Subject collection: Linguistics (2,773 titles, 1967–2015)

This book investigates the dialogic nature of research articles from the perspective of discourse analysis, based on theories of dialogicity. It proposes a theoretical and applied framework for the understanding and exploration of scientific dialogicity.

Focusing on some dialogic components, among them citations, concession, inclusive we and interrogatives, a combined model of scientific dialogicity is proposed, that reflects the place and role of various linguistic structures against the background of various theoretical approaches to dialogicity.

Taking this combined model as a basis, the analysis demonstrates how scientific dialogicity is realized in an actual scientific dispute and how a scientific project is constructed step by step by means of a dialogue with its readers and discourse community. A number of different patterns of scientific dialogicity are offered, characterized by the different levels of the polemic held with the research world and other specific researchers – from the “classic”, moderate and polite dialogicity to a direct and personal confrontation between scientists.

The volume presents language as fully integrated with human existence. On this view, language is not essentially ‘symbolic’, not represented inside minds or brains, and most certainly not determined by micro-social rules and norms. Rather, language is part of our ecology. It emerges when bodies co-ordinate vocal and visible gesture to integrate events with different histories. Enacting feeling, expression and wordings, language permeates the collective, individual and affective life of living beings. It is a profoundly distributed, multi-centric activity that binds people together as they go about their lives. Distributed Language pursues this perspective both theoretically and in relation to empirical work. Empirically, it reports studies on the anticipatory dynamics of reading, its socio-cognitive consequences, Shakespearean theatre, what images evoke (in brain and word), and solving insight problems. Theoretically, the volume challenges linguistic autonomy from overlapping theoretical positions. First, it is argued that language exploits a species specific form of semiotic cognition. Second, it is suggested that the central function of language lies in realizing values that derive from our ecosystemic existence. Third, this is ascribed to how cultural and biological symbols co-regulate the dynamics that shape human activity. Fourth, it is argued that language, far from being organism-centred, gives us an extended ecology in which our co-ordination is saturated by values and norms that are derived from our sociocultural environment. The contributions to this volume expand on those originally published in Pragmatics & Cognition 17:3 (2009).

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, variational, or interactional angles, this 8^th volume focuses on theories and phenomena at the level of discourse, but leaving aside conversational interaction. It provides the reader with pragmatics-oriented information on discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis and critical linguistics, as well as text linguistics and appraisal theory, while introducing other specific approaches to discourse through concepts such as polyphony, intertextuality, genre, and énonciation. Furthermore, topics such as public discourse, narrative, figures of speech, cohesion and coherence, pragmatic markers, manipulation, and humor, are all dealt with in separate chapters. The binding idea, explained in the introduction, is that ´discursive pragmatics´ may serve as a platform for a diversity of perspectives on discourse, as they have emerged not only in the language sciences but also in the humanities and social sciences in general.

Dynamic systems theory, a general theory of change and development, offers a new way to study first and second language development and requires a new set of tools for analysis of empirical data. After a brief introduction to the theory, this book, co-authored by several leading scholars in the field, concentrates on tools and techniques recently developed to analyze language data from a dynamic perspective. The chapters deal with the general thoughts and reasoning behind coding data, analyzing variability, discovering interacting variables and modeling. The accompanying How to sections give step-by-step instructions to using macros to speed up the coding, creating a dedicated lexical profile, making min-max graphs, testing for significance in single case studies by running simulations, and modeling. Example files and data sets are available on the accompanying website (http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lllt.29.website). Although the focus is on second language development, the tools are applicable to a wide range of phenomena in applied linguistics.

The fourteen contributions in this collection come from different approaches in pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and dialogue analysis; the name given to what is studied ranges from spoken language and conversation to interaction, dialogue, discourse and communication. What the articles have in common is a similar starting point: they are informed by a form of linguistic understanding which has emerged within what could be called the interactional turn. The materials investigated come from several different languages, representing a variety of interactions: private and public, written and spoken, historical and present-day. While studies of such diverse materials naturally differ in their starting points, goals and aims, engaging them in a dialogue can help reveal where old beliefs may be challenged and new understandings may emerge. The interactional approaches to discourse presented in this volume show that there are several discourses on interaction: interconnected, parallel, but also varying and even divergent.

Dialogue in Spanish provides a strong theoretical and empirical foundation for the study of dialogue. This edited collection of twelve original studies contributes to a broad comprehension of dialogue in two general contexts: personal interactions among friends and family; and public speech, such as political debates, medical interviews, court translations and service encounters. The studies, written by authors from Canada, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, the United States and Venezuela, present an in-depth look at issues and elements of dialogue such as irony, narrativity, discourse markers, coherence, conflict and expectations. Background research on dialogue grounds the articles in such areas as discourse analysis, pragmatics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and linguistics. The book will prove useful to those who study conversational interaction, pragmatics, and discourse analysis as applied to various functions and contexts, and it will be of particular interest to researchers and students of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, communications and education.

This volume brings together recent work on the formal and interpretational properties of determiners across a variety of typologically and geographically unrelated languages. It seeks to answer the core question of modern linguistic theory: Which properties of languages are universal and which are variable? In recent theorizing, much of language variation is argued to stem from differences in the properties of features associated with functional heads. As such, this volume can be viewed as a case study of one such category: the determiner (D). The contributions all investigate the status of D as a language universal by examining the language-specific syntactic and semantic properties associated with this category. This volume will appeal to researchers and students in syntax and semantics, as well as to those who have more a specific interest in determiners and noun phrases.

Discourse, of Course comes after Jan Renkema’s Introduction to Discourse Studies (2004) for undergraduates. The new book is a collection of twenty short papers. It is a capita selecta course and meant for graduate programs. The aim of this book is threefold:

• to present material for advanced courses in discourse studies;

• to unfold a stimulating display of research projects to future PhD students;

• to give an overview of new developments after the 2004

Introduction to Discourse Studies.

This publication fulfills both the teacher's need for a state-of-the-art overview of the main topics in discourse, and the student's need to acquire standards for developing research plans in theses and dissertations. It gives a combination of approaches from very different schools in discourse studies, ranging from argumentation theory to genre theory, from the study of multimodal metaphors to cognitive approaches to coherence analysis. This book is not only meant to serve as a textbook, but also as a reference book for researchers who want an update for various main topics in the field.

The Derivation of Anaphoric Relations resolves a conspicuous problem for Minimalist theory, the apparently representational nature of the binding conditions. Hicks adduces a broad variety of evidence against the binding conditions applying at LF and builds upon the insights of recent proposals by Hornstein, Kayne, and Reuland by reducing them to the core narrow-syntactic operations (specifically, Agree and Merge). Several novel and independently motivated claims about syntactic features and phases are made, not only explaining the previously stipulated roles played by c-command, reference, and locality, but furnishing the dervational binding theory with sufficient flexibility to capture some long-problematic empirical phenomena: These include connectivity effects, ‘picture-noun’ reflexives in English, and anaphor/pronoun non-complementarity. Specific proposals are also made for extending the derivational approach to accommodate structured crosslinguistic variation in binding, with thorough expositions and analyses of the Dutch, Norwegian, and Icelandic pronominal systems.