Discourse as Structure and Process

Discourse as Structure and Process PDF Author: Teun A. van Dijk
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780803978454
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
What are the structures of discourse and what are the functions of these structures in the communicative context? This volume explains how and why discourse is organized at various levels. The multidisciplinary contributions illustrate that discourse analysis goes far beyond the linguistic answer of designing grammars and goes hand in hand with the study of their uses and functions in the social context. Comprehensive and accessible, the volume covers a huge variety of discourse genres, including written and spoken, and storytelling and argumentation. The chapters also illustrate the necessity to examine the mental processes of the language users: How do people go about producing, understanding and remembering text or talk? The book stresses that both discourse and its mental processing have a social basis and can only be fully understood in relation to social interaction.

Discourse as Structure and Process

Discourse as Structure and Process PDF Author: Teun A. van Dijk
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780803978454
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
What are the structures of discourse and what are the functions of these structures in the communicative context? This volume explains how and why discourse is organized at various levels. The multidisciplinary contributions illustrate that discourse analysis goes far beyond the linguistic answer of designing grammars and goes hand in hand with the study of their uses and functions in the social context. Comprehensive and accessible, the volume covers a huge variety of discourse genres, including written and spoken, and storytelling and argumentation. The chapters also illustrate the necessity to examine the mental processes of the language users: How do people go about producing, understanding and remembering text or talk? The book stresses that both discourse and its mental processing have a social basis and can only be fully understood in relation to social interaction.

The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation

The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation PDF Author: Heike Pichler
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027272182
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Everyday language use overflows with discourse-pragmatic features. Their frequency, form and function can vary greatly across social groups and change dramatically over time. And yet these features have not figured prominently in studies of language variation and change. The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation demonstrates the theoretical insights that can be gained into both the structure of synchronic language variation and the interactional mechanisms creating it by subjecting discourse-pragmatic features to systematic variationist analysis. Introducing an innovative methodology that combines principles of variationist linguistics, grammaticalisation studies and conversation analysis, it explores patterns of variation in the formal encoding of I DON’T KNOW, I DON’T THINK and negative polarity tags in a north-east England interview corpus. Speakers strategically exploit the formal variability of these constructions to signal subtle meaning differences and to index social identities closely linked to the variables’ and their variants’ functional compartmentalisation in the variety. The methodology, results and implications of this study will be of great interest to scholars working throughout variationist sociolinguistics, grammaticalisation and discourse analysis.

Information Structure and Sentence Form

Information Structure and Sentence Form PDF Author: Knud Lambrecht
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316582418
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which it is used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumption about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus.

Discourse on the Move

Discourse on the Move PDF Author: Douglas Biber
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027291918
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Discourse on the Move is the first book-length exploration of how corpus-based methods can be used for discourse analysis, applied to the description of discourse organization. The primary goal is to bring these two analytical perspectives together: undertaking a detailed discourse analysis of each individual text, but doing so in terms that can be generalized across all texts of a corpus. The book explores two major approaches to this task: ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. In the ‘top-down’ approach, the functional components of a genre are determined first, and then all texts in a corpus are analyzed in terms of those components. In contrast, textual components emerge from the corpus analysis in the bottom-up approach, and the discourse organization of individual texts is then analyzed in terms of linguistically-defined textual categories. Both approaches are illustrated through case studies of discourse structure in particular genres: fund-raising letters, biology/biochemistry research articles, and university classroom teaching.

Discourse Structure and Anaphora

Discourse Structure and Anaphora PDF Author: Barbara A. Fox
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521439909
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Barbara Fox's thoughtful study examines the use of anaphora in both written and spoken discourse. Any treatment of anaphora must consider the hierarchical of its source texts-type. Texts may be produced and heard or read linearly, but they are designed and understood hierarchically. Discourse Structure and Anaphora goes beyond the information processing concerns of cognitive science to assess the critical role played in all text-types by social, interactional and affective factors. It also considers the fact that texts are organised by socially accepted conventions. Using conversation analysis and rhetorical structure analysis, this book looks at the distribution of pronouns and full noun phrases in three different genres of English, taking data from naturally occurring face-to-face and telephone conversations, small newspaper and magazine articles and a psychoanalytic biography.

Discourse Studies

Discourse Studies PDF Author: Teun A Van Dijk
Publisher: SAGE Publications Limited
ISBN: 9780761953210
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
This two-volume set is the first international text to provide a comprehensive introduction to discourse studies - the analysis of the linguistic, social, cultural and cognitive properties of text and talk in their various contexts. Designed specifically for students and other newcomers to this fascinating new `cross discipline', these volumes offer a wealth of theoretical, descriptive and methodological information. The contributors, world-renowned scholars from many countries and cultures, have written in an accessible, pedagogical style that combines useful literature reviews and clear illustrations of analysis with the originality of their own theoretical perspectives. These volumes are intended for use

The Discourse Potential of Underspecified Structures

The Discourse Potential of Underspecified Structures PDF Author: Anita Steube
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110209306
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
The volume demonstrates the interdependence of man’s language capacity and his other conceptual capacities. This enables linguistic structures to be minimalised, and for extra-linguistic domains to provide much of the interpretations of sound and meaning. Underspecification is demonstrated in the word formation of Indo-European, Late Archaic Chinese and modern Khmer; on the word- and sentence levels by the event structures of German; and in the information structure predominantly of languages with the so-called free word order: German, Slavic languages, Arabic compared with English and the tone language Hausa. The volume is noteworthy due to the close cooperation between theoretical and experimental research. Within grammar, it has especially strengthened prosodic research and the syntax-phonology interrelations and their interpretations, and it has helped to create data bases for the relations within texts and to evaluate the findings.

The Theory and Practice of Discourse Parsing and Summarization

The Theory and Practice of Discourse Parsing and Summarization PDF Author: Daniel Marcu
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262133722
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Most discourse researchers assume that full semantic understanding is necessary to derive the discourse structure of texts. This book documents an attempt to construct and use automatic and non-semantic computational structures for text summarization.

Modes of Discourse

Modes of Discourse PDF Author: Carlota S. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139435418
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In studying discourse, the problem for the linguist is to find a fruitful level of analysis. Carlota Smith offers a new approach with this study of discourse passages, units of several sentences or more. She introduces the key idea of the 'Discourse Mode', identifying five modes: Narrative, Description, Report, Information, Argument. These are realized at the level of the passage, and cut across genre lines. Smith shows that the modes, intuitively recognizable as distinct, have linguistic correlates that differentiate them. She analyzes the properties that distinguish each mode, focusing on grammatical rather than lexical information. The book also examines linguistically based features that appear in passages of all five modes: topic and focus, variation in syntactic structure, and subjectivity, or point of view. Operating at the interface of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, the book will appeal to researchers and graduate students in linguistics, stylistics and rhetoric.

Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language

Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language PDF Author: Adele E. Goldberg
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications
ISBN: 9781575860411
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 515

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Book Description
This collection of papers is the result of the first Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language conference (CSDL) held at the University of California, San Diego. The conference brought together researchers from both 'Cognitive' and 'Functional' approaches to linguistics. The papers in this volume span a variety of topics, but the common thread running through them is the claim that semantics and discourse properties are fundamental to the understanding of language. The themes presented in the volume include an emphasis on the dynamic nature of language, the relevance of a notion of viewpoint in grammatical analysis, the role and nature of metaphor and cognitive blend, the possibility of non-derivational ways to capture relationships among constructions and the importance of lexical semantics. This volume will appeal to a wide range of linguists, echoing the theme of the conference - bringing together two diverse approaches to linguistics.