Share

Word Order in Discourse

1995-01-01 Language Arts & Disciplines
Download Word Order in Discourse PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 1995-01-01
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 21X/5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK


Book Synopsis Word Order in Discourse by : Pamela Downing

Download or read book Word Order in Discourse written by Pamela Downing. This book was released on 1995-01-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon, a matter of selecting randomly one of the set of possible orders generated by the grammar. However, as the papers in this collection show, word order variation is not random, but rather governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages.The papers in this volume discuss word order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives, including experimental and quantitative text based studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which order is 'basic' among the alternatives. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in problems of word order variation, and to those interested in discourse syntax.

Discourse and Word Order

1987-01-01 Language Arts & Disciplines
Download Discourse and Word Order PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 1987-01-01
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 89X/5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK


Book Synopsis Discourse and Word Order by : Olga T. Yokoyama

Download or read book Discourse and Word Order written by Olga T. Yokoyama. This book was released on 1987-01-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrating various aspects of human communication traditionally treated in a number of separate disciplines, Olga T. Yokoyama develops a universal model of the smallest unit of informational discourse, and uncovers the regularities that govern the intentional verbal transfer of knowledge from one interlocutor to another. The author then places these processes within a new framework of Communicational Competence, which legitimizes certain nebulous but important linguistic phenomena hitherto caught in a noman's land between the formal and functional approaches to language. Russian word order, a classical problem of Slavic linguistics, is subjected to a rigorous examination within this theoretical framework; Yokoyama demonstrates how this “free word order language” can only be described by taking into account such generally neglected factors as the speakers' subjectivity and attitude. Of particular interest to Slavists is a new generative theory of Russian intonation, which is consistently incorporated into the description of Russian word order.

The Grammar of Discourse

2013-11-21 Psychology
Download The Grammar of Discourse PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 2013-11-21
Genre : Psychology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 620/5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK


Book Synopsis The Grammar of Discourse by : Robert E. Longacre

Download or read book The Grammar of Discourse written by Robert E. Longacre. This book was released on 2013-11-21. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English

1998-05-15 Language Arts & Disciplines
Download Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 1998-05-15
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 904/5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK


Book Synopsis Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English by : Betty J. Birner

Download or read book Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English written by Betty J. Birner. This book was released on 1998-05-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work provides a comprehensive discourse-functional account of three classes of noncanonical constituent placement in English – preposing, postposing, and argument reversal – and shows how their interaction is accounted for in a principled and predictive way. In doing so, it details the variety of ways in which information can be 'given' or 'new' and shows how an understanding of this variety allows us to account for the distribution of these constructions in discourse. Moreover, the authors show that there exist broad and empirically verifiable functional correspondences within classes of syntactically similar constructions. Relying heavily on corpus data, the authors identify three interacting dimensions along which individual constructions may vary with respect to the pragmatic constraints to which they are sensitive: old vs. new information, relative vs. absolute familiarity, and discourse- vs. hearer-familiarity. They show that preposed position is reserved for information that is linked to the prior discourse by means of a contextually licensed partially-ordered set relationship; postposed position is reserved for information that is 'new' in one of a small number of distinct senses; and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preverbal constituent be at least as familiar within the discourse as that represented by the postverbal constituent. Within each of the three classes of constructions, individual constructions vary with respect to whether they are sensitive to familiarity within the discourse or (assumed) familiarity within the hearer's knowledge store. Thus, although the individual constructions in question are subject to distinct constraints, this work provides empirical evidence for the existence of strong correlations between sentence position and information status. The final chapter presents crosslinguistic data showing that these correlations are not limited to English.

The Pragmatics of Word Order

2013-06-10 Language Arts & Disciplines
Download The Pragmatics of Word Order PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 2013-06-10
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 280/5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK


Book Synopsis The Pragmatics of Word Order by : Doris L. Payne

Download or read book The Pragmatics of Word Order written by Doris L. Payne. This book was released on 2013-06-10. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

You may also like...