Discourse Topics

Discourse Topics PDF Author: Richard Watson Todd
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027266220
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Discourse topics are a frequently mentioned but rarely operationalised concept in linguistics. Taking a text linguistic approach and defining discourse topics as clusterings of concepts, this book examines and compares methods for investigating topic boundaries, topic identification and topic development. The first book to be devoted to topics in extended discourse, Discourse Topics examines topics in several genres and generates new insights into the nature of discourse topics that challenge the status quo. It is essential reading for researchers in linguistics, discourse analysis, natural language processing and psychology whose work concerns topics.

Discourse Topics

Discourse Topics PDF Author: Richard Watson Todd
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027266220
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
Discourse topics are a frequently mentioned but rarely operationalised concept in linguistics. Taking a text linguistic approach and defining discourse topics as clusterings of concepts, this book examines and compares methods for investigating topic boundaries, topic identification and topic development. The first book to be devoted to topics in extended discourse, Discourse Topics examines topics in several genres and generates new insights into the nature of discourse topics that challenge the status quo. It is essential reading for researchers in linguistics, discourse analysis, natural language processing and psychology whose work concerns topics.

The Grammar of Discourse

The Grammar of Discourse PDF Author: Robert E. Longacre
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1489901620
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
In that The Anatomy of Speech Notions (1976) was the precursor to The Grammar of Discourse (1983), this revision embodies a third "edition" of some of the material that is found here. The original intent of the 1976 volume was to construct a hierarchical arrangement of notional categories, which find surface realization in the grammatical constructions of the various languages of the world. The idea was to marshal the categories that every analyst-regardless of theoretical bent-had to take account of as cognitive entities. The volume began with a couple of chapters on what was then popularly known as "case grammar," then expanded upward and downward to include other notional categories on other levels. Chapters on dis course, monologue, and dialogue were buried in the center of the volume. In the 1983 volume, the chapters on monologue and dialogue discourse were moved to the fore of the book and the chapters on case grammar were made less prominent; the volume was then renamed The Grammar of Discourse. The current revision features more clearly than its predecessors the intersection of discourse and pragmatic concerns with grammatical structures on various levels. It retains and expands much of the former material but includes new material reflecting current advances in such topics as salience clines for discourse, rhetorical relations, paragraph structures, transitivity, ergativity, agency hierarchy, and word order typologies.

Topic Continuity in Discourse

Topic Continuity in Discourse PDF Author: T. Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027280258
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered, traditionally, from two distinct drawbacks. First, it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second, quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major departure from past practices, without rejecting both their intuitive appeal and the many good results yielded by them. First, “topic” and “topicality” are re-analyzed as a scalar property, rather than as an either/or discrete prime. Second, the graded property of “topicality” is firmly connected with sensible cognitive notions culled from gestalt psychology, such as “predictability” or “continuity”. Third, we develop and utilize precise measures and quantified methods by which the property of “topicality” of clausal arguments can be studied in connected discourse, and thus be properly hinged in its rightful context, that of topic identification, maintenance and recoverability in discourse. Fourth, we show that many grammatical phenomena which used to be studied by linguists in isolation, all partake in one functional domain of grammar, that of topic identification. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of this new approach to the study of “topic” and “topicality” by applying the same text-based quantifying method to a number of typologically-diverse languages, in studying actual texts. Languages studied here are: Written and spoken English, spoken Spanish, Biblical Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa, Japanese, Chamorro and Ute.

Media Discourse

Media Discourse PDF Author: Mary Talbot
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748630074
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This lively and accessible study of media and discourse combines theoretical reflection with empirical engagement, and brings together insights from a range of disciplines. Within media and cultural studies, the study of media texts is dominated by an exclusive focus on representation. This book adds long overdue attention to social interaction. The book is divided into two sections. The first outlines key theoretical issues and concepts, including informalisation, genre hybridisation, positioning, dialogism and discourse. The second is a sustained interrogation of social interaction in and around media. Re-examining issues of representation and interaction, it critically assesses work on the para-social and broadcast sociability, then explores distinct sites of interaction: production communities, audience communities and 'interactivity' with audiences.

The Syntax of Topic, Focus, and Contrast

The Syntax of Topic, Focus, and Contrast PDF Author: Ad Neeleman
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1614511454
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This book addresses how core notions of information structure (topic, focus and contrast) are expressed in syntax. The authors propose that the syntactic effects of information structure come about as a result of mapping rules that are flexible enough to allow topics and foci to be expressed in a variety of positions, but strict enough to capture certain cross-linguistic generalisations about their distribution. In particular, the papers argue that only contrastive topics and contrastive foci undergo movement and that this is because such movement has the function of marking the scope of contrast. Several predications are derived from this proposal: such as that a focus cannot move across a topic – whether the latter is in situ or not. Syntactic and semantic evidence in support of this proposal is presented from a wide range of languages (including Dutch, English, Japanese, Korean and Russian) and theoretical consequences explored. The first chapter not only outlines its theoretical aims, but also provides an introduction to information structure. As a consequence, the book is accessible to advanced students as well as professional linguists.

Discourse Analysis and Other Topics in Biblical Greek

Discourse Analysis and Other Topics in Biblical Greek PDF Author: Stanley E. Porter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474236154
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This collection brings together into one volume papers first delivered in the Section on Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meetings in 1992 and 1993. Part I, on discourse analysis, includes an introductory survey of the field, followed by three major papers and two responses. Each author uses his particular model of discourse analysis to analyse the book of Philippians, paying particular attention to the question of unity. Part 2, on other topics in biblical Greek, includes a probing introduction on the nature of language and five papers on a range of other areas of study.

The Theme-topic Interface

The Theme-topic Interface PDF Author: María A. Gómez-González
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027250865
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
The Theme-Topic Interface (TTI) gives a useful catalogue of approaches to the concept Theme in the analysis of Natural Language. The book is written with both theoretical and descriptive goals and aims to synthesize and revise current approaches to pragmatic functions. In addition, TTI explains that different thematic constructions in natural language reveal different discourse strategies related to point of view and speaker subjectivity, which shows the mutually supportive role of form and discourse function vis-á-vis each other. The book's value is enhanced by the use of natural language corpora, the Lancaster IBM Spoken English Corpus (LIBMSEC), and by running multivariate statistical tests, taking into account both segmental and suprasegmental features. The bibliography lists more than 600 publications providing ample material for further research into an integrated theory of language and its use. The indexes provide easy access to most authors mentioned and to the major concepts covered.

Topics in Political Discourse Analysis

Topics in Political Discourse Analysis PDF Author: Samuel Gyasi Obeng
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781604563917
Category : Discourse analysis
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The authors focus on the analysis of language (possibly in conjunction with other semiotic systems) in course of our lives as citizens of established polities of various scopes. The text includes social or human sciences insofar as they deal with discourse as politic behaviour.

Architecture of Topic

Architecture of Topic PDF Author: Valéria Molnár
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 150150438X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
This volume contains innovative papers that target the linguistic status of topic at the interface between grammar and discourse. The purpose of the volume is to discuss the universal properties of topics and, at the same time, to document the range of discourse-semantic and grammatical variation within this phenomenon in European languages. The volume is structured accordingly: (i) theoretical foundations of topicality in grammar and discourse; (ii) discourse-semantic correlates of topicality; (iii) variation in the grammatical (external and internal) encoding of topicality; (iv) topics from the diachronic perspective. The articles take different perspectives, including contrastive studies of modern languages, studies on diachronic development, and typological generalizations. They also take into consideration various types of empirical data – introspective data, semi-spontaneously produced data, experimental data and language corpora. The articles in this volume show that the concept of topic is necessary for the description and explanation of a number of discourse-semantic phenomena. They present a state of the art account of the architecture of topic while making recent research on the phenomenon accessible to a wider readership.

Speaking

Speaking PDF Author: Willem J. M. Levelt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262620895
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description
In Speaking, Willem "Pim" Levelt, Director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, accomplishes the formidable task of covering the entire process of speech production, from constraints on conversational appropriateness to articulation and self-monitoring of speech. Speaking is unique in its balanced coverage of all major aspects of the production of speech, in the completeness of its treatment of the entire speech process, and in its strategy of exemplifying rather than formalizing theoretical issues.