The Study Of Language Beyond The Sentence

How do we design sentences to fit their purposes and how do we combine them to communicate complex, contextualized meanings? This work takes discourse apart to show how it is organized and how it aids communication.

Approaches to Discourse Analysis demonstrates the importance of the diverse perspectives that various approaches to discourse bring to bear on human communication. Linguists and other readers interested in the interplay of language and culture will gain new insight and understanding from this rich compilation.

This is the third volume in the series Within Language, Beyond Theories, which focuses on current linguistic research that surpasses the limits of contemporary theoretical frameworks in order to gain new insights into the structure of the language system and to offer more explanatorily adequate accounts of linguistic phenomena taken from a number of the world’s languages. This book offers a collection of fourteen chapters organized into three parts and serves as a vehicle for the survey of new voices in discourse analysis, pragmatics and corpus-based studies. Part I addresses a panorama of topics related to different discourse types, such as talk show discourse, multimodal discourse, and everyday spoken discourse, as well as written academic discourse. Part II covers a range of highly controversial issues in pragmatics, including the status of ad-hoc concepts, linguistically encoded meaning, explicit content, and the lexicographic treatment of modality. Part III encompasses chapters which offer an overview of some of the recent phenomena covered in the area of corpus-based research, including the semantic functions of the temporal meanings of selected prepositions; the diffusion of gerundive complements; the institutionalization and de-institutionalization of neologisms; contextual factors in the placement of the adverb “well”; the behaviour of the verb “bake” in copular constructions; the syntactic flexibility of English idioms and their thematic composition; tendencies in the formation of nouns in tabloids; and the application of cluster analysis to the categorization of linguistic data. Drawing on recent advances in discourse analysis, pragmatics and corpus-based studies, the majority of the issues discussed here are approached and investigated from a dual perspective. While on the theoretical side, an array of different theoretical models is surveyed, in the analytical parts, the practical applications of the models examined are tested against data from English (both British and American), Estonian and Polish. The wide range of theoretical and empirical issues discussed in this book will help to provoke further academic discussion on the study of language in the areas of discourse analysis, pragmatics, and corpus-based research.

The book examines the development and maintenance of a minority language, engaging on both micro and macro levels to address open questions in the field. Guardado provides a history of the study of language maintenance, including discussion of language socialization, cosmopolitan identities, and home practices. In particular, the author uses 'discourse' as a primary tool to understand minority language development and maintenance.

An exploration of how any language produced by man, spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose and within a context.

This best-selling textbook provides an engaging and user-friendly introduction to the study of language. Assuming no prior knowledge in the subject, Yule presents information in short, bite-sized sections, introducing the major concepts in language study – from how children learn language to why men and women speak differently, through all the key elements of language. This fourth edition has been revised and updated with twenty new sections, covering new accounts of language origins, the key properties of language, text messaging, kinship terms and more than twenty new word etymologies. To increase student engagement with the text, Yule has also included more than fifty new tasks, including thirty involving data analysis, enabling students to apply what they have learned. The online study guide offers students further resources when working on the tasks, while encouraging lively and proactive learning. This is the most fundamental and easy-to-use introduction to the study of language.

Perspectives on Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice provides the student/reader with the basic theoretical knowledge and the empirical tools of some of the most relevant approaches to the analysis of discourse. It has been mainly conceived of as a general (university) course on Discourse Analysis, but it can also be useful for any person or group whose main concern is to acquire the basic necessary knowledge and skills for analyzing any type of discourse. The subject matter of the book could not only be of use for linguists or prospective linguists: given its interdisciplinary character, its findings can be (and in fact are) used and applied by practitioners and scholars from different fields, such as sociology, psychology, medical science, computer science, and so on. Thus the book can be used by any person who, having certain linguistic knowledge, is interested in exploring the fascinating world of discourse. All the chapters contain both a theoretical and an empirical section, the latter containing examples of analysis, as well as exercises (Practice) and self-evaluation questions, whose answers can be found at the end of the book (in the Practice key and Key to self-evaluation questions sections). The book is divided into 12 chapters. The first two introduce basic information about discourse analysis and text linguistics, as well as the necessary techniques for gathering data, including a very brief introduction to corpus linguistics. Chapters 3-11 present and discuss some of the most prominent and well-known approaches to discourse analysis, namely Pragmatics, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis, The Ethnography of Communication, Variation Analysis and Narrative Analysis, Functional Sentence Perspective, Post-Structuralist Theory and Social Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis and Positive Discourse Analysis, and Mediated Discourse Analysis. Finally, Chapter 12 deals with crucial and further issues, such as the type of discourse chosen for the analysis, the strategies and functions of discourse, or the problem of choosing an appropriate unit of analysis which will suit the aims of research. Perspectives on Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice may prove of value to all those who are professionally involved in the area of discourse and pragmatic studies, or simply to those who wish to acquire the necessary basic knowledge and techniques for analyzing any type of discourse, from medical, journalistic or political discourse to computer-mediated, humoristic, or hegemonic discourse (where the use and abuse of power is an important issue), just to name a few of the innumerable possibilities. A desirable and intended effect of this book is also the development of an open and tolerant mind, which will eventually lead to a better understanding of the different and varied manifestations of language, culture and communication in human society.