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Books in Discourse pragmatics and sociolinguistics

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    • The Discourse of Negotiation

      Studies of Language in the Workplace
      • 1st Edition
      • A. Firth
      • English
      The study of negotiation has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent decades, yet rarely have discourse analysts applied their particular concerns and interests to the phenomenon. Although a fundamental characteristic of negotiation is linguistic action, the detailed study of negotiation as a communicative, discourse activity is in its infancy. In the first collection of its kind, Alan Firth has brought together 14 original studies of negotiation discourse.Drawing on insights and methodologies from discourse and conversation analysis, pragmatics, ethnography and ethnomethodology, the book examines negotiations in a wide range of workplaces, including the US Federal Trade Commission, management-union meetings, doctors' surgeries, travel agencies, international trading houses in Denmark, Belgium and Australia, Swedish social welfare offices, and consumer helplines. Collectively, the book explores the notion of negotiation both as a formal encounter and as a gloss for more informal decision-making activities.Questions specifically addressed include: what is the interactional character of negotiation? How are negotiations related to the work context? And how are negotiations undertaken linguistically - as discourse-based activities? Answers are sought by utilising transcripts of real-life instances of negotiation. This allows for finely-detailed descriptions of the observed activities, providing important insight into the discourse-context relationship, the interactional bases of work acitivities, and the communicative processes of negotiation.

    • Language Processing in Social Context

      • 1st Edition
      • Volume 54
      • R. Dietrich + 1 more
      • English
      The book presents an interdisciplinary analysis of social, cognitive, situational and contextual aspects of language and language processing by first and second language speakers. Linguists and psychologists formulate theoretical models and empirical analyses of the influence of such factors on various levels of language processing. These relate specifically to syntactic and semantic parsing, lexical selection, and text production. The issue of ``hearer orientation'' in language use lies at the forefront of interest in this anthology and is tackled from such different fields as linguistics, text linguistics, formal semantics, social psychology, psychology of language, artificial intelligence, and second language acquisition.

    • Sociolinguistic Metatheory

      • 1st Edition
      • E. Figueroa
      • English
      Linguistics is a discipline with ever expanding boundaries and interests. Despite the narrow definition of linguistics which dominates academia, sub-fields continue to flourish and ways of doing linguistics continue to expand. As ways to do linguistics increase, and as approaches to linguistics accumulate over time, it becomes increasingly necessary for students of linguistics to have ways of understanding and comparing developments in linguistics.Sociolin... Metatheory is a book which explains foundational developments in linguistics by taking the past three decades of developments in sociolinguistics and relating them to contemporaneous developments in received linguistics. Sociolinguistic Metatheory takes the reader through the basic philosophical questions which drive linguistic research. It looks in detail at three models of sociolinguistics - Dell Hymes and the Ethnography of Communication, William Labov and Sociolinguistic Realism, and John Gumperz and Interactional Sociolinguistics - and focuses on such questions as: Where is language located? How is an utterance-based approach to linguistics different from a sentence-based approach? How do metatheoretical paradigm assumptions such as realism or relativism affect the development of linguistic theory? What interesting developments in linguistic theory and analysis have sociolinguistics provided?

    • Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics

      • 2nd Edition
      • J.L. Mey + 1 more
      • English
      Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics, Second Edition (COPE) is an authoritative single-volume reference resource comprehensively describing the discipline of pragmatics, an important branch of natural language study dealing with the study of language in it's entire user-related theoretical and practical complexity. As a derivative volume from Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition, it comprises contributions from the foremost scholars of semantics in their various specializations and draws on 20+ years of development in the parent work in a compact and affordable format. Principally intended for tertiary level inquiry and research, this will be invaluable as a reference work for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics inquiring into the study of meaning and meaning relations within languages. As pragmatics is a centrally important and inherently cross-cutting area within linguistics, it will therefore be relevant not just for meaning specialists, but for most linguistic audiences.

    • Knowledge and Language

      • 1st Edition
      • Volume 39
      • I. Kurcz + 2 more
      • English
      How do people represent their knowledge about the world and use that knowledge for communication? This question is the central theme of this book. Among the aspects discussed in the first three sections are: the relationship between formal, logical descriptions of language, and psychological analyses of language use; how knowledge interacts with language use; and childrens' acquisition of language in different countries. In the last two sections, the topics discussed include the complex relationships between the development, transmission, and comprehension of intention and meaning, the growth of the representation of social knowledge, and the impact acquiring a language (or two languages) has on the development of the child's knowledge structures.

    • Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics

      • 1st Edition
      • R. Mesthrie
      • English
      This is the ninth in the acclaimed series of spinoff volumes based on the outstanding Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. It comprises 285 articles of which 80 are short biographical entries. 50 of the biographies and 42 other articles are entirely new, while the remaining entries are suitably revised and updated from ELL. This work provides uniquely comprehensive and authoritative information on all aspects of sociolinguistics.

    • Mental Models in Discourse Processing and Reasoning

      • 1st Edition
      • Volume 128
      • G. Rickheit + 1 more
      • English
      In this interdisciplinary discussion on mental models, researchers from various areas in cognitive science tackle the following questions: What is a mental model? What are the prospects and limitations in applying the mental model notion in cognitive science? How can the ideas on the nature of mental models and their mode of operation be empirically substantiated? The primary goal of the research group was to work out a definition of mental models that embraces the overall use of this construct in cognitive science as well as the more specific conceptions used in particular research domains such as cognitive linguistics. Theoretical claims about the properties of mental models were discussed and their tenability evaluated against the empirical evidence.The volume is divided into three parts. Fundamental aspects of mental models are presented in the first section, the following part contains contributions to the function of mental models in discourse processing, and finally problems of mental models in reasoning and problem solving are outlined.

    • Handbook of Neurolinguistics

      • 1st Edition
      • Harry A. Whitaker + 1 more
      • English
      The Handbook of Neurolinguistics is a state-of-the-art reference and resource book; it describes current research and theory in the many subfields of neurolinguistics and its clinical application. Thorough and clearly written, the handbook provides an excellent overview of the field of neurolinguistics and its development. The book is organized into five parts covering the history of neurolinguistics, methods in clinical and experimental neurolinguistics, experimental neurolinguistics, clinical neurolinguistics, and resources in neurolinguistics. The first four parts contain a wide range of topics which discuss all important aspects of the many subfields of neurolinguistics. Also included are the relatively new and fast developing areas of research in discourse, pragmatics, and recent neuroimaging techniques. The resources section provides currently available resources, both traditional and modern. The handbook is useful to the newcomer to the field, as well as the expert searching for the latest developments in neurolinguistics.

    • Discourse and Syntax

      Syntax and Semantics
      • 1st Edition
      • Talmy Givón
      • English
      Syntax and Semantics, Volume 12: Discourse and Syntax provides information pertinent to the fundamental aspects of the study of the syntax of isolated sentences. This book discusses the relationship between the discourse notion topic and the syntactic notion subject. Organized into five parts encompassing 20 chapters, this volume begins with an overview of the discourse-function definition of so-called movement transformations. This text then presents the argument against the existence of an independent structural level called syntax as far as it can go, suggesting that all syntactic behavior within a given range of data can be predicted from functional considerations. Other chapters consider syntax as a mode of the automatic processing of speech. This book discusses as well the integration of the speaker's goals with communicative strategies in the structure and flow of personal narratives. The final chapter deals with discourse-pragmatic governance of so-called syntactic phenomena. This book is a valuable resource for linguists.