of large textual units and consideration of text-external features in relation to discourse has so far received little attention. To fill that gap, this volume offers studies of medieval instructional and religious texts and correspondence from the early modern period. The contributions highlight writer-audience relationships, the intended use of texts, descriptions of text-type, and questions of orality and manuscript contextualization. The topics, ranging from the reception of Old English texts to the conventions of practical instruction in Middle English to the epistolary construction of science in early Modern English, are directly relevant to historical linguists, discourse and text linguists, and students of the history of English.
This book contributes to the scholarly debate on the forms and patterns of interaction and discourse in modern digital communication by probing some of the social functions that online communication has for its users. An array of experts and scholars in the field address a range of forms of social interaction and discourses expressed by users on social networks and in public media. Social functions are reflected through linguistic and discursive practices that are either those of ‘convergence’ or ‘controversy’ in terms of how the discourse participants handle interpersonal relations or how they construct meanings in discourses. In this sense, the book elaborates on some very central concerns in the area of digital discourse analysis that have been reported within the last decade from various methodological perspectives ranging from sociolinguistics and pragmatics to corpus linguistics. This edited collection will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the fields of digital discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, social media and communication, and media and cultural studies.
In her examination of neglected diaristic texts, Anne-Marie Millim expands the field of Victorian diary criticism by complicating the conventional notion of diaries as mainly private sources of biographical information. She argues that for Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin, Edith Simcox and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the exposure or publication of their diaries was a real possibility that they either coveted or feared. Millim locates the diary at the intersection of the public and private spheres to show that well-known writers and public figures of both sexes exploited the diary's self-reflexive, diurnal structure in order to enhance their...
In the present-day context of cross-linguistic perspectives on language acquisition, The Acquisition of Dutch offers a much needed overview of the wealth of Dutch child language research that was hitherto lacking. Its comprehensive coverage in terms of topics, its many new theoretical contributions and its focus on providing a solid basis for cross-linguistic comparisons will be of interest to linguists and psycholinguists studying child language everywhere.The volume consists of four thematic chapters preceded by an introductory overview. The thematic chapters cover early speech development in the first year of life, the acquisition of phonology, the lexicon and syntax. The consolidated list of references cover most of the work on Dutch child language in the last few decades.
In recent years there has been a renewed interest in correspondence both as a literary genre and as cultural practice, and several studies have appeared, mainly spanning the centuries between Early and Late Modern times. However, it is between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the roots of contemporary usage begin to evolve, thanks to the circulation of new educational materials and more widespread schooling practices. In this volume, chapters representing diverse but complementary methodological approaches discuss linguistic and discursive practices of correspondence in Late Modern Europe, in order to offer material for the comparative, cross-linguistic analyses of patterns occurring in different social contexts. The volume aims to provide a general and solid methodological structure for the study of largely untapped language material from a variety of comparable sources, and is expected to appeal to scholars and students interested in the linguistic history of epistolary writing practices, as well as to all those interested in the more recent history of European languages.
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.