Diachronic Pragmatics
Diachronic Pragmatics

Author: Leslie K. Arnovick

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2000-02-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9027299021

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The purpose of Diachronic Pragmatics is to exemplify historical pragmatics in its twofold sense of constituting both a subject matter and a methodology. This book demonstrates how diachronic pragmatics, with its complementary diachronic function-to-form mapping and diachronic form-to-function mapping, can be used to trace pragmatic developments within the English language. Through a set of case studies it explores the evolution of such speech acts as promises, curses, blessings, and greetings and such speech events as flyting and sounding. Collectively these “illocutionary biographies” manifest the workings of several important pragmatic processes and trends: increased epistemicity, subjectification, and discursization (a special kind of pragmaticalization). It also establishes the centrality of cultural traditions in diachronic reconstruction, examining various de-institutionalizations of extra-linguistic context and their affect on speech act performance. Taken together, the case studies presented in Diachronic Pragmatics highlight the complex interactions of formal, semantic, and pragmatic processes over time. Illustrating the possibilities of historical pragmatic pursuit, this book stands as an invitation to further research in a new and important discipline.

Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics
Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics

Author: Irma Taavitsainen

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789027256485

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Based on a corpus of Old Spanish texts, the discourse traditions of counselling are analysed within the framework of diachronic corpus pragmatics and dialogue analysis. On a methodological level, the study distinguishes three types of pragmatics and offers a clear-cut distinction between language change and cultural changes in the realm of discourse traditions. In order to clearly define the different interaction patterns in these dialogues, the qualitative approach of traditional philology is combined with quantitative methods that extract lexical clusters which are typical of counselling dia.

Exploring Intensification
Exploring Intensification

Author: Maria Napoli

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2017-09-30

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9027265127

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This book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification, which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree, scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers, there is still a need for the characterization of intensification as a distinct functional category in the domain of modification. The eighteen papers of the volume contribute to this aim with a new approach (mainly corpus-based). They focus on intensification from different perspectives (both synchronic and diachronic) and theoretical frameworks, concern ancient languages (Hittite, Greek, Latin) and modern languages (mainly Italian, German, English, Kiswahili), and involve different levels of analysis. They also identify and examine different types of intensifiers, applied to different forms and structures, such as adverbs, adjectives, evaluative affixes, discourse markers, reduplication, exclamative clauses, coordination, prosodic elements, and shed light on issues which have not been extensively studied so far.

Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems
Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems

Author: Irma Taavitsainen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 902725348X

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Topics covered in this volume include: the system of Czech bound address forms until 1700; Spanish forms of address in the 16th century; and pronominal usage in Shakespeare.

Corpus Pragmatics
Corpus Pragmatics

Author: Karin Aijmer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 1107015049

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The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.

Pragmatics in the History of English
Pragmatics in the History of English

Author: Laurel Brinton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1009322923

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A state-of-the-art overview of English historical pragmatics, covering topics such as speech representation, politeness, and address terms.

Current Trends in Diachronic Semantics and Pragmatics
Current Trends in Diachronic Semantics and Pragmatics

Author: Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2012-11-02

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9004253211

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The focus of this volume is on semantic and pragmatic change, its causes and mechanisms. The papers gathered here offer both theoretical proposals of more general scope and in-depth studies of language-specific cases of meaning change in particular notional domains. The analyses include data from English, several Romance languages, German, Scandinavian languages, and Oceanic languages. Detailed case-studies covering central semantic domains, such as concession, evidentiality, intensification, modality, negation, scalarity, subjectivity, and temporality, allow the authors to test and refine current models of semantic change, by focusing, for instance, on the respective roles of speakers and hearers in the process and on the relationship between semantic and syntactic reanalysis. Key theoretical notions, such as presuppositions, paradigms, word order, and discourse status are revisited in a diachronic perspective to provide innovative accounts of causes and motivations for linguistic changes. A prominent theme is the evolution of procedural meanings of various kinds. Thus, several papers feature different types of pragmatic markers as their object of study, while others are concerned with items and constructions expressing modality, evidentiality, negation, and relational meanings. Closely related themes are: the interface between semantics and pragmatics/discourse, with figurative uses of language, rhetorical-argumentational strategies, discourse traditions, information structure, and the importance of dialogic contexts in change playing a salient role in several papers; the relationship between meaning change and processes such as grammaticalization, subjectification and pragmaticalization; and, the thorny issue of the categorization of linguistic items such as discourse markers or modal particles, evidentials or epistemic modals, to which the diachronic data are shown to contribute substantially. The volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and historical linguistics.

Synchrony and Diachrony of Ancient Greek
Synchrony and Diachrony of Ancient Greek

Author: Georgios K. Giannakis

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-01-18

Total Pages: 502

ISBN-13: 3110719339

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This collective volume contains thirty six original studies on various aspects of Ancient Greek language, linguistics and philology written by an international group of leading authorities in the field. The essays are organized in five thematic groups covering a wide variety of issues of ancient Greek linguistics, ranging from epigraphy and the study of individual dialects to various other aspects of the structure of the language, such as phonetics and phonology, morphology, lexicon and word formation, etymology, metrics as well as many syntactic matters and problems of pragmatics and stylistics of the language; a number of essays move in the middle ground where language, linguistics and philology crosscut and cross-fertilize each other with the application of linguistic theory to the study of classical texts. The work is of special relevance to scholars interested in Greek linguistics in general and in particular aspects of the Greek language.

Variation and Change
Variation and Change

Author: Mirjam Fried

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 9027207836

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The ten volumes of the "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, interactional, or discursive angles, this sixth volume focuses on the dynamic aspects of language and reviews the relevant developments in variationist and diachronic scholarship. The areas explored in the volume concern several general themes: specific methodological approaches, from comparative reconstruction to evolutionary pragmatics; issues in intra-lingual variation in terms of standard and non-standard varieties; cross-linguistic variation, including its cross-cultural dimension; and the study of diachronic relations across linguistic patterns, including changes in all areas of pragmatic patterns and categories. The contributions document two prominent and interrelated trends that shape contemporary variationist and diachronic research. One, it has moved from situating change within context-independent systems toward incorporating patterns of language use and the speaker s role in language change. And two, it has reoriented its focus away from cataloguing instances of variation and toward seeking theoretically informed accounts that aim at "explaining" variation and change. On the whole, the volume argues for accepting and developing actively a systematic connection between research in diachrony, synchronic variation, and typology, while also incorporating the socio-cognitive perspective in linguistic analysis as a particularly promising source of useful methodology and explanatory models."

Cognitive Pragmatics
Cognitive Pragmatics

Author: Bruno G. Bara

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2010-05-28

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0262014114

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An argument that communication is a cooperative activity between agents, who together consciously and intentionally construct the meaning of their interaction. In Cognitive Pragmatics, Bruno Bara offers a theory of human communication that is both formalized through logic and empirically validated through experimental data and clinical studies. Bara argues that communication is a cooperative activity in which two or more agents together consciously and intentionally construct the meaning of their interaction. In true communication (which Bara distinguishes from the mere transmission of information), all the actors must share a set of mental states. Bara takes a cognitive perspective, investigating communication not from the viewpoint of an external observer (as is the practice in linguistics and the philosophy of language) but from within the mind of the individual. Bara examines communicative interaction through the notion of behavior and dialogue games, which structure both the generation and the comprehension of the communication act (either language or gesture). He describes both standard communication and nonstandard communication (which includes deception, irony, and "as-if" statements). Failures are analyzed in detail, with possible solutions explained. Bara investigates communicative competence in both evolutionary and developmental terms, tracing its emergence from hominids to Homo sapiens and defining the stages of its development in humans from birth to adulthood. He correlates his theory with the neurosciences, and explains the decay of communication that occurs both with different types of brain injury and with Alzheimer's disease. Throughout, Bara offers supporting data from the literature and his own research. The innovative theoretical framework outlined by Bara will be of interest not only to cognitive scientists and neuroscientists but also to anthropologists, linguists, and developmental psychologists.