Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse

Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse PDF Author: Esam N. Khalil
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027251015
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse explores the discourse notion of grounding (viz. the foreground-background structure), and examines it in the various structures that occur in short news texts. A text-level approach to grounding and the differentiation between several core concepts relating to the various textual and non-textual structures, distinguish the book from other approaches in the field. A corpus-based analysis focuses on sentence-initial expressions and examines the grounding-signalling function of several markers in both English and Arabic. The analysis captures constraints on the occurrence of particular markers, and the extensive illustrative examples explain the strategies that writers employ to cope with problems of recasting grounding-values in news texts. The author also shows how the failure to signal appropriate grounding-values is likewise associated with the failure to deliver the appropriate type of text. Grounding is a relatively unexplored area of investigation in Arabic (text)linguistics, and the study identifies a series of previously unrecognized language features, highlighting the discourse pragmatic function that syntax serves. The book will be invaluable to researchers and students of discourse, pragmatics, contrastive rhetoric, and communication. It will also be of interest to all those involved in translation and intercultural studies.

Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse

Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse PDF Author: Esam N. Khalil
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027251015
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse explores the discourse notion of grounding (viz. the foreground-background structure), and examines it in the various structures that occur in short news texts. A text-level approach to grounding and the differentiation between several core concepts relating to the various textual and non-textual structures, distinguish the book from other approaches in the field. A corpus-based analysis focuses on sentence-initial expressions and examines the grounding-signalling function of several markers in both English and Arabic. The analysis captures constraints on the occurrence of particular markers, and the extensive illustrative examples explain the strategies that writers employ to cope with problems of recasting grounding-values in news texts. The author also shows how the failure to signal appropriate grounding-values is likewise associated with the failure to deliver the appropriate type of text. Grounding is a relatively unexplored area of investigation in Arabic (text)linguistics, and the study identifies a series of previously unrecognized language features, highlighting the discourse pragmatic function that syntax serves. The book will be invaluable to researchers and students of discourse, pragmatics, contrastive rhetoric, and communication. It will also be of interest to all those involved in translation and intercultural studies.

Historical Pragmatics

Historical Pragmatics PDF Author: Andreas H. Jucker
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027250472
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 645

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Book Description
Until very recently, pragmatics has been restricted to the analysis of contemporary spoken language while historical linguistics has studied historical texts and language change in a decontextualized way. This has now radically changed and scholars from around the world are trying to build a new theoretical framework that integrates recent advances both in pragmatics and in historical linguistics. The volume, which contains 22 original articles, starts with an introduction that is both a state-of-the-art account of historical pragmatics and a programmatic statement of its future potential and its different subfields. Part I contains seven pragmaphilological papers that deal with historical texts and their interpretations by paying close attention to the communicative context of these texts. The second and third parts comprise papers in diachronic pragmatics. The ten papers of part II take a linguistic form as their starting point, e.g. particular lexical items or syntactic constructions, and study their pragmatic functions at different times (diachronic form-to-function mappings), while the four papers of part III take a particular pragmatic function as their starting point, e.g. discourse strategies or politeness, and study their linguistic realisation at different times (diachronic function-to-form mappings).

Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues

Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues PDF Author: Terry Walker
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027254016
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
This book is a corpus-based study examining thou and you in three speech-related genres from 1560–1760, a crucial period in the history of second person singular pronouns, spanning the time from when you became dominant to when thou became all but obsolete. The study embraces the fields of corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and historical sociolinguistics. Using data drawn from the recently released A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and manuscript material, the aim is to ascertain which extra-linguistic and linguistic factors highlighted by previous research appear particularly relevant in the selection and relative distribution of thou and you. Previous research on thou and you has tended to concentrate on Drama and/or been primarily qualitative in nature. Depositions in particular have hitherto received very little attention. This book is intended to help fill a gap in the literature by presenting an in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of pronoun usage in Trials, Depositions, and, for comparative purposes, Drama Comedy.

Epistemic Stance in English Conversation

Epistemic Stance in English Conversation PDF Author: Elise Kärkkäinen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027253579
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book is the first corpus-based description of epistemic stance in conversational American English. It argues for epistemic stance as a pragmatic rather than semantic notion: showing commitment to the status of information is an emergent interactive activity, rooted in the interaction between conversational co-participants. The first major part of the book establishes the highly regular and routinized nature of such stance marking in the data. The second part offers a micro-analysis of I think, the prototypical stance marker, in its sequential and activity contexts. Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis and paying serious attention to the manifold prosodic cues attendant in the speakers' utterances, the study offers novel situated interpretations of I think. The author also argues for intonation units as a unit of social interaction and makes observations about the grammaticization patterns of the most frequent epistemic markers, notably the status of I think as a discourse marker.

Writing in Nonstandard English

Writing in Nonstandard English PDF Author: Irma Taavitsainen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902729903X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This book investigates linguistic variation as a complex continuum of language use from standard to nonstandard. In our view, these notions can only be established through mutual definition, and they cannot exist without the opposite pole. What is considered standard English changes according to the approach at hand, and the nonstandard changes accordingly. This book offers an interdisciplinary and multifaceted approach to this central theme of wide interest. The articles approach writing in nonstandard language through various disciplines and methodologies: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, historical linguistics, dialectology, corpus linguistics, and ideological and political points of view. The theories and methods from these fields are applied to material that ranges from nonliterary writing to canonized authors. Dialects, regional varieties and worldwide Englishes are also addressed.

The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English

The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English PDF Author: Susan M. Fitzmaurice
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9781588111869
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This research monograph examines familiar letters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English to provide a pragmatic reading of the meanings that writers make and readers infer. The first part of the book presents a method of analyzing historical texts. The second part seeks to validate this method through case studies that illuminate how modern pragmatic theory may be applied to distant speech communities in both history and culture in order to reveal how speakers understand one another and how they exploit intended and unintended meanings for their own communicative ends. The analysis demonstrates the application of pragmatic theory (including speech act theory, deixis, politeness, implicature, and relevance theory) to the study of historical, literary and fictional letters from extended correspondences, producing an historically informed, richly situated account of the meanings and interpretations of those letters that a close reading affords. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of the English language, historical pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as to social and cultural historians, and literary critics.

Academic Writing

Academic Writing PDF Author: Eija Ventola
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027285659
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Writing is crucial to the academic world. It is the main mode of communication among scientists and scholars and also a means for students for obtaining their degrees. The papers in this volume highlight the intercultural, generic and textual complexities of academic writing. Comparisons are made between various traditions of academic writing in different cultures and contexts and the studies combine linguistic analyses with analyses of the social settings in which academic writing takes place and is acquired. The common denominator for the papers is writing in English and attention is given to native-English writers’ and non-native writers’ problems in different disciplines. The articles in the book introduce a variety of methodological approaches for analyses and search for better teaching methods and ways of improving the syllabi of writing curricula. The book as a whole illustrates how linguists strive for new research methods and practical applications in applied linguistics.

Second Language Interaction

Second Language Interaction PDF Author: Salla Kurhila
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027253889
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Members of divergent societies are increasingly involved in interactional situations, both publicly and privately, where participants do not share linguistic resources. Second language conversations have become common everyday events in the globalized world, and an interest has evolved to determine how interaction is conducted and understanding achieved in such asymmetric conversations. This book describes how mutual intelligibility is established, checked and remedied in authentic interaction between first and second language speakers, both in institutional and everyday situations. The study is rooted in the interactional view on language, and it contributes to our knowledge on interactional practices, in particular in cases where some doubt exists about the level of intersubjectivity between the participants. It expands the traditional research agenda of conversation analysis that is based on the concepts of 'membership' and 'members' shared competences'. By showing in detail how speakers with restricted linguistic resources can interact successfully and achieve the (institutional) goals of interactions, this study also adds to our knowledge of the questions that are central in second language research, such as when and how the non-native speakers' 'linguistic output' is modified by themselves or by the native speakers, or when the non-native speakers display uptake after these modifications.

Beyond Misunderstanding

Beyond Misunderstanding PDF Author: Kristin Bührig
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027253870
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
This book challenges two tacit presumptions in the field of intercultural communication research. Firstly, misunderstandings can frequently be found in intercultural communication, although, one could not claim that intercultural communication is constituted by misunderstandings alone. This volume shows how new perspectives on linguistic analyses of intercultural communication go beyond the analysis of misunderstanding. Secondly, intercultural communication is not solely constituted by the fact that individuals from different cultural groups interact. Each contribution of this volume analyses to what extent instances of discourse are institutionally and/or interculturally determined. These linguistic reflections involve different theoretical frameworks, e.g. functional grammar, systemic functional linguistics, functional pragmatics, rhetorical conversation analysis, ethno-methodological conversation analysis, linguistic an­thro­­pology and a critical discourse approach. As the contributions focus on the discourse of genetic counseling, gate-keeping discourse, international team co-operation, international business communication, workplace discourse, internet communication, and lamentation discourse, the book exemplifies that the analysis of intercultural communication is organized in response to social needs and, therefore, may contribute to the social justification of linguistics.

Meaning Through Language Contrast

Meaning Through Language Contrast PDF Author: Katarzyna Jaszczolt
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9781588112064
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
These volumes contain selected papers from the Second International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, in September 2000. They include papers on negation, temporality, modality, evidentiality, eventualities, grammar and conceptualization, grammaticalization, metaphor, cross-cultural pragmatics and speech acts and the semantics-pragmatics boundary. There are contributions by, amongst many others, Les Bruce, Ilinca Crainiceanu, Thorstein Fretheim, Saeko Fukushima, Ronald Geluykens, Javier Gutierrez-Rexach, Klaus von Heusinger, K. M. Jaszczolt, Susumu Kubo, Akiko Kurosawa, Eva Lavric, Didier Maillat, Marta Maleczki, Steve Nicolle, Sergei Tatevosov, L. M. Tovena, Jacqueline Visconti and Krista Vogelberg.