The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation
The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation

Author: Heike Pichler

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2013-04-08

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9027272182

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Everyday language use overflows with discourse-pragmatic features. Their frequency, form and function can vary greatly across social groups and change dramatically over time. And yet these features have not figured prominently in studies of language variation and change. The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation demonstrates the theoretical insights that can be gained into both the structure of synchronic language variation and the interactional mechanisms creating it by subjecting discourse-pragmatic features to systematic variationist analysis. Introducing an innovative methodology that combines principles of variationist linguistics, grammaticalisation studies and conversation analysis, it explores patterns of variation in the formal encoding of I DON’T KNOW, I DON’T THINK and negative polarity tags in a north-east England interview corpus. Speakers strategically exploit the formal variability of these constructions to signal subtle meaning differences and to index social identities closely linked to the variables’ and their variants’ functional compartmentalisation in the variety. The methodology, results and implications of this study will be of great interest to scholars working throughout variationist sociolinguistics, grammaticalisation and discourse analysis.

Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context
Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context

Author: Alexandra D'Arcy

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2017-09-21

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 9027265313

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Like is a ubiquitous feature of English with a deep history in the language, exhibiting regular and constrained variable grammars over time. This volume explores the various contexts of like, each of which contributes to the reality of contemporary vernaculars: its historical context, its developmental context, its social context, and its ideological context. The final chapter examines the ways in which these contexts overlap and inform current understanding of acquisition, structure, change, and embedding. The volume also features an extensive appendix, containing numerous examples of like in its pragmatic functions from a range of English corpora, both diachronic and synchronic. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, language variation and change, discourse-pragmatics and the interface of these fields with formal linguistic theory.

Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English
Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English

Author: Heike Pichler

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-06-02

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1107055768

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Introducing a range of new methods and insights for analysing discourse-pragmatic variation and change, this volume aims to inform future studies in the field.

Pragmatic Variation in First and Second Language Contexts
Pragmatic Variation in First and Second Language Contexts

Author: J. César Félix-Brasdefer

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2012-09-12

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9027273278

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Departing from Schneider and Barron (2008), representing the emerging field of Variational Pragmatics, this volume examines pragmatic variation focusing on methods utilized to collect and analyze data in a variety of first (L1) and second (L2) language contexts. The objectives are to: (1) examine variation in such areas of pragmatics as speech acts, conventional expressions, metapragmatics, stance, frames, mitigation, communicative action, (im)politeness, and implicature; and (2) critically review central methodological concerns relevant for research in pragmatic variation, such as coding, ethical issues, qualitative and quantitative methods, and individual variation. Theoretical frameworks vary from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, to variational pragmatics. This collection contains eleven chapters by leading scholars, including two state-of-the art chapters on key methodological issues of pragmatic variation study. Given the theoretical perspectives, methodological focus, and analyses, the book will be of interest to those who study pragmatics, discourse analysis, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and language variation.

Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change
Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change

Author: Elizabeth Peterson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-07-28

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1108836208

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The book highlights the expansion of discourse-pragmatic variation and change, especially under-studied variables and languages.

Pragmatics of Discourse
Pragmatics of Discourse

Author: Klaus P. Schneider

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-06-18

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 3110375028

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Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

Sentence and Discourse
Sentence and Discourse

Author: Jacqueline Guéron

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-10-29

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 019105982X

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This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.

Socioeconomic Pragmatic Variation
Socioeconomic Pragmatic Variation

Author: Larssyn Staley

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2018-07-19

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 9027263922

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On a regular basis people encounter unfamiliar uses of pragmatic features, such as offers or requests with differing levels of directness or terms of address showing differing amounts of solidarity or deference. Variational pragmatics is the study of such uses, according to region, gender, age, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, among national and sub-national varieties of pluricentric languages. Despite the wide focus just outlined, this volume provides the first study of pragmatic variation across different social classes, using naturally occurring, interactional data. The discourse analyzed here was collected in over twenty restaurant service encounters spanning three price points. The aim of this study is two-fold: to provide a potential framework for how pragmatic variables and their context can be defined, using the concept of a communicative activity, and to investigate socioeconomic variation in pragmatics by taking offers, thanks responses and address forms as examples. This study contributes, both on a methodological and empirical level, to the growing body of research in variational pragmatics, as well as speech acts, terms of address, relational work and sociolinguistics.

Pragmatics of Society
Pragmatics of Society

Author: Gisle Andersen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-12-23

Total Pages: 720

ISBN-13: 3110214423

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Pragmatics of society takes a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics and gives a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a wide range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield of pragmatics encompasses sociolinguistic studies that focus on how pragmatic and discourse features vary according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies investigating variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also covers studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.

The Role of Semantic, Pragmatic, and Discourse Factors in the Development of Case
The Role of Semantic, Pragmatic, and Discourse Factors in the Development of Case

Author: Jóhanna Barðdal

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2009-03-11

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 9027289921

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The aim of this volume is to bring non-syntactic factors in the development of case into the eye of the research field, by illustrating the integral role of pragmatics, semantics, and discourse structure in the historical development of morphologically marked case systems. The articles represent fifteen typologically diverse languages from four different language families: (i) Indo-European: Vedic Sanskrit, Russian, Greek, Latin, Latvian, Gothic, French, German, Icelandic, and Faroese; (ii) Tibeto-Burman, especially the Bodic languages and Meithei; (iii) Japanese; and (iv) the Pama-Nyungan mixed language Gurindji Kriol. The data also show considerable diversity and include elicited, archival, corpus-based, and naturally occurring data. Discussions of mechanisms where change is obtained include semantically and aspectually motivated synchronic case variation, discourse motivated subject marking, reduction or expansion of case marker distribution, case syncretism motivated by semantics, syntax, or language contact, and case splits motivated by pragmatics, metonymy, and subjectification.