Coherence and Grounding in Discourse

Coherence and Grounding in Discourse

Author: Russell S. Tomlin

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 1987-01-01

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13: 9027286272

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This volume seeks to expand our understanding of the relation holding between discourse relations, cognitive units, and linguistic coding. The twenty contributions in this collection explore one or more of the following themes: How point of view, or the salience of information in discourse, affects the organizational coherence of text and discourse; the concept of cognitive and linguistic event and how events are reflected in text and discourse organization; the nature of linguistic coding of events and other kinds of significant information; and the cognitive bases or cognitive correlates of the linguistic organization of discourse.


Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence

Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence

Author: C. Unger

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-11-28

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0230288200

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This book seeks to explain how discourse types influence the addressee's understanding of the communicator's intention. Examining global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, it argues that the key to a solution lies in the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson.


Coherence

Coherence

Author: T. Givón

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 9027260796

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Coherence, connectivity and the fitting together of smaller parts into larger structures and a coherent whole is the hallmark of complex biologically-based systems. As a structure-internal constraint, coherence makes it possible for the parts to work together as a whole. As an external constraint, it lets complex system evolve and adapt to novel contexts. As a constraint on information processing, it makes new knowledge accessible to the maturing, learning or evolving mind-brain. As a constraint on cultures, it enables members of social groups to be empathic and cooperative. As a constraint on language and communication, lastly, it allows the mind of speakers to be accessible to the mind of hearers. Part I explores first the role of coherence in the evolution of complex biological design, from precellular to mono-cellular to multi-cellular to multi-organ sentient beings. The complex hierarchic design of the mind-brain is explored next, probing the coherent organization of major brain systems—perception, attention, motor control, memory and language. In surveying the coherence of cultures next, the first-evolved Society of Intimates is viewed as the model for social cohesion, empathy, trust and cooperation. Part II deals with language and communication, touching upon the coherent organization of semantic memory, event clauses and clause chains, and the central role of grammar in coherent communication. Part III deals with three general issues. First, the role of coherence in organized science. Second, the eternal seesaw of selfish vs. social motivation in coherently functioning cultures. And last, the frail balance between homogeneity diversity in large-scale Societies of Strangers.


Context as Other Minds

Context as Other Minds

Author: Talmy Givón

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2005-01-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9789027232274

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Givon's new book re-casts pragmatics, and most conspicuously the pragmatics of sociality and communication, in neuro-cognitive, bio-adaptive, evolutionary terms. The fact that context, the core notion of pragmatics, is a framing operation undertaken on the fly through judgements of relevance, has been well known since Aristotle, Kant and Peirce. But the context that is relevant to the pragmatics of sociality and communication is a highly specific mental operation — the mental modeling of the interlocutor's current, rapidly shifting belief-and-intention states. The construed context of social interaction and communication is thus a mental representation of other minds. Following a condensed intellectual history of pragmatics, the book investigates the adaptive pragmatics of lexical-semantic categories — the 1st-order framing of “reality", what cognitive psychologists call “semantic memory”. Utilizing the network model, the book then takes a fresh look at the adaptive underpinnings of metaphoric meaning. The core chapters of the book outline the re-interpretation of “communicative context” as the systematic, on-line construction of mental models of the interlocutor's current, rapidly-shifting states of belief and intention. This grand theme is elaborated through examples from the grammar of referential coherence, verbal modalities and clause-chaining. In its final chapters, the book pushes pragmatics beyond its traditional bounds, surveying its interdisciplinary implications for philosophy of science, theory of personality, personality disorders and the calculus of social interaction.


Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse

Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse

Author: Wendan Li

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-02-19

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 9004360883

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In Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse Wendan Li offers a comprehensive and innovative account of how Mandarin Chinese, as a language without extensive morphological marking, highlights (or foregrounds) major events of a narrative and demotes (or backgrounds) other supporting descriptions. Qualitative and quantitative methods in the analysis and examinations of authentic written text provide extensive evidence to demonstrate that various types of morpho-syntactic devices are used in a wide range of structural units in Chinese to mark the distinction between foregrounding and backgrounding. The analysis paves the way for future studies to systematically approach grounding-related issues. The typological viewpoint adopted in the chapters serves well readers from both the Chinese tradition and other languages in discourse analysis.


Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse

Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse

Author: Esam N. Khalil

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9789027251015

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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.


Building Coherence and Cohesion

Building Coherence and Cohesion

Author: María Teresa Taboada

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9789027253729

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This book examines the resources that speakers employ when building conversations. These resources contribute to overall coherence and cohesion, which speakers create and maintain interactively as they build on each other s contributions. The study is cross-linguistic, drawing on parallel corpora of task-oriented dialogues between dyads of native speakers of English and Spanish. The framework of the investigation is the analysis of speech genres and their staging; the analysis shows that each stage in the dialogues exhibits different thematic, rhetorical, and cohesive relations. The main contributions of the book are: a corpus-based characterization of a spoken genre (task-oriented dialogue); the compilation of a body of analysis tools for generic analysis; application of English-based analyses to Spanish and comparison between the two languages; and a study of the characteristics of each generic stage in task-oriented dialogue.


Doing Discourse Analysis

Doing Discourse Analysis

Author: Linda A. Wood

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2000-05-11

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1452263523

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Providing both the practical steps for doing discourse analysis and the theoretical justifications for those steps, this book shows students how the social world revolves around talk and text. The authors draw on conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, and the discursive approach developed in social psychology. The book presents actual examples, covers data collection methods and strategies for data analysis, and addresses issues of reliability and validity.


Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible

Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible

Author: Ellen van Wolde

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-08-30

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 9004497528

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Biblical Hebrew grammar was until recently concentrated on the morpho-syntax within sentence boundaries. In the past few decades text-syntactic theories have been developed. At the conference Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible (Tilburg 1996) six eminent scholars presented both a paper on Hebrew syntax and a workshop in which Exodus 19-24 or 1 Samuel 1 was studied. Both kinds of contributions are collected in this volume. They tend to lead towards one conclusion: traditional sentence-grammar and text-syntactic studies should not exclude, but include each other. The verb forms, word-order and other syntactic features need to be studied as functioning at more than one level. A combination of a morpho-syntactic study at the sentence level and a text-syntactic approach is thus defended. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.