Connectives And Discourse Relations

Provides a cutting-edge yet accessible introduction to connectives and discourse relations, with examples from a range of languages.

This set of eleven articles, by linguists from four different European countries and a variety of theoretical backgrounds, takes a new look at the discourse functions of a number of English connectives, from simple coordinators (and, but) to phrases of varying complexity (after all, the fact is that). Using authentic spoken and written data from varied sources, the authors explore the ways in which current uses of connectives result from the interaction of syntax, semantics and prosody, both over time and through diversity of discourse situations. Most adopt an integrative approach in which speaker-listener or writer-reader relationships are viewed as part and parcel of the linguistic properties of each marker. Because it combines functional, generative and enunciative approaches into a coherent whole with a common explanatory aim, this book will be of interest to linguists, corpus-linguists and all those who investigate the semantics-pragmatics interface.

Over the past four decades, discourse coherence has been studied from linguistic, psycholinguistic, computational, and applied perspectives. This volume identifies current issues and under-researched topics in the pragmatics of discourse coherence. Nine studies from various disciplines address the realization and signalling of coherence relations in various genres and languages, their acquisition and use by first- and second-language learners and university students, the relationship between coherence relations and genre-specific discourse structure, and extensions of the coherence paradigm to multimodal discourse and visual art. This collection will be of interest to researchers from linguistics, applied linguistics, psychology, communication, and multimodal semiotics.

This volume focuses on the role language plays at all levels of the argumentation process. It explores the effects that specific linguistic choices may have in the production and the reception of arguments and in doing so, it moves beyond the first, necessary, descriptive stance provided by current literature on the topic. Each chapter provides an original take illuminating one or more of the following three issues: the range of linguistic resources language users draw on as they argue; how cognitive processes of meaning construction may influence argumentative practices; and which discursive devices can be used to fulfil a number of argumentative goals. The volume includes theoretical and empirical or applied stances, providing the reader both with state-of-the-art reflections on the relationship between argumentation and language, and with concrete examples of how this relationship plays out in naturally occurring argumentative practices, such as classroom interaction, and political, parliamentary or journalistic discourse. This is a very original, timely and welcome contribution to the study of argumentation conducted with the tools of the language sciences. The collection of papers relevantly tackles key linguistic, discursive and cognitive aspects of argumentative practices whose treatment is underrepresented in mainstream argumentation studies by offering new and exciting linguistically-grounded theoretical accounts. As such, the volume testifies both to the vigour of the linguistic current within the discipline and to the high standards of scholarly commitment and quality that the younger generation is pushing forward. Without question, this book marks an important milestone in the relationships between linguistics and argumentation theory. Christian Plantin, Professor Emeritus

Chinese is a discourse-oriented language and the underlying mechanisms of the language involve encoding and decoding so the language can be correctly delivered and understood. To date, there has been a lack of consolidation at the discourse level such that a reference framework for understanding the language in a top-down fashion is still underdeveloped. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Discourse Analysis is the first to showcase the latest research in the field of Chinese discourse analysis to consolidate existing findings, put the language in both theoretical and socio-functional perspectives, offer guidance and insights for further research and inspire innovative ideas for exploring the Chinese language in the discourse domain. The book is aimed at both students and scholars researching in the areas of Chinese linguistics and discourse analysis.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 18th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2017, held in Leshan, China, in May 2017. The 48 full papers and 5 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 176 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: lexical semantics; applications of natural language processing; lexical resources; and corpus linguistics.

This book demonstrates the advantage of a corpus based approach to Arabic, and presents an overview of current research on the Arabic language within corpus linguistics. Dealing not only with modern standard Arabic, the book also considers classical and colloquial forms.

Linguistically annotated corpora are becoming a central part of the corpus linguistics field. One of their main strengths is the level of searchability they offer, but with the annotation come problems of the initial complexity of queries and query tools. This book gives a full, pedagogic account of this burgeoning field. Beginning with an overview of corpus linguistics, its prerequisites and goals, the book then introduces linguistically annotated corpora. It explores the different levels of linguistic annotation, including morphological, parts of speech, syntactic, semantic and discourse-level, as well as advantages and challenges for such annotations. It covers the main annotated corpora for English, the Penn Treebank, the International Corpus of English, and OntoNotes, as well as a wide range of corpora for other languages. In its third part, search strategies required for different types of data are explored. All chapters are accompanied by exercises and by sections on further reading.