Interactive Dialogue Sequences In Middle English Drama

This book looks at mediaeval English drama using the theoretical frameworks of historical sociopragmatics and dialogue analysis. It focuses on the collection of cycle plays known as the N.Town Plays, preserved in a manuscript from the fifteenth century. The book examines various linguistic markers that are important for the expression of social relations and pragmatic stance: pronouns and terms of address, modal markers, performatives, and sequential structures such as question-answer, imperative-compliance, etc. These elements are examined separately and then brought together to arrive at a more integrated analysis of dramatic dialogue and of the dynamics of interaction it portrays. A separate chapter is devoted to tracing the same mechanisms on a different communication level, i.e. in 'dialogue' with the audience, which is particularly relevant to the instructional purposes of the plays. The book will be useful to students and scholars of pragmatics, historical linguistics, dialogue studies and drama studies.

Pathos in Late-Medieval Religious Drama and Art explores the connections between the language of European late-medieval drama and co-temporary themes and motifs in visual communication, focussing on the triggering of emotional reactions in the viewers as a persuasive device.

The Handbook of Historical Pragmatics provides an authoritative and accessible overview of this versatile new field in pragmatics devoted to a diachronic study of language use and human interaction in context. It covers all areas of historical pragmatics from grammaticalization theory to pragmatic entities, such as discourse markers, speech acts and politeness to individual discourse domains from scientific writing to literary discourse. Each contribution, written by a leading specialist, gives a succinct, representative and up-to-date overview of research questions, theories, methods and recent developments in the field.

The Japanese sentence-final particles, "ne," "yo" and "yone" have proved notoriously difficult to explain and are especially challenging for second language users. This book investigates the role of the particles in talk-in-interaction with the aim of providing a comprehensive understanding that accounts for their pragmatic properties and sequential functions and that provides a sound basis for second language pedagogy. This study starts by setting up an original particle function hypothesis based on the figure/ground "gestalt," and then tests its validity empirically with unmarked, marked and native/non-native talk-in-interaction data. The analysis illustrates not only expectable but also unexpected or strategic use of particles, as well as the problems posed for native speakers by non-native speakers whose use of particles is idiosyncratic. The study demonstrates that the proposed hypothesis is capable of accounting for all the uses of particles in the extensive and varied data set examined. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in pragmatics and CA and to teachers of Japanese as a foreign language.

The book provides a new angle for the study of otherwise amply discussed discourse and interactional phenomena. The new perspective consists in addressing the interconnections between resonance, stance, represented discourse and joking in Mexican conversational discourse. In so doing, it contributes to a better understanding of the interplay between collaboration, intersubjectivity and emergence, among other relevant issues. Scholars and advanced students concerned with dialogic syntax theory, stance theory and Spanish, will find the present analysis interesting and innovative. However, the writing and methodology, based on clearly discussed and presented examples from selected conversational excerpts, including graphic representations of linguistic and discourse data, makes the analysis easy to follow also to non-specialists. The book is thus interesting to a broad circle of readers, whether they are concerned with any of the issues dealt with or with their mutual connections, whether they are specialists or not.

Arranged alphabetically, this volume contains articles on various aspects of life in the Middle Ages, from A.D. 500 to 1500 and covering a geographic area including the Latin West, the Slavic world, Asia Minor, the lands of the caliphate in the East, and the Muslim-Christian areas of North Africa.

This book is a corpus-based study examining thou and you in three speech-related genres from 1560–1760, a crucial period in the history of second person singular pronouns, spanning the time from when you became dominant to when thou became all but obsolete. The study embraces the fields of corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and historical sociolinguistics. Using data drawn from the recently released A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and manuscript material, the aim is to ascertain which extra-linguistic and linguistic factors highlighted by previous research appear particularly relevant in the selection and relative distribution of thou and you. Previous research on thou and you has tended to concentrate on Drama and/or been primarily qualitative in nature. Depositions in particular have hitherto received very little attention. This book is intended to help fill a gap in the literature by presenting an in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of pronoun usage in Trials, Depositions, and, for comparative purposes, Drama Comedy.