Grammaticalization and Pragmatics: Facts, Approaches, Theoretical Issues PDF Download

Author: Corinne Rossari
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900425319X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The studies collected in this volume deal with pragmatic factors involved in the evolution of grammatical or lexical forms or in the emergence of complex syntactic structures in various languages (Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian and Spanish). They are set against the theoretical framework of grammaticalization. The main methodological tools are cross-linguistic contrastive analysis and diachronic perspective. The two main issues that emerge from these studies are the place of pragmatic factors in language change (input, output or setting/frame of the process) and the existence or otherwise of a prevailing mechanism for explaining change phenomena.

Author: Sophie Marnette
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027294321
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
This book analyses and describes Speech and Thought Presentation (S&TP) in French from a broad theoretical perspective, building bridges between linguistic, stylistic and narratological frameworks that have until now been developed separately. It combines the French théorie de l’énonciation and different Anglo-Saxon approaches of reported discourse into a harmonious whole, in order to create a new and exciting paradigm for our conception of S&TP strategies. Basing its findings on actual corpora and going beyond the canonical categories of reported discourse, it shows that the study of S&TP strategies is essential to our understanding of phenomena as diverse as the evolution and categorization of literary genres, the production and staging of ‘orality’ in literature, the various conceptualizations of the notion of ‘Truth’ in fiction and non-fiction, the expression of points of view in narrative, the structuring of rhetorical strategies and the construction of the ‘Self’ versus the representation of the ‘Other’ in discourse.

Author: Gunther Kaltenböck
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004253246
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Hedging is an essential part of everyday communication. It is a discourse strategy which is used to reduce commitment to the force or truth of an utterance to achieve an appropriate pragmatic effect. In recent years hedges have therefore attracted increased attention in Pragmatics and Applied Linguistics, with studies approaching the concept of hedging from various perspectives, such as speech act - and politeness theory, genre-specific investigations, interactional pragmatics, and studies of vague language. The present volume provides an up-to-date overview of current research on the topic by bringing together studies from a variety of fields. The contributions span a range of different languages, investigate the use of hedges in different communicative settings and text types, and consider all levels of linguistic analysis from prosody to morphology, syntax and semantics. What unites the different studies in this volume is a corpus-based approach, in which various theoretical concepts and categories are applied to, and tested against, actual language data. This allows for patterns of use to be uncovered which have previously gone unnoticed and provides valuable insights for the adjustment and fine-tuning of existing categories. The usage-based approach of the investigations therefore offers new theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the context-dependent nature and multifunctionality of hedges.

Author: Hélène Vassiliadou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527589099
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
In recent decades, research on clear and approximate categorizations and their manifestations in language has been generating a number of studies on syntax, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, philosophy, and logic. This is particularly interesting because these two operations have formally similar realizations even in languages belonging to different groups. The existence of a large number of type nouns testifies to their productivity. If these nouns serve to both categorize and approximate, the fundamental question is that of identifying the processes of interpretation concerned, since there is not always a consensus on interpretation. This book makes it clear that there are different ways to reach the category associated with a word by putting into perspective the issues surrounding the categorization and approximation and by comparing the ways of expression in languages belonging to different language groups. All in all, by investigating syntactic, morphological, and semantic correlations between type noun binominals and other constructions in various languages, this volume will provide an overview of the current state of research on the subject in order to help scholars and students to grasp the meaning and the cognitive foundations of approximation and categorization. The functioning of each language might clarify the links between categorization and approximation, two often opposed, yet essentially indissociable, operations.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 982

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Book Description

Author: Martine Vanhove
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027205736
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

Author: Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110711249
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 755

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Book Description
Virtually unstudied until the 1980s, discourse markers have gone on to become a growth industry. Research on markers is central to comprehensive theories of the synchronic linguistic system as such, of the use of language in communication, and of language change. From the very beginning, linguists working on Romance languages have been at the forefront of research on discourse markers. Including among its contributors many of the foremost experts in the field, this volume not only offers substantial state-of-the-art introductions to the diverse facets of contemporary research on discourse markers, with a focus on Romance, but it achieves added value by including in each chapter original and previously unpublished results. The first part of the book addresses foundational issues: What are discourse markers? What is their relationship to other types of pragmatic markers? The second part considers discourse markers at different levels of linguistic description, in particular: their grammatical status, their semantics and pragmatics, their prosodic features, their positioning within discourse units. The third part outlines different approaches to the study of discourse markers, namely contrastive studies, corpus linguistics, discourse traditions, and historical linguistics. The fourth part explores discourse markers at the interface with central topics in linguistics, such as politeness, social variation, language acquisition and psycholinguistic processing. The final part focuses on discourse markers in each of the major Romance languages, namely French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and Romanian. The volume will be of interest to researchers and students working in the field of Romance studies, general linguists, pragmaticians, discourse analysts, educationalists, and psychologists.

Author: Marlis Hellinger
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027296812
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
This is the third of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the assumption that masculine/male expressions are interpreted as generics? Can tendencies of variation and change be observed, and have alternatives been proposed for a more equal linguistic treatment of women and men? This volume (and the previous two volumes) will provide the much-needed basis for explicitly comparative analyses of gender across languages. All chapters are original contributions and follow a common general outline developed by the editors. The book contains rich bibliographical and indexical material. Languages of Volume 3: Czech, Danish, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Oriya, Polish, Serbian, Swahili and Swedish.

Author:
Publisher: KARTHALA Editions
ISBN: 2811100660
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description

Author: Günter Radden
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027232427
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Meaning does not reside in linguistic units but is constructed in the minds of the language users. Meaning construction is an on-line mental activity whereby speech participants create meanings on the basis of underspecified linguistic units. The construction of meaning is guided by cognitive principles. The contributions collected in the volume focus on two types of cognitive principles guiding meaning construction: meaning construction by means of metonymy and metaphor, and meaning construction by means of mental spaces and conceptual blending. The papers in the former group survey experiential evidence of figurative meaning construction and discuss high-level metaphor and metonymy, the role of metonymy in discourse, the chaining of metonymies, metonymy as an alternative to coercion, and metaphtonymic meanings of proper names. The papers in the latter group address the issues of meaning construction prompted by personal pronouns, relative clauses, inferential constructions, “sort-of” expressions, questions, and the into-causative construction.