Pragmatics & Beyond New Series

Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics provides readers with a much-needed insight into the development of pragmatic competence, an area of research long neglected in interlanguage pragmatics. The longitudinal investigation which provides the basic material for this book consists of a corpus of requests, offers and refusals of offers elicited from Irish learners of German over a ten-month study abroad period using production questionnaires and a variety of metapragmatic instruments. The analysis focuses on developments in these learners’ knowledge of discourse structure, pragmatic routines and internal modification. Findings present valuable information pertaining to the process of acquisition of pragmatic competence. They also point to the favourable but imperfect nature of the study abroad context for the development of pragmatic competence. A comprehensive discussion of theoretical and methodological issues, an in-depth analysis and an extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in interlanguage pragmatics, cross-cultural pragmatics, German as a foreign language and study abroad research.

This volume explores a relational pattern that occurs during one type of speech event — classroom “participant examples.” A participant example describes, as an example of something, an event that includes at least one person also participating in the conversation. Participants with a role in the example have two relevant identities — as a student or teacher in the classroom, and as a character in whatever event is described as the example. This study reports that in some cases speakers not only discuss, but also act out the roles assigned to them in participant examples. That is, speakers do, with each other, what they are talking about as the content of the example. Participants act as if events described as the example provide a script for their interaction. Drawing on linguistic pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics, the author describes the linguistic mechanisms that speakers use to act out participant examples. He focuses on the role of deictics, and personal pronouns in particular, in establishing and organizing relationships. The volume also presents a new methodological technique — “deictic mapping” — that can be used to uncover interactional organization in all sorts of speech events. Drawing on the philosophy and sociology of education, the volume discusses the social and educational implications of enacted participant examples. Educational theorists generally find participant examples to be cognitively useful, as devices to help students understand pedagogical content. But enacted participant examples have systematic relational consequences as well. The volume presents and discusses enacted participant examples that have clear, and sometimes undesirable, social consequences. It also discusses how we might adjust educational theory and practice, given the relational implications of classroom participant examples.

This multi-faceted collection of research papers on Advice in Discourse focuses on advisory practices in different contexts. Data is drawn from academic, educational and training settings, health-related practices, and computer-mediated communication. The languages involved are Cantonese, English, Finnish, Japanese, Spanish and Russian. The chapters treat professional and institutional practices, practices that contain peer interaction within an institutional framework, and non-institutional peer interaction, as well as solicited and non-solicited advice in written and spoken form. The work reported on clearly demonstrates the complexity of the advisory activity, which needs to be studied in its cultural framework and interactional context. The richness and diversity of this practice is studied from different methodological angles, covering qualitative and quantitative as well as theoretical and empirical analyses. The volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the research field, thought-provoking theoretical discussions and extensive references for future research. It is essential for linguists, advice-practitioners and for those who want to learn more about the discourse of advice.

How do participants display affectivity in social interaction? Based on recordings of authentic everyday conversations and radio phone-ins, this study offers a fine-grained analysis of how recipients of affect-laden informings deploy sound objects, i.e. interjections (oh, ooh and ah) and paralinguistic signals (whistle and clicks), for responsive displays of affectivity. Examining the use of such sound objects across a number of interactional activities including news telling, troubles talk, complaining, assessments and repair, the study provides evidence that the sound pattern and sequential placement of sound objects systematically contribute to their specific meaning-making in interaction, i.e. the management of sequence organisation and interactional relevancies (e.g. affiliation). Presenting an in-depth analysis of a little researched area of language use from an interactional linguistic perspective, the book will be of theoretical and methodological interest to an audience with a background in linguistics, sociology and conversational studies.

Internet-mediated communication is pervasive nowadays, in an age in which many people shy away from physical settings and often rely, instead, on social media and messaging apps for their everyday communicative needs. Since pragmatics deals with communication in context and how more gets communicated than is said (or typed), applications of this linguistic perspective to internet communication, under the umbrella label of internet pragmatics, are not only welcome, but necessary.

The volume covers straightforward applications of pragmatic phenomena to internet interactions, as happens with speech acts and contextualization, and internet-specific kinds of communication such as the one taking place on WhatsApp, WeChat and Twitter. This collection also addresses the role of emoticons and emoji in typed-text dialogues and the importance of “physical place” in internet interactions (exhibiting an interplay of online-offline environments), as is the case in the role of place in locative media and in broader place-related communication, as in migration.

This book is about a theory of language that combines two observations (1) that language is based on an extensive cognitive infrastructure (cognitivism) and (2) that it is functional for its user (functionalism). These observations are regarded as two dimensions of one phenomenon that both need to be accounted for, simultaneously and coherently, in accounting for language. Chapter 1 presents the cognitivist and functionalist points of view and their interrelation and discusses the integration of language research under a cognitive umbrella; the issue of defining 'functions of language', and the formalism-functionalism debate. Chapter 2 criticizes the Chomskyan formalist conception of language and cognition from the perspective of cognitive-pragmatic theory. The focus is on different aspects of the competence-performance dichotomy, and in particular on the nature of linguistic knowledge. The ontogenesis and phylogenesis of language are also discussed. Chapter 3 deals with the potential contribution of a functional-linguistic grammar to an integrated conception of the cognitive systems of language, viz. Dik's Functional Grammar, and introduces the concept of a Functional Procedural Grammar as a more integrative model for language production. Special attention is also paid to the nature of conceptual knowledge and the relationship between language production and interpretation. The debate is illustrated by an analysis of negative-raising.

This book challenges two tacit presumptions in the field of intercultural communication research. Firstly, misunderstandings can frequently be found in intercultural communication, although, one could not claim that intercultural communication is constituted by misunderstandings alone. This volume shows how new perspectives on linguistic analyses of intercultural communication go beyond the analysis of misunderstanding. Secondly, intercultural communication is not solely constituted by the fact that individuals from different cultural groups interact. Each contribution of this volume analyses to what extent instances of discourse are institutionally and/or interculturally determined. These linguistic reflections involve different theoretical frameworks, e.g. functional grammar, systemic functional linguistics, functional pragmatics, rhetorical conversation analysis, ethno-methodological conversation analysis, linguistic an­thro­­pology and a critical discourse approach. As the contributions focus on the discourse of genetic counseling, gate-keeping discourse, international team co-operation, international business communication, workplace discourse, internet communication, and lamentation discourse, the book exemplifies that the analysis of intercultural communication is organized in response to social needs and, therefore, may contribute to the social justification of linguistics.

While it has long been taken for granted that context or background information plays a crucial role in reference assignment, there have been very few serious attempts to investigate exactly how they are used. This study provides an answer to the question through an extensive analysis of cases of bridging. The book demonstrates that when encountering a referring expression, the hearer is able to choose a set of contextual assumptions intended by the speaker in a principled way, out of all the assumptions possibly available to him. It claims more specifically that the use of context, as well as the assignment of referent, is governed by a single pragmatic principle, namely, the principle of relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995), which is also a single principle governing overall utterance interpretation. The explanatory power of the criterion based on the principle of relevance is tested against the two major, current alternatives — truth-based criteria and coherence-based criteria — using data elicited in a battery of referent assignment questionnaires. The results show clearly that the relevance-based criterion has more predictive power to handle a wider range of examples than any other existing criterion. As such, this work adds to the growing body of evidence supporting the insights of relevance theory.

The work has been awarded the 2001 Ichikawa Award for the best achievement in English Linguistics by a young scholar in Japan.

This book examines the resources that speakers employ when building conversations. These resources contribute to overall coherence and cohesion, which speakers create and maintain interactively as they build on each other’s contributions. The study is cross-linguistic, drawing on parallel corpora of task-oriented dialogues between dyads of native speakers of English and Spanish. The framework of the investigation is the analysis of speech genres and their staging; the analysis shows that each stage in the dialogues exhibits different thematic, rhetorical, and cohesive relations. The main contributions of the book are: a corpus-based characterization of a spoken genre (task-oriented dialogue); the compilation of a body of analysis tools for generic analysis; application of English-based analyses to Spanish and comparison between the two languages; and a study of the characteristics of each generic stage in task-oriented dialogue.

Telephone helplines have become one of the most pervasive sites of expert-lay interaction in modern societies throughout the world. Yet surprisingly little is known of the in situ, language-based processes of help-seeking and help-giving behavior that occurs within them. This collection of original studies by both internationally renowned and emerging scholars seeks to improve upon this state of affairs. It does so by offering some of the first systematic investigations of naturally-occurring spoken interaction in telephone helplines. Using the methods of Conversation Analysis, each of the contributors offers a detailed investigation into the skills and competencies that callers and call-takers routinely draw upon when engaging one another within a range of helplines. Helplines in the US, the UK, Australia, Scandinavia, The Netherlands, and Ireland, dealing with the provision of healthcare, emotional support and counselling, technical assistance and consumer rights, tourism and finance, make up the studies in the volume. Collectively and individually, the research provides fascinating insight into an under-researched area of modern living and demonstrates the relevance and potential of helplines for the growing field of institutional interaction.

This book will be of interest to students of communication, applied linguistics, discourse and conversation, sociology, counselling, technology and work, social psychology and anthropology.

Based on a corpus of private email from Jamaican university students, this study explores the discourse functions of Jamaican Creole in computer-mediated communication. From this participant-centered perspective, it contributes to the longstanding theoretical debates in creole studies about the creole continuum. The book will likewise be useful to students of computer-mediated communication, the use and development of non-standardized languages, language ecology, and codeswitching. The central methodological issue in this study is codeswitching in written language, a neglected area of study at the moment since most literature in codeswitching research is based on spoken data. The three analytical chapters present the data in a critical discussion of established and more recent theoretical approaches to codeswitching.

Fields that will benefit from this book include interactional sociolinguistics, creole studies, English as a world language, computer-mediated discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology.

Until very recently, coherence (unlike cohesion) was widely held to be a ‘rather mystical notion’. However, taking account of new trends representing a considerable shift in orientation, this volume aims at helping relieve coherence of its mystifying aura. The general bibliography which concludes the book bears witness to this intriguing development and the rapidly changing scene in coherence research. Preceding this comprehensive up-to-date Bibliography on Coherence are 13 selected papers from the 1997 International Workshop on Coherence at the University of Augsburg, Germany. They share a number of theoretical and methodoligical assumptions and reflect a trend in text and discourse analysis to move away from reducing coherence to a product of (formally represented) cohesion and/or (semantically established) connectivity. Instead, they start from a user- and context-oriented interpretive understanding and rely on authentic data throughout in relating micro-linguistic to macro-linguistic issues. The first group of papers looks at the (re-)creation of coherence in, inter alia, reported speech, casual conversation, argumentative writing, news reports and conference contributions. The second group describes the negotation of coherence in oral examinations, text summaries and other situations that require special efforts on the part of the recipient to overcome misunderstandings and other disturbances. The third group discusses theoretical approaches to the description of coherence.

This book approaches cohesion and coherence from a perspective of interaction and collaboration. After a detailed account of various models of cohesion and coherence, the book suggests that it is fruitful to regard cohesion as contributing to coherence, as a strategy used by communicators to help their fellow communicators create coherence from a text. Throughout the book, the context-sensitive and discourse-specific nature of cohesion is stressed: cohesive relations are created and interpreted in particular texts in particular contexts. By investigating the use of cohesion in four different types of discourse, the study shows that cohesion is not uniform across discourse types. The analysis reveals that written dialogue (computer-mediated discussions) and spoken monologue (prepared speech) make use of similar cohesive strategies as spoken dialogue (conversations): in these contexts the communicators’ interaction with their fellow communicators leads to a similar outcome. The book suggests that this is an indication of the communicators’ attempt to collaborate towards successful communication.

Languages change and they keep changing as a result of communicative interactions and practices in the context of communities of language users. The articles in this volume showcase a range of such communities and their practices as loci of language change in the history of English. The notion of communities of practice takes its starting point in the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger and refers to groups of people defined both through their membership in a community and through their shared practices. Three types of communities are particularly highlighted: networks of letter writers; groups of scribes and printers; and other groups of professionals, in particular administrators and scientists. In these diverse contexts in England, Scotland, the United States and South Africa, language change is not seen as an abstract process but as a response to the communicative needs and practices of groups of people engaged in interaction.

Compliments are among the most widely studied speech acts in pragmatics. The present study takes a new sequential approach by investigating compliments in context, considering compliment form, as part of a Positive Remark continuum, with the respective Response Strategy uttered in response. Analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively in multi-party conversations of the Santa Barbara Corpus of American English, the sequences suggest a connection between the address and reference terms in the Positive Remarks and the strategies chosen as a response.

This volume deals with the occurrence of lexical gaps in the domain of linguistic action verbs. Though these constitute a considerable proportion of the verb inventory of many languages, not all concepts of verbal communication may be expressed by lexical items in any particular one of them. Introducing a conceptual system which allows gaps to be searched for systematically, this study shows which concepts of verbal communication are and which are not lexicalised in English, German and Dutch. The lexicalisation patterns observed shed light on the way in which verbal behaviour is conceptualised in a particular speech community. To complete the picture, the volume also addresses the question of whether communication concepts which may not be expressed by verbs may be lexicalised by fixed multiword expressions.

It is timely for researchers to approach metaphor as social and situated, as a matter of language and discourse, and not just as a matter of thought. Over the last twenty five years, scholars have come to appreciate in depth the cognitive, motivated and embodied nature of metaphor, but have tended to background the linguistic form of metaphor and have largely ignored how this connects to its role in the discourses in which our lives are constructed and lived. This book brings language and social dimensions into the picture, offering snapshots of metaphor use in real language and in real lives across the very different cultures of Europe and Brazil and contributing to the theorizing of metaphor in discourse.

It is a commonplace to say that the meaning of text is more than the conjunction of the meaning of its constituents. But what are the rules governing its interpretation, and what are the constraints that define well-formed discourse? Answers to these questions can be given from various perspectives. In this edited volume, leading scientists in the field investigate these questions from structural, cognitive, and computational perspectives. The last decades have seen the development of numerous formal frameworks in which the structure of discourse can be analysed, the most important of them being the Linguistic Discourse Model, Rhetorical Structure Theory and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. This volume contains an introduction to these frameworks and the fundamental topics in research about discourse constraints. Thus it should be accessible to specialists in the field as well as advanced graduate students and researchers from neighbouring areas. The volume is of interest to discourse linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, and computational linguists.

The analysis of discourse is probably one of the most complex problems of linguistics. It can be approached from many different directions, involving a large variety of different methods. This volume unites psycholinguistic studies, investigations of logical and computational models of discourse, corpus studies, and linguistic case studies of language-specific devices. This variety of approaches reflects the complexity of discourse production and understanding, and it also reflects the necessity of understanding the complex interplay of diverse parameters which influence these processes. The growing importance of corpus-based and experimental approaches to discourse analysis is duly reflected in this volume. Most of the chapters make use of them in one or the other form. This collection of articles grew out of the third installment of the Constraints in Discourse conferences, and will be of interest to researchers from linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science.

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to first person non-singular reference (‘we’). Its aim is to explore the interplay between the grammatical means that a language offers for accomplishing collective self-reference and the socio-pragmatic – broadly speaking – functions of ‘we’. Besides an introduction, which offers an overview of the problems and issues associated with first person non-singular reference, the volume comprises fifteen chapters that cover languages as diverse as, e.g., Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Cha’palaa and Norf’k, and various interactional and genre-specific contexts of spoken and written discourse. It, thus, effectively demonstrates the complexity of collective self-reference and the diversity of phenomena that become relevant when ‘we’ is not examined in isolation but within the context of situated language use. The book will be of particular interest to researchers working on person deixis and reference, personal pronouns, collective identities, etc., but will also appeal to linguists whose work lies at the interface between grammar and pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse and conversation analysis.

Departing from the premise that ‘being ordinary’ is brought into the discourse and brought out in the discourse and is thus an interactional achievement, the contributions to this edited volume investigate its construction, reconstruction and deconstruction in media discourse. Ordinariness is perceived as a scalar notion which is conceptualised against the background of both non-ordinariness and extra-ordinariness. The chapters address its strategic construction across media genres (public talk, Prime Minister’s Questions, interview, radio call-in, commenting) and discursive activities (tweets, social media posts) as done in various languages (American English, Austrian German, British English, Chinese, French, Finnish, Hebrew and Japanese) by professional participants (e.g., politicians, journalists, scientists) and by ordinary people participating in media discourse (e.g., ordinary citizens, viewers, members of the audience). Discursive strategies used to bring about (non/extra) ordinariness include small stories, quotations, conversational style, irony, naming and addressing as well as references to the private-public interface.

This book departs from the premise that context represents a complex relational configuration which can no longer be conceived as an analytic prime but rather requires a parts-whole perspective to capture its inherent dynamism. The edited volume presents a collection of papers which examine the connectedness between context, contextualization and entextualization. They address the questions how meaning and speech acts are situated in context, how both are influenced by context, how context influences speech acts and meaning, how context is imported into the discourse, and how context is entextualized in discourse. The papers cover institutional and non-institutional contexts, the language of Greek laws, political discourse, confrontational media discourse and task-oriented face-to-face and back-to-back interactions. They reflect current moves in pragmatics and discourse analysis to cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating relevant premises and insights, in particular cognition, adaptive action, negotiation of meaning, sequentiality, recipient design and genre.

This volume suggests a novel treatment of context in the analysis of everyday interaction. On a theoretical level, it advocates a switch of focus from 'context' as a preestablished, monolithic category which constringes co-participants' verbal and nonverbal behaviour, to an active notion of 'contextualization': in order to make oneself understood, participants have to establish and maintain those shared contextual frames which in turn are relevant to the local interpretation of their verbal and nonverbal activities. On an empirical level, the volume contains exemplary analyses that show how participants employ 'contextualization cues' of prosodic (rhythm, intonation, tempo, etc.) or nonverbal (gaze, gesture, etc.) nature in order to 'achieve context'.The volume is also an appraisal of the theory of contextualization developed by John Gumperz. In their contributions, researchers from various schools of research, such as conversation analysis, micro-ethnography, phonetics/phonology and metapragmatics, relate their work to this theory.

The study of media, texts and culture(s) and especially the analysis of interdependent relationships between them has become a major concern in various academic fields, such as intercultural communication, contrastive textology, comparative cultural studies, historical and intercultural pragmatics. Starting from the observation that in contrastive studies of mass media communication not only the theoretical status of “culture” often remains unclear but also the interdependent relation between the theoretical conceptualization of “culture” and the methodological approach of text analysis, this volume brings together linguistic mass media studies with intercultural, diachronic, intermedia and interlingual perspectives. Apart from offering new empirical insights into the field, this volume’s aim is to advance and to broaden the methodological and theoretical discussions involved. Comparing such diverse formats and genres like newspapers, TV news shows, TV commercials, radio phone-ins, obituaries, fanzines and film subtitles, the contributions of this volume illustrate the complexity of the growing field of contrastive media analysis.

This book provides the first comprehensive account of English-German pragmatic contrasts in written discourse and their effects on English-German translations. The novel and multi-dimensional corpus-based studies of business communication and popular science writing presented in this book combine quantitative and qualitative approaches and focus on the use of evaluative adjectives and epistemic modal markers. They provide empirical evidence that English and German differ in systematic ways and that translations, while being adapted to target audience’s preferences to a large extent, are clearly susceptible to source language interference when it comes to more fine-grained differences. The book discusses which general factors determine the degree of impact of source language features on translations and also comments on the possibility of source language influence on target language norms via translations. The book is of interest to researchers and students in a variety of fields, such as pragmatics, translation studies, genre analysis and stylistics.

This collection assembles early, yet previously unpublished research into the practices that organize conversational interaction by many of the central figures in the development and advancement of Conversation Analysis as a discipline. Using the methods of sequential analysis as first developed by Harvey Sacks, the authors produce detailed empirical accounts of talk in interaction that make fundamental contributions to our understanding of turntaking, action formation and sequence organization. One distinguishing feature of this collection is that each of the contributors worked directly with Sacks as a collaborator or was trained by him at the University of California or both. Taken together this collection gives readers a taste of CA inquiry in its early years, while nevertheless presenting research of contemporary significance by internationally known conversation analysts.

Today, computer-mediated communication spans a range of activities from interactive messages to word processing. Researchers interested in this new technology have concentrated on its effects in the workplace for knowledge production and dissemination or on its word processing function. The study reported here examines communication events in which the computer is the medium and views such computer-mediated communication from the perspective of language use. Its goal is to understand, through data collected from an anthropological perspective, the ways of communicating used by members of an established community of computer users. In particular, it answers the questions: (i) How do computer communicators choose among the available media and modes of communication? (ii) What are the basic and recurring discourse patterns across media and modes through which this community achieves its institutional goals of innovation and product development? (iii) How do the answers to the previous two questions inform our understanding of language use in general?

The original studies in this volume provide new insights into the history of medical discourse across centuries in both professional and lay texts. The central themes deal with changes in medical writing in various societal and cultural contexts in search for best practices in corpus pragmatics for future work. Some studies apply quantitative methods of corpus linguistics and Digital Humanities, others adopt a qualitative, discourse-analytical perspective, focusing on particular texts, authors or medical topics, or specific functionally-defined discourse forms such as narratives. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are mutually complementary and shed light on different aspects of historical medical discourse. The methodologies aim at establishing validity and reliability for pragmatic analysis, taking into account relevant contextual factors and insights from other fields, such as medical and social history, history of ideas, and science studies.

The goal of this volume is to examine academic discourse (AD) from cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives. The adjective Cross-cultural in the volume title is not just limited to national contexts but also includes a cross-disciplinary perspective. Twelve scientific fields are under scrutiny in the articles. One of the unique aspects of the volume is the inclusion of a variety of foreign languages (English (as a lingua franca), Spanish, French, Swedish, Russian, German, Italian, and Norwegian). Besides, in several articles dealing with oral AD, comparisons and parallels are also established with written AD. The research methodologies used in the studies are varied and they offer an overview of the diversity and richness of approaches to AD. All in all, it is hoped that the volume appeals not only to young researchers but also to confirmed scholars interested in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural aspects of AD. It will also be of interest to language teachers or teachers who are involved with e.g. international students and academic mobility.

This book addresses the problems and challenges of studying the discourse of "danger" cross-linguistically and cross-culturally, and proposes the cultural pragmatics of danger as a new field of inquiry. Detailed case studies of several linguacultures include Arabic, Chinese, Danish, English, German, Japanese and Spanish. Focusing on global and local contexts surrounding “living in dangerous times”, this book showcases how the new model of cultural pragmatics can be used to illuminate cultural meanings in discourse. Unlike the universalist approaches to pragmatics, cultural pragmatics focuses on understanding the linguacultural logics of discourse, and in the case of “danger”, the multiple cultural logics around which the themes and domains of “danger” revolve. The approach makes use of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) as its principal analytical tool, and concepts such as “cultural keywords” and “cultural scripts” figure prominently as bearers of culture-specific meanings.

The book will be of interest to students of pragmatics and discourse studies, researchers in cultural and cognitive semantics, anthropological linguistics, global humanities, political rhetoric and environmental studies, as well as linguists working in applied areas, such as risk and disaster studies, crisis and emergency communication.

Having been established as a field in its own right for the last decade, intercultural pragmatics is increasingly being recognized as an important area of research among scholars working in pragmatics. The present volume is a collection of selected papers from the 6th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication – admittedly the biggest venue for researchers in the area, and comprises contributions that report on recent research that deals with or can directly inform work in intercultural pragmatics. Given the breadth of research areas that are

represented herein, ranging from lingua franca and business communication to the study of cultural perceptions, translation and pragmatic development, this volume is bound to be of interest to not only students and scholars engaged in the area of intercultural pragmatics, but also to all those with a more general interest in the sociocultural turn in the study of pragmatics.

Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish provides the reader with a representative spectrum of current research in the most dynamic areas of the pragmatics of Spanish. It brings together a collection of academic essays written by well-established as well as emerging voices in Hispanic pragmatics. The essays include applications of pragmatic concepts to sub-fields of (Spanish) linguistics (i.e., pragmatics and grammar; pragmatics and applied linguistics; pragmatics and cross- and inter-cultural communication), studies of ‘traditional’ topics in pragmatics (i.e., discourse markers, politeness, metaphor, humour) as well as a proposal to amalgamate the dominant pragmatic approaches, namely socio-pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics, into one comprehensive model. The essays in this collection represent both new theoretical and empirical research and as such they constitute a valuable contribution to the field of pragmatics in general and an essential reference to those researching the pragmatics of Spanish.

This book explores factors relevant in the choices speakers and writers make in regard to explicitness of reference to the subjects and objects in their utterances. Bulgarian is a particularly felicitous target language for this type of study, since it possesses a rich inventory of available packaging techniques, ranging from zero reference, to various stressed and unstressed single forms, to actual doubled (“reduplicated”) constructions. The study systematically addresses the need to avoid referential and grammatical ambiguity, and the crucial influence of emphasis. Another, and perhaps most interesting central factor is the status of what the communication is about, which is assessed on two different levels. The book makes use of data from both published Bulgarian fiction and naturally occurring oral conversations. The fundamental similarities between these modes of communication with respect to noun phrase selection is demonstrated, but explanations are also proposed for the observable differences.

The role deixis plays in structuring language and its relation to the context of utterance provides the focus for an examination of information packaging in Russian discourse. The analysis is based on a model which interprets discourse as constituted by four interrelated frameworks — the linguistic text, the text setting, the text content, and the participant framework. Deixis is divided into three primary dimensions of time, space, and person, which are metaphorically extended to secondary dimensions of information status (knowledge, focus, and theme). The linguistic devices which function in these dimensions encode information status by serving one or more communicative functions, including the presentative, directive, identifying, informing, acknowledging, and expressive functions. Discourse markers and deictics provide links between the content of the message, the linguistic text itself, and the context in which the message is produced. They introduce new participants, signal changes in thematic structure, bracket topical units, and mark the relative status of information.

The book is written with both descriptive and theoretical goals. It aims to synthesize and revise current approaches to deixis and information packaging to account for the Russian data. The analysis extends beyond primary deixis to include knowledge structures and sources of knowledge, as well as the metalinguistic devices which signal changes in information flow, and grounding and saliency relations.

Diachronic corpus pragmatics extends the pragmatic perspective to developments in the history of various languages and uses corpus-linguistic methods to trace them. The chapters in this volume focus on linguistic elements at several levels, from individual words to phrases, clauses and entire genres and discourse forms. Using the most recent corpus tools, the authors investigate correlations between forms, functions and contexts in diachronic case studies that combine quantitative precision with close qualitative interpretation. The articles deal with different languages including English, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Estonian and Japanese, bringing their research traditions in pragmatics and corpus linguistics in dialogue with each other. This is the first time that such a wide range of languages has been brought together to showcase an exciting new field at the intersection of pragmatics, historical linguistics and corpus methodology.

The purpose of Diachronic Pragmatics is to exemplify historical pragmatics in its twofold sense of constituting both a subject matter and a methodology. This book demonstrates how diachronic pragmatics, with its complementary diachronic function-to-form mapping and diachronic form-to-function mapping, can be used to trace pragmatic developments within the English language. Through a set of case studies it explores the evolution of such speech acts as promises, curses, blessings, and greetings and such speech events as flyting and sounding. Collectively these “illocutionary biographies” manifest the workings of several important pragmatic processes and trends: increased epistemicity, subjectification, and discursization (a special kind of pragmaticalization). It also establishes the centrality of cultural traditions in diachronic reconstruction, examining various de-institutionalizations of extra-linguistic context and their affect on speech act performance. Taken together, the case studies presented in Diachronic Pragmatics highlight the complex interactions of formal, semantic, and pragmatic processes over time. Illustrating the possibilities of historical pragmatic pursuit, this book stands as an invitation to further research in a new and important discipline.

Discourse Description presents in one convenient volume a variety of approaches to text description that have been proposed in the linguistic literature in the last decade or so. The book is organized to make it easy to understand and compare the various approaches. Since all of the researchers are analyzing the same text, their differences are readily seen.

The text they analyze is a letter, mailed in bulk by a Washington-based lobbying organization which is supported by contributions from donors. Far from simply informing the readers, the letter seeks to appeal to them on many levels, intellectual, emotional, and financial. It is a fascinating study in how texts do their work.

Discourse Description is expected to serve both as a research document and as a case textbook for graduate and undergraduate courses in discourse and text analysis, as well as a resource for text analysts.

Spoken language is characterized by the occurrence of linguistic devices such as discourse markers (e.g. so, well, you know, I mean) and other so-called “disfluent” phenomena, which reflect the temporal nature of the cognitive mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension. The purpose of this book is to distinguish between strategic vs. symptomatic uses of these markers on the basis of their combination, function and distribution across several registers in English and French. Through deep quantitative and qualitative analyses of manually annotated features in the new DisFrEn corpus, this usage-based study provides (i) an exhaustive portrait of discourse markers in English and French and (ii) a scale of (dis)fluency against which different configurations of discourse markers can be diagnosed as rather fluent or disfluent. By bringing together discourse markers and (dis)fluency under one coherent framework, this book is a unique contribution to corpus-based pragmatics, discourse analysis and crosslinguistic fluency research.

This volume provides new insights into the nature of the Early Modern English discourse markers marry, well and why through the analysis of three corpora (A Corpus of English Dialogues, 1560-1760, the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English). By combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches in the study of pragmatic markers, innovative findings are reached about their distribution throughout the period 1500-1760, their attestation in different speech-related text types as well as similarities and differences in their functions. Additionally, this work engages in a sociopragmatic study, based on the sociopragmatically annotated Drama Corpus of almost a quarter of a million words, to enhance our understanding about their use by characters of different social status and gender. This volume therefore constitutes an essential piece of the puzzle in our attempt to gain a full picture of discourse marker use.This book won the 2014 ESSE book award in English Language and Linguistics

The emotional aspects of language have so far not received the attention they deserve. This study focuses on nonpropositional, i.e. expressive and interactional meanings of Japanese signs, with special emphasis on understanding their cognitive, psychological and social meanings. It shows how the Japanese language is richly endowed to express personal voice and emotive nuances, and confronts the theoretical issues related to this. The author proposes a new theoretical framework for Discourse Modality, a primary concern for Japanese speakers, to analyze the 'expressiveness' of language.

This book offers the first comprehensive linguistic analysis of live text commentary, one of the most innovative online genres of modern news media. The study focuses on written sports commentaries in online newspapers that enable partial real-time audience involvement in the media text. Adopting an approach from interactional pragmatics, the book identifies the genre’s characteristic micro-linguistic features as well as its unique narrative structure. Live text commentary is shown to be a hybrid and multimodal text format – an internally complex form of media communication that combines elements of live spoken broadcasting, blogging, informal conversation and online chat. It aims to inform as well as entertain the audience: by using humour, banter and real or staged dialogue it seeks to create a sense of community among its readers – sports fans. The book will be of interest to many scholars in linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis and social sciences, as well as to all others interested in modern online genres, news media and sports discourse.

This book is about particles in the narrower sense of the word as opposed to the broader meaning covering all uninflected words of a language. In the narrower meaning of the linguistic term particles can be distinguished between logical, or scalar particles and modal, or pragmatic particles. The semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties of modal particles differ vastly from those of the scalar particles, on the one hand, and their homonymic counterparts functioning in different syntactic categories, on the other hand. The contributions to this volume offer the latest research on the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties of particles in the English and German language.

Covering nearly one thousand years, this volume explores medieval and modern English texts from fresh perspectives. Within the relatively new field of historical discourse linguistics, the synchronic analysis of large textual units and consideration of text-external features in relation to discourse has so far received little attention. To fill that gap, this volume offers studies of medieval instructional and religious texts and correspondence from the early modern period. The contributions highlight writer-audience relationships, the intended use of texts, descriptions of text-type, and questions of orality and manuscript contextualization. The topics, ranging from the reception of Old English texts to the conventions of practical instruction in Middle English to the epistolary construction of science in early Modern English, are directly relevant to historical linguists, discourse and text linguists, and students of the history of English.

Discourse topics are a frequently mentioned but rarely operationalised concept in linguistics. Taking a text linguistic approach and defining discourse topics as clusterings of concepts, this book examines and compares methods for investigating topic boundaries, topic identification and topic development. The first book to be devoted to topics in extended discourse, Discourse Topics examines topics in several genres and generates new insights into the nature of discourse topics that challenge the status quo. It is essential reading for researchers in linguistics, discourse analysis, natural language processing and psychology whose work concerns topics.

Discourses of Helping Professions brings together cutting-edge research on professional discourses from both traditional helping contexts such as doctor-patient interaction or psychotherapy and more recent helping contexts such as executive coaching. Unlike workplace, professional and institutional discourse – by now well established fields in linguistic research – discourses of helping professions represent an innovative concept in its orientation to a common communicative goal: solving patients’ and clients’ physical, psychological, emotional, professional or managerial problems via a particular helping discourse. The book sets out to uncover differences, similarities and interferences in how professionals and those seeking help interactively tackle this communicative goal. In its focus on professional helping contexts and its inter-professional perspective, the current book is a primer, intended to spark off more interdisciplinary and (applied) research on helping discourses, a socio-cultural phenomenon that is of growing importance in our post-modern society. As such, it is of great relevance for discourse researchers and discourse practitioners, caretakers and social scientists of all shades as well as for everybody interested in helping professions.

This volume examines the language of microblogs drawing on the example of a group of eleven users who are united by their interest in ballet as a physical activity and an art form. The book reports on a three and a half year study which complemented a 20,000 word corpus of tweets with semi-structured interviews and participant observation. It deals with two main questions: how users exploit the linguistic resources at their disposal to build a certain identity, and how the community boundaries are performed discursively. The focus is on the speech acts of self-praise and complaint, and on the storytelling practices of microbloggers. The comprehensive treatment of the speech act theory and the social psychological approaches to self-disclosure provides a stepping stone to the analysis of identity work, for which the users draw on two distinctive interpretive repertoires – affiliative and self-promoting.

This book introduces a unique model of medical discourse that identifies the forms of talk – voices – that doctors and patients use during the consultation, and studies the dynamic interaction as it unfolds particularly in follow-up visits. Natural recordings, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and ethnographic observations provide the data for the research, which was carried out in an Outpatient Clinic in Santiago, Chile. Using an interactional sociolinguistic approach, analysis of the data identifies doctor–patient communication as a micro-performance of broader socio-cultural realities, in which social status, power, knowledge and personal beliefs and values all find expression in the consultative setting. Importantly, while both doctor and patient voices are shown to contribute to an essentially asymmetrical exchange, the study also identifies the holistic and empathic Fellow Human voice, which places doctors and patients on a more equal footing. In connection with this voice, the Spanish concept of simpatía is also discussed.While the model in this study was developed within a specific socio-cultural framework, it is hoped that it will be adapted and modified more widely and contribute to a better understanding between doctors and their patients.

Rethinking Sinclair and Coulthard’s sequentiality-based notion of the follow-up, this volume explores its forms and communicative functions in traditional and contemporary modes of communication (parliamentary sessions, interviews, debates, speeches, op-eds, discussion forums and Twitter) wherein political actors address challenges to their political agenda and to their political face. In so doing, the volume achieves two major advances. First, its contributions expand the understanding of follow-ups beyond the traditional focus on structural sequentiality, considering communicative function as a defining feature of a follow-up. Second, it broadens the understanding of what constitutes political discourse, as not being limited to a single discourse, but also being able to span multiple discourses of different forms and speech events over time.

In Early Modern Britain, new publication channels were developed and new textual genres established themselves. News discourse became increasingly more important and reached wider audiences, with pamphlets as the first real mass media. Newspapers appeared, first on a weekly and then on a daily basis. And scientific news discourse in the form of letters exchanged between fellow scholars turned into academic journals. The papers in this volume provide state-of-the art analyses of these developments.

The first part of the volume contains studies of early newspapers that range from reports of crime and punishment to want ads, and from traces of religious language in early newspapers to the use of imperatives. The second part is devoted to pamphlets and provides detailed analyses of news reporting and of impoliteness strategies. The last section is devoted to scientific news discourse and traces the early publication formats in their various manifestations.