Browse results

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 181 items for :

  • Pragmatics & Discourse Analysis x
  • Upcoming Publications x
  • Just Published x
  • Primary Language: English x
  • Search level: All x
  • Status (Books): Published x
Clear All
Volume Editors: and
Our sense of agency and ability to distinguish between intentional and accidental actions are fundamental for social interaction. They allow us to plan and perform joint actions and assign responsibility for our own actions and those of others. Research on the nature of agency and intentions has been very fruitful over the last few decades in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. However, trully new discoveries could be made only when we engage in interdisciplinary discussions. This volume is the result of such discussions.
Author:
In this volume, long-standing assumptions about the formal changes involved in grammaticalization are evaluated in the light of the striking diversity of human languages. To this end, the traditional notions of morphological coalescence, syntactic fixation and phonological erosion are reassessed with regard to their relationship with the diachronic changes affecting the function of the construction and with larger-scale typological changes that affect the language as a whole (especially, shifts in morphological type and word-order patterns). The author reaches the conclusion that suprasegmental phonological erosion and syntactic fixation (redefined in a template-based framework) are direct consequences of functional change and are therefore significant indicators of grammaticalization, whereas coalescence and segmental erosion are independently motivated by psycholinguistic, rather than strictly grammatical factors.
Author:
Meaning change in grammaticalization has been variously described in terms of decreasing semantic weight and increasing generality, abstraction, (inter)subjectivity or discourse orientation. The author shows that all these trends are subsumed by the notion of scope increase along a precise hierarchy of semantic and pragmatic layers of grammatical organization such as endorsed by Functional Discourse Grammar. The scope-increase hypothesis is immune from the exceptions and veritable counterexamples to all the aforementioned generalizations and has the decisive advantage of being more objectively measurable, given its direct bearing on actual linguistic structure. The extremely rare exceptions to this generalization are also addressed and found to always result from a type of change independent from grammaticalization – the merger of two separate speech acts.
A Synchronic, Diachronic, and Sociolinguistic Analysis
When I entered her shop, my friend turned to me and said: «Arà, che si dice?» (‘Hey there, how you doing?’). This was not a full-fledged sentence in Italian, as she had thrown a little Sicilian word in – arà. It was a greeting, of course, but also a way of expressing her surprise at seeing me there, and a way of prompting me to start our conversation. The fact she used Sicilian had a clear meaning too: the vernacular indicates a shared social identity.
In a nutshell, this book analyses the cases of Sicilian arà and mentri to understand the complexity of discourse markers: what functions they perform, how they evolve historically, and what their social meaning is in a bilingual speech community.
This book is a study of around seven hours of naturally occurring video data, recorded by the author in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. Drawing on the methodology of Conversation Analysis, Gazin analyses instructional sequences of interaction during driving lessons. The temporal constraints of mobility make the driving lessons a rich setting for the investigation of sequence organisation and action constitution. The author identifies different types of actions that compose the unfolding driving and instructing activity, and their turn-constructional features (e.g. different verb forms for specific instructions). The analyses thereby offer insights that inform fundamental concepts like multiactivity and multimodality. The investigations in this book contribute to an increased understanding of the mechanisms of human interaction in general and in mobile settings more specifically.
This study argues that the establishment of the millennium binding of Satan and the vindication of the saints in Revelation 20:1–6 are cohesively linked with Jesus’s victorious battle in Revelation 19:11–21. The major implication of this analysis views both these events as consequent effects of Christ’s victory at the eschatological battle. Applying systemic functional linguistics and discourse analysis of cohesion, this study advances critical scholarship on the Book of Revelation by offering the first fully sustained answer to this frequently debated question regarding Satan’s binding from a modern linguistic approach.
By applying a stylistic analysis within a systemic-functional linguistic framework, this study argues that Luke's construal of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 and its co-thematic passages attempt to persuade Jewish believers of Luke's audience not to separate from multi-ethnic churches, a goal that is accomplished through subverting the value orientations of a prominent Noahic tradition within Second Temple Jewish literature that promotes strict Jewish isolation from Gentiles. As a result, this study breaks fresh methodological ground in the linguistic study on the New Testament and also advances critical scholarship on the book of Acts.