Discourse Topics

Author : Richard Watson Todd
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027266220
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Discourse Topics written by Richard Watson Todd and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-11-24 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Robert E. Longacre
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1489901620
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Grammar of Discourse written by Robert E. Longacre and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : T. Givón
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027280258
Total Pages : 498 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Topic Continuity in Discourse written by T. Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Talmy Givón
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027228671
Total Pages : 499 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Topic Continuity in Discourse written by Talmy Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Ruth Wodak
Publisher : SAGE
ISBN 13 : 1446244083
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis written by Ruth Wodak and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2009-03-19 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis provides a concise, comprehensible and thoroughly up-to-date introduction to CDA, appropriate for both novice and experienced researchers. This new edition has been updated throughout, with a new introduction contextualizing the development of the CDA approach, and two entirely new chapters on the 'social actor approach' to CDA and the use of quantitative corpus linguistic methods. The editors have brought together contributions from leading experts in the field, who each introduce their own approaches to CDA. Examples are included throughout, demonstrating the value of the method in analyzing a variety of genres of written material on a whole range of topics, including global warming, leadership in management, and globalization. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in linguistics, sociology and psychology interested in interdisciplinary approaches to coping with topical social problems.

Author : Wolfram Bublitz
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027274401
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Supportive Fellow-Speakers and Cooperative Conversations written by Wolfram Bublitz and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of a specific type of everyday conversation whose essential hallmark is its participants' attempt to gain agreement and consent when establishing and maintaining a continuous and coherent flow of talk. Basing his analyses on the Survey'-corpus and resorting to an interpretative, reconstructive mode of description, Bublitz focusses on two main phenomena: (a) discourse topic and topical actions (like INTRODUCING and CHANGING A TOPIC or DIGRESSING from it), (b) hearer signals and reactive speaker contributions. The interlocutors' topic-centered and topic-organizing behaviour is shown to be predominantly and systematically oriented towards supporting their fellow-speakers to the extent that it seems to be justified to regard large parts of these conversations as having a monological character'.

Author : Lenore A. Grenoble
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027284369
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian Discourse written by Lenore A. Grenoble and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998-04-15 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role deixis plays in structuring language and its relation to the context of utterance provides the focus for an examination of information packaging in Russian discourse. The analysis is based on a model which interprets discourse as constituted by four interrelated frameworks — the linguistic text, the text setting, the text content, and the participant framework. Deixis is divided into three primary dimensions of time, space, and person, which are metaphorically extended to secondary dimensions of information status (knowledge, focus, and theme). The linguistic devices which function in these dimensions encode information status by serving one or more communicative functions, including the presentative, directive, identifying, informing, acknowledging, and expressive functions. Discourse markers and deictics provide links between the content of the message, the linguistic text itself, and the context in which the message is produced. They introduce new participants, signal changes in thematic structure, bracket topical units, and mark the relative status of information. The book is written with both descriptive and theoretical goals. It aims to synthesize and revise current approaches to deixis and information packaging to account for the Russian data. The analysis extends beyond primary deixis to include knowledge structures and sources of knowledge, as well as the metalinguistic devices which signal changes in information flow, and grounding and saliency relations.

Author : J. Lachlan Mackenzie
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9783039106967
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Studies in Functional Discourse Grammar written by J. Lachlan Mackenzie and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2005 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains eight studies on Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), with work by FDG's foremost proponents, who provide both an introduction to the theory and a glimpse of current research projects. FDG derives its name from taking the discourse act as the basic unit of linguistic analysis. Each such unit receives four parallel analyses displaying its interpersonal, representational, morphosyntactic and phonological characteristics respectively. What is striking about the emergence of FDG is that it enters into lively debate with various other contemporary frameworks that share its functionalist orientation. This facet of FDG is highlighted in this book, every chapter of which brings out the interconnectedness of current theoretical trends.

Author : Daniel Altshuler
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198804237
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Coordination and the Syntax DS Discourse Interface written by Daniel Altshuler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-09 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.

Author : Ruth Wodak
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1137047984
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences written by Ruth Wodak and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can language tell us about society? Looking at a range of genres, from political speeches to internet chat, this book shows how qualitative methods are used to analyse discourses throughout the social sciences. The practical problems of designing and conducting discourse-based research are solved in this key resource for all social scientists.