This volume seeks to answers such questions as: how is conscious experience translated into discourse? How are foregrounding and backgrounding accomplished? What is the function of features like lexical choice and referential choice? And many more.
New technologies are constantly transforming traditional notions of language use and literacy in online communication environments. While previous research has provided a foundation for understanding the use of new technologies in instructed second language environments, few studies have investigated new literacies and electronic discourse beyond the classroom setting. This volume seeks to address this gap by providing corpus-based and empirical studies of electronic discourse analyzing social and linguistic variation as well as communicative practices in chat, discussion forums, blogs, and podcasts. Several chapters also examine the assessment and integration of new literacies. This volume will serve as a valuable resource for researchers, teachers, and students interested in exploring electronic discourse and new literacies in language learning and teaching.
In this book Michael McCarthy and Ronald Carter describe the discoursal properties of language and demonstrate what insights this approach can offer to the student and teacher of language. The authors examine the relationship between complete texts, both spoken and written, and the social and cultural contexts in which they function. They argue that the functions of language are often best understood in a discoursal environment and that exploring language in context compels us to revise commonly-held understandings about the forms and meanings of language. In so doing, the authors argue the need for language teachers, syllabus planners and curriculum organisers to give greater attention to language as discourse.
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.
This volume features a discourse empirical orientation from diverse perspectives and various methodologies, in which narratives, interviews, surveys, and large-scale databases or self-created written and spoken corpora are employed and analyzed to gain a better understanding of new developments and changes in Chinese language and discourse. Authors employ updated approaches from a variety of fields, including applied linguistics, functional linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics, to describe the structure of Chinese language and discourse and to examine its critical issues, many focusing on globalization-induced language developments and changes. With an empirically-based discourse/socio-cultural approach, this collection makes valuable contributions to research on Chinese language and discourse and serves as a sound reference for Chinese researchers and educators in diverse fields such as Chinese language and discourse, Chinese linguistics and language education, Chinese multiculturalism, and more.
Discourse and Grammar in Australian Languages is the first major survey to address the issue of the effects of information packaging on Australian languages, widely known for nonconfigurationality. The papers are based on individual fieldwork and describe a wide range of Australian languages of different types, ranging from the polysynthetic languages of Arnhem Land and the Kimberley to the classical types represented by Walpiri. Topics covered include the pragmatics of information exchange, the interaction of noun class marking with polarity and referentiality, the effects of specificity on argument indexing, the discourse uses of the ergative case, the contribution of pronouns to NP reference, the interaction of tense and aspect clitics with information structure, clause-initial position, and discourse and grammar in Australian languages. The volume will appeal to scholars interested in discourse, typology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
The topic of Language and Ideology has increasingly gained importance in the linguistic sciences. The general aim of critical linguistics is the exploration of the mechanisms of power which establish inequality, through the systematic analysis of political discourse (written or oral). This reader contains papers on a variety of topics, all related to each other through explicit discussions on the notion of ideology from an interdisciplinary approach with illustrative analyses of texts from the media, newspapers, schoolbooks, pamphlets, talkshows, speeches concerning language policy in Nazi-Germany, in Italofascism, and also policies prevalent nowadays. Among the interesting subjects studied are the jargon of the student movement of 1968, speeches of politicians, racist and sexist discourse, and the language of the green movement. Because of the enormous influence of the media nowadays, the explicit analysis of the mechanisms of manipulation, suggestion, and persuasion inherent in language or about language behaviour and strategies of discourse are of social relevance and of interest to all scholars of social sciences, to readers in all educational institutions, to analysts of political discourse, and to critical readers at large.
The book examines the development and maintenance of a minority language, engaging on both micro and macro levels to address open questions in the field. Guardado provides a history of the study of language maintenance, including discussion of language socialization, cosmopolitan identities, and home practices. In particular, the author uses 'discourse' as a primary tool to understand minority language development and maintenance.
Subjectivity in Language and in Discourse deals with the linguistic encoding and discursive construction of subjectivity across languages and registers. The aim of this book is to complement the highly specialized, parallel and often separate research strands on the phenomenon of subjectivity with a volume that gives a forum to diverse theoretical vantage points and methodological approaches, presenting research results in one place which otherwise would most likely be found in substantially different publications and would have to be collected from many different sources. Taken together, the chapters in this volume reflect the rich diversity in contemporary research on the phenomenon of subjectivity. They cover numerous languages, colloquial, academic and professional registers, spoken and written discourse, diverse communities of practice, speaker and interaction types, native and non-native language use, and Lingua Franca communication. The studies investigate both already well explored languages and registers (e.g. American English, academic writing, conversation) and with respect to subjectivity, less studied languages (Greek, Italian, Persian, French, Russian, Swedish, Danish, German, Australian English) as well as many different communicative settings and contexts, ranging from conference talk, promotional business writing, academic advising, disease counselling to internet posting, translation, and university classroom and research interview talk. Some contributions focus on individual linguistic devices, such as pronouns, intensifiers, comment clauses, modal verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and their capacity of introducing the speaker's subjective perspective in discourse and interactional sequence; others examine the role of larger functional categories, such as hedging and metadiscourse, or interactional sequencing.
Discourse and Language Education offers a practical, accessible discussion of discourse analysis. Discourse analysis describes how such communication is structured, so that it is socially appropriate and linguistically accurate. This book gives practical experience in analyzing discourse and the study of written language. The analyses show the ways we use linguistic signals to carry out our discourse goals and the differences between written and spoken language as well as across languages. This text can be used as a manual in teacher education courses and linguistics and communications courses. It will be of great interest to second language teachers, foreign language teachers, and special education teachers (especially those involved with the hearing impaired).