Profiling Discourse Participants

Profiling Discourse Participants PDF Author: Barbara De Cock
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 902727021X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
The construction of discourse is a challenging field where many discourse structures and interactional effects remain poorly understood. This analysis provides a systematic explanation for the way in which discourse participants (speaker and hearer) are construed in Spanish through a corpus-driven analysis of informal conversation, TV-debates and parliamentary debates. It deals not only with person deixis, but with the full range of possibilities speakers choose from when profiling their self or their relationship with the interlocutor. This analysis also offers new insights into the operationalization of the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity as tools for the analysis of person reference and genre comparison. The comparative and corpus-driven approach offers methodological tools for genre analysis that can be transposed to other languages and/or genres. The detailed description of three socially highly relevant discourse types from a cognitive-functional perspective makes this book a useful resource not only for pragmatists but also for researchers in political and media discourse.

Profiling Discourse Participants

Profiling Discourse Participants PDF Author: Barbara De Cock
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 902727021X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
The construction of discourse is a challenging field where many discourse structures and interactional effects remain poorly understood. This analysis provides a systematic explanation for the way in which discourse participants (speaker and hearer) are construed in Spanish through a corpus-driven analysis of informal conversation, TV-debates and parliamentary debates. It deals not only with person deixis, but with the full range of possibilities speakers choose from when profiling their self or their relationship with the interlocutor. This analysis also offers new insights into the operationalization of the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity as tools for the analysis of person reference and genre comparison. The comparative and corpus-driven approach offers methodological tools for genre analysis that can be transposed to other languages and/or genres. The detailed description of three socially highly relevant discourse types from a cognitive-functional perspective makes this book a useful resource not only for pragmatists but also for researchers in political and media discourse.

The Discourse of Public Participation Media

The Discourse of Public Participation Media PDF Author: Joanna Thornborrow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131757995X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Discourse of Public Participation Media takes a fresh look at what ‘ordinary’ people are doing on air – what they say, and how and where they get to say it. Using techniques of discourse analysis to explore the construction of participant identities in a range of different public participation genres, Joanna Thornborrow argues that the role of the ‘ordinary’ person in these media environments is frequently anything but. Tracing the development of discourses of public participation media, the book focusses particularly on the 1990s onwards when broadcasting was expanding rapidly: the rise of the TV talk show, increasing formats for public participation in broadcast debate and discussion, and the explosion of reality TV in the first decade of the 21st century. During this period, traditional broadcasting has also had to move with the times and incorporate mobile and web-based communication technologies as new platforms for public access and participation - text and email as well as the telephone - and an audience that moves out of the studio and into the online spaces of chat rooms, comment forums and the ‘twitterverse’. This original study examines the shifting discourses of public engagement and participation resulting from these new forms of communication, making it an ideal companion for students of communication, media and cultural studies, media discourse, broadcast talk and social interaction.

Categoriality in Language Change

Categoriality in Language Change PDF Author: Lauren Fonteyn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190917598
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents the first serious attempt to set out a functional-semantic definition of diachronic transcategorial shift between the major classes noun/nominal and verb/clause. In English, speakers have different options to refer to an event, ranging from that-clauses (That he had guessed her size) over infinitives (For him to guess her size) and verbal gerunds (Him guessing her size) to nominal gerunds (His guessing of her size) and deverbal nouns (His guess of her size). Interestingly, not only do these strategies each resemble "prototypical" nominals to varying extents, but also some of these strategies increasingly resemble clauses and decreasingly resemble prototypical nominals over time, as if they are gradually shifting categories. Thus far, the literature that has dealt with such cases of diachronic categorial shift has mainly described the processes by focusing on form, leaving us with a clear picture of what and how changes have occurred. Yet, the question of why these formal changes have occurred is still shrouded in mystery. In this book, Lauren Fonteyn tackles this mystery by showing that the diachronic processes of nominalization and verbalization can also involve functional-semantic changes in two steps. First, building on functionalist and cognitive models of grammar, she offers a theoretical model of categoriality that allows us to study diachronic nominalization and verbalization not just as morphosyntactic but also as functional-semantic processes. Second, she offers more concrete, "workable" definitions of the abstract functional-semantic properties of the nominal and verbal/clausal class, which are subsequently applied to one of the most intriguing deverbal nominalization systems in the history of English: the English gerund.

Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages

Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages PDF Author: Pekka Posio
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961104166
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume brings together contributions by researchers focusing on personal pronouns in Ibero-Romance languages, going beyond the well-established variable of expressed vs. non-expressed subjects. While factors such as agreement morphology, topic shift and contrast or emphasis have been argued to account for variable subject expression, several corpus studies on Ibero-Romance languages have shown that the expression of subject pronouns goes beyond these traditionally established factors and is also subject to considerable dialectal variation. One of the factors affecting choice and expression of personal pronouns or other referential devices is whether the construction is used personally or impersonally. The use and emergence of new impersonal constructions, eventually also new (im)personal pronouns, as well as the variation found in the expression of human impersonality in different Ibero-Romance language varieties is another interesting research area that has gained ground in the recent years. In addition to variable subject expression, similar methods and theoretical approaches have been applied to study the expression of objects. Finally, the reference to the addressee(s) using different address pronouns and other address forms is an important field of study that is closely connected to the variable expression of pronouns. The present book sheds light on all these aspects of reference to discourse participants. The volume contains contributions with a strong empirical background and various methods and both written and spoken corpus data from Ibero-Romance languages. The focus on discourse participants highlights the special properties of first and second person referents and the factors affecting them that are often different from the anaphoric third person. The chapters are organized into three thematic sections: (i) Variable expression of subjects and objects, (ii) Between personal and impersonal, and (iii) Reference to the addressee.

Discourse Approaches to an Emerging Age of Populist Politics

Discourse Approaches to an Emerging Age of Populist Politics PDF Author: Isabel Íñigo-Mora
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819713552
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Politics of Person Reference

The Politics of Person Reference PDF Author: Naomi Truan
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260184
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, the first systematic exploration of the third person in English, German, and French, takes a fresh look at person reference within the realm of political discourse. By focusing on the newly refined speech role of the target, attention is given to the continuity between second and third grammatical persons as a system. The role played by third-person forms in creating and maintaining interpersonal relationships in discourse has been surprisingly overlooked. Until now, third-person forms have overwhelmingly been considered as referring to the absent, i.e. to someone outside the communication situation, other than the speaker or the hearer: the “nonperson”. By broadening the scope and finally integrating the third person, we come to understand The Politics of Person Reference fully, and to see the strategic, argumentative, and dialogical nature of the act of referring to other discourse participants, understood as the act of creating new referents.

Analysing Citizenship Talk

Analysing Citizenship Talk PDF Author: Heiko Hausendorf
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027293805
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Get Book Here

Book Description
Citizenship talk refers to various types of discourse initiated to make citizens take part in politically and socially contested decision-making processes (‘citizen participation’). ‘Citizenship’ has, accordingly, become one of the dazzling key words whenever the democratic deficit of modern societies is moaned about. Asking for citizenship to be conceived of as a communicative achievement, the present book shows that sociolinguistics and pragmatics can essentially contribute to this interdisciplinary up-to-date issue of research: the volume offers a theoretically innovative concept of communicated citizenship and it presents a set of methodological approaches suited to deal with this concept at an empirical level (including contributions from Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Positioning Theory, Speech Act Theory and Ethnography). Furthermore, concrete data and empirical analyses are provided which take up the case of decision-making processes around the application of modern ‘green’ biotechnology (‘GMO field trials’). The volume thus illustrates the kind of findings and results that can be expected from this new and promising approach towards citizenship talk.

Controversy as News Discourse

Controversy as News Discourse PDF Author: Peter A. Cramer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 940071288X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents a constitutive approach to controversy based on a discourse analysis of news texts, focusing on the role of journalists as participants who shape public controversy for readers. Drawing data from the Reuters Corpus, the project identifies formulas that journalists use in reporting controversy and draws conclusions about how these serve professional and textual functions and how they shape public controversy as a natural, historical, and pragmatic event. While the traditions of dialectic and rhetoric have focused on the prescriptive aim of training participants to resolve controversies in philosophical dialogue or public debate settings, this orientation has tended to preempt questions about where controversy is located and how it is shaped. This project contributes to descriptive, ethnographic research about controversy, using discourse analysis to address a problem in argumentation.

Iconicity and Analogy in Language Change

Iconicity and Analogy in Language Change PDF Author: Janice Aski
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501500988
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the alternation between accusative-dative and dative-accusative order in Old Florentine clitic clusters and its decline in favor of the latter. Based on an exhaustive analysis of data collected from medieval Florentine and Tuscan texts we offer a novel analysis of the rise of the variable order, the transition from one order to the other, and the demise of the alternation that relies primarily on iconicity and analogy. The book employs exophoric pragmatic iconicity, a language-external iconic relationship based on similarity between linguistic structure and the speaker/writer's conceptualization of reality, and endophoric iconicity, a language-internal iconic relationship where the iconic ground is construed between linguistic signs and structures. Analogy is viewed as a productive process that generalizes patterns or extends grammatical rules to formally similar structures, and obtains the form of the analogical relationship between the masculine singular definite article and the third person singular accusative clitic, which shared the same phonotactically constrained distribution patterns. The data indicate that exophoric pragamatic iconicity exploits and maintains the alternation, whereas endophoric iconicity and analogy conspire to end it.

Binominal Quantifiers in Spanish

Binominal Quantifiers in Spanish PDF Author: Katrien Dora Verveckken
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311040673X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 532

Get Book Here

Book Description
Quantification is central to human experience (cf. Aristotle’s Organon): the most basic aspects of human life and reasoning involve quantity assessment. This study sheds lights on a highly frequent way to express quantification in Spanish, viz. the binominal quantifier (e.g. un aluviónN1 de llamadasN2 ‘a flood of calls’) which assesses the quantity of N2 in terms of N1. This volume offers a corpus-based, cognitive-functional analysis of binominal quantifiers (BQ) in Spanish. The first part is dedicated to the development of BQs and starts from the assumption that BQs are cross-linguistically involved in grammaticalization. This monograph frames the history of BQs in Spanish in terms of constructional levels of change and highlights the complex interplay between analogical thinking and conceptual persistence. The second part motivates both the ample variation in the paradigm of quantifying nouns and their combinatorial pattern by the very same mechanism of conceptually-driven analogy. The study thus yields an innovative functional model of BQs in Spanish, in synchrony and in diachrony, with major implications for reference grammars and theory building.