Pragmatics Discourse And Society Volume 1

This two-volume work speaks to the entire scope of Professor Odebunmi’s research concerns in general pragmatics, medical and clinical pragmatics, literary discourse, critical discourse analysis, applied linguistics and language sociology. Its 52 chapters across both volumes (24 chapters in this volume and 28 chapters in Volume 2) written by established scholars such as Jacob Mey, Paul Hopper, Joyce Mathangwane, and Ming-Yu Tseng, in addition to the honoree, explore the dynamics of the interplay of spatial, temporal, agential and (non-)institutional factors that drive discourse/textual constructions, negotiations and interpretations and sometimes influence human cognition and actions. The volume will appeal to all academics, researchers and students who are interested in the interface of context and meaning in human communication.

Pragmatics of society takes a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics and gives a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a wide range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield of pragmatics encompasses sociolinguistic studies that focus on how pragmatic and discourse features vary according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies investigating variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also covers studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.

This volume is part of the series ‘Pragmatics, Philosophy and Psychology’, edited for Springer by Alessandro Capone. It is intended for an audience of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postgraduate and advanced researchers. This volume focuses on societal pragmatics. One of the main concerns of societal pragmatics is the world of language users. We are interested in the investigation of linguistic practices in the context of societal practices (‘praxis’, to use a term used in the Wittgensteinian and other traditions). It is clear that the world of users, including their practices, their culture, and their social aims has to be taken into account and seriously investigated when we deal with the pragmatics of language. It is not enough to discuss principles of language use solely in the guise of abstract theoretical tools. Consequently, the present volume focuses explicitly on the interplay of abstract, theoretical principles and the necessities imposed by societal contexts often requiring a more flexible use of such theoretical tools. The volume includes articles on pragmemes, politeness and anti-politeness, dialogue, joint utterances, discourse markers, pragmatics and the law, institutional discourse, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics and culture, cultural scripts, argumentation theory, connectives and argumentation, language games and psychotherapy, slurs, the analysis of funerary rites, as well as an authoritative chapter by Jacob L. Mey on societal pragmatics.

"A landmark in the oeuvre of one of the founding fathers of discourse analysis. Van Dijk has managed to edit a volume of lasting significance, and some of the chapters in this book belong to the most widely read in the field. In its totality, Discourse Studies offers us a 360 degree tour of the field... Nothing in this volume is dated, everything remains mandatory reading for every student and advanced practicioner." - Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University "This very welcome updated second edition will allow Teun van Dijk′s very popular Discourse Studies to consolidate its already strong and central position in the area. Featuring chapters written by so many of the leading scholars it will continue to be a stimulating and wide-ranging introduction to the discipline of discourse studies for new generations of students." - Malcolm Coulthard, University of Birmingham This book is the largest, most complete, most diverse and only multidisciplinary introduction to the field. A combined Second Edition of two seminal texts in the field (the 1997 titles Discourse as Social Interaction and Discourse as Structure and Process) this essential handbook: Is fully updated from start to finish to cover contemporary debates and research literature. Covers everything from grammar, narrative, argumentation, cognition and pragmatics to social, political and critical approaches. Adds two new chapters on ideology and identity. Puts the student at the centre, offering brand new features such as worked examples, sample analyses and recommended further reading. Written and edited by world-class scholars in their fields, it is the essential, one-stop companion for any student of discourse analysis and discourse studies.

Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

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, cultural, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this seventh volume underlines the mutually constitutive relation between society and language use. It highlights a number of the most prominent approaches of this relation and it draws attention to a selected number of topics that the study of language in its social context has characteristically brought to bear. Despite their theoretical and methodological differences, each of the chapters in this book assumes that it is necessary to look at society and language use as interdependent phenomena, and that by attending to microscopic linguistic phenomena one is also keeping a finger on the pulse of broader, macroscopic social tendencies that at the same time facilitate and constrain language use. The introduction provides a sketch of the intellectual antecedents of the volume’s two ‘mother disciplines’, viz., linguistics and social theory before pointing at recent common ground in the rising attention for discourse and what has come to be called ‘late-modernity’.