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Politeness as practised across 22 European societies, firmly set within critical debates developed since the 1980s, is here presented in ways related to concrete situations in which language-users interact with one another to achieve their goals. Areas covered include types of politeness, forms of address, negotiation and small-talk in various contexts.
This collection of papers celebrates the work of Jeanette K. Gundel, who has contributed to the field of grammar-pragmatics interface through her publications on the syntactic realization of topic and comment and the cognitive status of referring expressions, as well as by inspiring colleagues to make contributions to the overall field of pragmatics. This volume collects together papers from colleagues and former students on pragmatics and syntax, pragmatics and reference, and pragmatics and social variables. The volume includes papers devoted to explicating the grammar-pragmatics interface, with the focus of the papers ranging from Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, construction grammar, and genre theory to formal semantics, as well as papers devoted to expanding on Gundel's own original approach to factors such as the cognitive status decisions underlying speakers' choice of referring expression and the topic and focus decisions underlying speakers' choice of referring expression and the topic and focus decisions underlying speakers' choice of syntactic construction.
Through electronic corpora we can observe patterns which we were unaware of before or only vaguely glimpsed. The availability of multilingual corpora has led to a renewal of contrastive studies. We gain new insight into similarities and differences between languages, at the same time as the characteristics of each language are brought into relief. The present book focuses on the work in building and using the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. Case studies are reported on lexis, grammar, and discourse. A concluding chapter sums up problems and prospects of corpus-based contrastive studies, including applications in lexicography, translator training, and foreign-language teaching. Though the main focus is on English and Norwegian, the approach should be of interest more generally for corpus-based contrastive research and for language studies in general. Seeing through corpora we can see through language.
The present volume draws together contributions from a number of scholars with an interest in empirical, cross-linguistic description. Most of the papers were first presented at the symposium Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective held in Oslo in November/December 2000. The descriptions are functionally oriented, and their common focus is how information structure – in a broad sense – can be compared across languages. 'Information structure' has been approached in a variety of ways by the authors, so as to give a broad picture of this fundamental principle of text production, involving the way in which a speaker/writer chooses to present a message in terms of given/new information, focus, cohesion, and point of view. Central to much of the research is the problem of establishing criteria for isolating linguistic constraints on language use from cultural-linguistic conventions in text production. The linguistic comparison includes English, German and/or one of the Scandinavian languages, with sidelights to other languages. Most of the papers are text- or corpus-based, and the ongoing work on parallel corpora in Scandinavia is reflected in several contributions.
This book aims to disseminate at an international level a set of innovative studies whose descriptive and applied point of reference is the Catalan language. The volume constitutes a significant contribution to the field of intercultural pragmatics and also to a broad range of grammatical and cognitive issues which have been approached from the pragmatic perspective.
This volume brings together sixteen in-depth studies of final particles in various languages of the world, offering a rich variety of approaches to this still relatively underresearched class of elements. The volume is of interest to typologists, to experts in syntax and the analysis of spoken language, and to linguists studying the form and function of final particles in single languages. Final particles offers an overview of the different types of final particles found in typologically distinct languages, different methological approaches to the study of final particles, and of typical grammaticalization pathways that these elements have taken in different languages.
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This book addresses students and researchers of both phonetics and phonology, and the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. It employs an autosegmental-metrical model of intonation to investigate the marking of aspects of information structure, concentrating on the Given-New dimension. It begins with an overview of the state of the art in the areas of intonation and information structure, and, since the term 'Givenness' has been used in the literature in diverging ways, provides a model of 'Givenness proper', focussing on the cognitive states of discourse referents, and how these states are expressed through the choice of words and their prosody. The empirical evidence provided here is based on German. It comprises the analysis of a read corpus and two perception experiments which show that the dichotomy of 'accented' versus 'uncaccented' corresponding to 'New' versus 'Given' information is inadequate. In fact, there is evidence that a range of pitch accent types (including deaccentuation) can be mapped onto the gradient scale of Givenness degrees, with the pitch height on the accented syllable being the determining factor.
This volume brings together scholars of diverse theoretical persuasions who all share an interest in capturing the role that nominal determination and reference assignment play in the complicated interplay between thought, language and communication. The articles can be divided roughly into five main areas of concern: the conceptual level of determination; the emergence and function of articles; their semantic contribution to nominal interpretation; the morphology and syntax of determiners; and the interplay and contrasts between articles, demonstratives and possessives. Thus, linguistic and philosophical issues in the subject field of nominal determination are addressed at all interface levels between morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. This volume shows that different theoretical frameworks may be brought fruitfully together in the effort to formulate new analyses of well-known problems, but also to raise new questions and point to new areas which may prove interesting topics for future research both in functional and formal paradigms.
Although the notion of procedural meaning is found in areas such as discourse markers, reference, tense, modality and intonation, until now there has been no single volume entirely devoted to it. Over 25 years, since the initial proposal by Blakemore, a number of refinements have been suggested, yet some criticisms have also been raised. The role and status of the conceptual / procedural distinction within a theory of human communication and the nature of procedural encoding were in need of reassessment in the light of current research in linguistic theory, cognitive science, experimental pragmatics and language acquisition. The papers collected here serve this general purpose from different...