Pragmatic Markers In Oral Narrative

This book presents the multifunctional nature of pragmatic discourse markers in English and Catalan oral narratives from the point of view of text linguistics and contrastive analysis. It is argued that English and Catalan markers are distributed and operate differently at four different levels in the varied discourse structures of the text, i.e. at the ideational, the rhetorical, the sequential, and the inferential levels. The results confirm the distinctions in functional-systemic levels, and indicate that the nature of the two languages has a direct influence on the presence and nature of markers in the texts. The study is built up on a corpus of English and Catalan elicited narratives of native speakers, adopting the sociolinguistic Labovian framework adapted to the situation of educated adults. The study results in a better understanding of the contribution of pragmatic markers to the organization and the interpretation of oral texts, bringing insights from relevance and cognitive approaches to text structure, and moving from descriptive to theoretical levels of analysis and discussion.

This book presents the multifunctional nature of pragmatic discourse markers in English and Catalan oral narratives from the point of view of text linguistics and contrastive analysis. It is argued that English and Catalan markers are distributed and operate differently at four different levels in the varied discourse structures of the text, i.e. at the ideational, the rhetorical, the sequential, and the inferential levels. The results confirm the distinctions in functional-systemic levels, and indicate that the nature of the two languages has a direct influence on the presence and nature of markers in the texts. The study is built up on a corpus of English and Catalan elicited narratives of native speakers, adopting the sociolinguistic Labovian framework adapted to the situation of educated adults. The study results in a better understanding of the contribution of pragmatic markers to the organization and the interpretation of oral texts, bringing insights from relevance and cognitive approaches to text structure, and moving from descriptive to theoretical levels of analysis and discussion.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies, which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics. For further publications in English linguistics see also our Dialects of English book series. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

An original study of pragmatic markers in a corpus of spoken English, with a focus on the functions performed by the markers in different types of text.

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2015 im Fachbereich Didaktik für das Fach Englisch - Pädagogik, Sprachwissenschaft, , Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Writing, as a macro skill, has been a central focus in most Philippine curricula in the last three decades and continues to be so. Filipino students are taught varied strategies on how they can improve their writing to produce well-organized texts. Specific writing devices are needed to help students formulate cohesive and coherent texts. Several studies have aimed at analyzing these devices, generally termed as discourse markers (DMs), which were considered as “growth market in linguistics” by Fraser (1998). DMs were first dealt in a seminal paper by Halliday and Hassan (1976) when they analyzed text and questioned: “What makes a text different from a random collection of unrelated sentences?” Although the direct use of the term DMs was not mentioned, Halliday and Hasan, proposed a set of cohesive devices (reference, repetition, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction) that “help create a text by indicating semantic relations in an underlying structure of ideas.” Fraser (2009) found that several expressions are used to refer to DMs including cue phrases, discourse connectives, discourse markers, discourse operators, discourse particles, pragmatic expressions, and pragmatic markers. DMs are linguistic items such as well, however, so, because, etc. which contribute to the cohesiveness, cohesion, and meaning in discourse segments. Fraser (1990) provided an account of DMs to clarify their status and defined DMs as “a class of lexical expressions drawn primarily from the syntactic classes of conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositional phrases.” In analyzing DMs, two accounts have emerged to which researchers subscribe. The issue highlighted in this difference is regarded to “how the use of DMs contributes to discourse interepretation” The current study seeks to identify, quantify, and analyze the use of DMs in high school students’ argumentative and narrative essays. It also intends to probe into the relationship of the frequency and use of DMs to the quality of the students’ writing, Specifically, it would answer the following: 1. What types of discourse markers are utilized by Grade 9 Filipino ESL learners in personal narrative and argumentative writing? 2. Are there any significant quantitative and qualitative differences in the use of discourse markers by Grade 9 Filipino ESL learners? 3. Is there a direct relationship between the number of discourse markers used and the quality of students’ writings?

A new examination of the little-studied phenomena of Direct Speech in Old English poetry.

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.