UID:
almafu_9960119316002883
Format:
1 online resource (xii, 288 pages) :
,
digital, PDF file(s).
ISBN:
1-107-71042-1
,
1-107-71297-1
,
0-511-80522-5
Series Statement:
Cambridge textbooks in linguistics
Content:
Discourse analysis is a term that has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. In this textbook, first published in 1983, the authors provide an extensive overview of the many and diverse approaches to the study of discourse, but base their own approach centrally on the discipline which, to varying degrees, is common to them all - linguistics. Using a methodology which has much in common with descriptive linguistics, they offer a lucid and wide-ranging account of how forms of language are used in communication. Their principal concern is to examine how any language produced by man, whether spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose in a context.
Note:
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
,
Part I: Introduction: linguistic forms and function -- The functions of language -- Spoken and written language -- Sentence and utterance -- Part II: The role of context in interpretation -- Pragmatics and discourse context -- The context of situation -- The expanding context -- The principles of 'local interpretation' and of 'analogy' -- Part III: Topic and the representation of discourse content -- Discourse fragments and the notion of 'topic' -- Sentential topic -- Discourse topic -- Relevance and speaking topically -- Speaker's topic -- Topic boundary makers -- Discourse topic and the representation of discourse content -- Problems with the proposition-based representation of discourse content -- Memory for text-content: story-grammars -- Representing text-content as a network -- Part IV: 'Staging' and the representation of discourse structure -- The linearisation problem -- Theme -- Thematisation and 'staging' -- Part V: Information structure -- The structure of information -- Information structure and syntactic form -- Th psychological status of 'givenness' -- Conclusion -- Part VI: The nature of reference in text and in discourse -- What is 'text'? -- Discourse reference -- Pronouns in discourse -- Part VII: Coherence in the interpretation of discourse -- Coherence in discourse -- Computing communicative function -- Speech acts -- Using knowledge of the world -- Top-down and bottom-up processing -- Representing background knowledge -- Determining the inferences to be made -- Inferences as missing links -- Inferences and non-automatic connections --- Inferences as filling in gaps or discontinuities in interpretation -- Conclusion.
,
English
Additional Edition:
ISBN 0-521-28475-9
Additional Edition:
ISBN 0-521-24144-8
Language:
English
URL:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805226
