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Social Setting, Stigma, and Communicative Competence : Explorations of the conversational interactions of retarded adults
Jan 1985
Book
Mentally retarded individuals have been studied almost exclusively as clinical entities not as persons immersed in the stream of social life. This has led not only to a lack of appreciation for the complexity of their lives and concerns but also to an underestimation and incomplete understanding of their intellectual and linguistic skills. By exploring aspects of the ongoing linguistic and social lives of retarded individuals in various community contexts this volume contributes to a growing body of literature which attempts to fill in this inadequate picture. In addition the studies in this volume offer social scientists insights into the way that stigma such as that associated with intellectual and social incompetence affects social groups and influences conversational behavior and language use.
Women, Feminist Identity and Society in the 1980s : Selected papers
Jan 1985
Book
The general objective of this volume is to present and discuss different modes of existence in women’s texts and feminist identity in political and poetic discourse on the one hand and to analyze the factors which determine differing relationships between women and society and which result in specific forms of identity on the other. The essays in this volume explore language gender mass media sexuality class and social change women’s identity as Blacks and in the Third World as well as the nature of domination feminine criticism and female creativity. The volume opens with a challenging question by the feminist poet Adrienne Rich ‘Who is We?’
Prolegomena to Inferential Discourse Processing
Jan 1984
Book
This book shows that in reading verbal texts human reasoning is responsible for the recognition and construction of different forms of organization. On the one hand it spells out in what ways human thinking succeeds in recognizing the surface form of grammatical organization which is characteristic of discourse expression (termed ‘cohesion’). On the other hand it makes clear which human reasoning processes are involved in the construction of the different levels of organization which are characteristic of text content (termed ‘coherence’). Much attention is devoted to the hierarchical relationships between cohesion and coherence. In line with these hierarchizing endeavors this book also addresses the related problem of whether the reasoning processes involved in reading verbal texts are ranked in order of importance. This book lends much weight to the empirical control of its claims. It does not only consider the language processing activities of normals but it also devotes a great deal of attention to the disordered language reception activities of schizophrenics and aphasics.
‘Well’ in Dialogue Games : A discourse analysis of the interjection ‘well’ in idealized conversation
Jan 1984
Book
This dialogue game approach to the discourse analysis of the English interjection well aims at the formulation of rules which would be informative (marking some contexts of use as more natural than others) systematic (applicable in a mechanical or at least in a non-ad hoc way) and adequate (showing putative competitors to be either false to fact too narrow or too wide or demonstrably equivalent).
Prejudice in Discourse : An analysis of ethnic prejudice in cognition and conversation
Jan 1984
Book
In this book a study is made of ethnic prejudice in cognition and conversation based on intensive interviewing of white majority group members. After an introductory survey of traditional and more recent approaches in social psychology to the study of prejudice a new 'sociocognitive' theory is sketched. This theory explains how cognitive representations and strategies of ethnic prejudice depend on their social functions within intergroup relations. It is also shown how ethnic prejudice is communicated in society through everyday talk among majority members. The major part of the book systematically analyzes the various dimensions of prejudiced conversations such as topical structures storytelling argumentation local semantic strategies style and rhetoric and more specific conversational properties. It is shown that such an explicit discourse analysis may reveal underlying cognitive representations and strategic uses of prejudice. Moreover it appeared that many aspects of prejudiced talk are geared towards the overall strategic goals of adequate self-expression and positive self-presentation. This book is interdisciplinary in nature and should be of interest to linguists discourse analysts cognitive and social psychologists sociologists and all those interested in ethnic stereotypes prejudice and racism.
Topic Continuity in Discourse : A quantitative cross-language study
Jan 1983
Book
The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered traditionally from two distinct drawbacks. First it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major departure from past practices without rejecting both their intuitive appeal and the many good results yielded by them. First “topic” and “topicality” are re-analyzed as a scalar property rather than as an either/or discrete prime. Second the graded property of “topicality” is firmly connected with sensible cognitive notions culled from gestalt psychology such as “predictability” or “continuity”. Third we develop and utilize precise measures and quantified methods by which the property of “topicality” of clausal arguments can be studied in connected discourse and thus be properly hinged in its rightful context that of topic identification maintenance and recoverability in discourse. Fourth we show that many grammatical phenomena which used to be studied by linguists in isolation all partake in one functional domain of grammar that of topic identification. Finally we demonstrate the validity of this new approach to the study of “topic” and “topicality” by applying the same text-based quantifying method to a number of typologically-diverse languages in studying actual texts. Languages studied here are: Written and spoken English spoken Spanish Biblical Hebrew Amharic Hausa Japanese Chamorro and Ute.
Switch Reference and Universal Grammar : Proceedings of a symposium on switch reference and universal grammar, Winnipeg, May 1981
Jan 1983
Book
Canonical switch-reference is an inflectional category of the verb which indicates whether or not its subject is identical with the subject of some other verb. Switch-reference may be analyzed from a structural or a functional point of view. Functionally switch-reference is a device for referential tracking. Formally switch-reference is almost always a verbal category similar to the familiar category of verbal concord. In most languages switch-reference marking is indicated by a verbal affix however in some languages it may be marked by an independent morpheme. The contributions to this volume are concerned with questions of form function and genesis of canonical switch-reference systems.
The Perception of Nonverbal Behavior in the Career Interview
Jan 1983
Book
Walburga von Raffler-Engel takes a novel approach to compiling information about doctor-patient communication. She has surveyed popular literature around the world to gain a grass-roots' perception of this relationship in various cultures. Most of the contributions are by practicing physicians illustrating reflections on doctor-patient communication from both the physician's as well as the patient's points of view. A variety of disciplines are involved in the study of this subject such as discourse analysis non-verbal communication psychology sociology education etc.
Argumentation : Approaches to theory formation. Containing the contributions to the Groningen Conference on the Theory of Argumentation, October 1978
Jan 1982
Book
The contributions in the first part ‘Re-modelling logic’ of this volume take account of formal logic in the theory of ‘rational’ argumentation. Part two contains papers that distinguish the various dialogue games for logics in terms of ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’ of the players. The authors following in the third section study the interaction between participants in a dialogue. Here the tools of the logician are used for the wider purpose of studying the nature of dialogue. The fourth section concern modes of argumentation that are actually found in philosopical texts from earlier centuries. To be followed by contributions in Part five that may be read as attempts to retrieve what was left of the spirit of criticism and debate in philosphy after the onslaught of Cartesianism and idealism.
Situation et signification
Jan 1982
Book
Ceux qui parlent une langue seconde savent par leur propre expérience que malgré une bonne connaissance du vocabulaire et des règles de la grammaire ils n’arrivent pas à réagir verbalement à des situations concrètes de la même manière que ceux qui la parlent en langue maternelle. Cet ouvrage à la fois théorique et pratique tâche de combler ce vide par une analyse contrastive serrée des enonces en situation à partir d’un corpus étendu et varié et de tests nombreux avec des sujets français anglais italiens hongrois et japonais.
You Know : A discourse-functional approach
Jan 1981
Book
The basic function the expression you know serves in conversational discourse is said to be that of a pragmatic particle used when the speaker wants the addressee to accept as mutual knowledge (or at least be cooperative with respect to) the propositional content of his utterance. The fact that you know is even used when the addressee is assumed not to know what the speaker is talking about suggests that it functions at the deference level of politeness as a striving towards attaining a camaraderie relationship between speaker and hearer. You know is found to be more often used by women than by men in spontaneous conversation and the manner in which it is used is significantly different from male usage. Ontogenetically the age of four seems to be crucial for initial steps to use and master pragmatic particles including you know. Data for the study were derived from tape-recorded conversations and interviews.
A Pragmatic Logic for Commands
Jan 1980
Book
The purpose of this essay is to both discuss commands as a species of speech act and to discuss commands within the broader framework of how they are used and reacted to.
Talk and Taxonomy : A methodological comparison of ethnosemantics and ethnomethodology with reference to terms for Canadian doctors
Jan 1980
Book
The thesis of this essay is that social or cultural competence consists more of an interpretive or methodological ability to use language in the service of interaction than of a substantive knowledge of collections of cultural categories and of the semantic relations between the terms naming those categories.
'The boat's gonna leave' : A study of children learning a second language from conversations with other children
Jan 1980
Book
This essay attempts to show how a second language is acquired by very young children in the process of socialization with other children. The study seeks to integrate the process of second language learning in the general framework of child development concentrating in particular on the development of language and conversational skills.
A Discourse Production Model for 'Twenty Questions'
Jan 1980
Book
This essay is an attempt to build up a plausible model of the cognitive processes behind the behavior exhibited by speaker-hearers in a specific discourse situation.