This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.
Das vorliegende Buch untersucht die semantischen und diskurs-pragmatischen Eigenschaften indefiniter Nominalphrasen. Dabei wird der Zusammenhang zwischen den folgenden zwei Faktoren untersucht: (i) der referenziellen Form (markierte indefinite Nominalphrasen vs. unmarkierte indefinite Nominalphrasen), und (ii) dem diskursstrukturierenden Potential. Durch eine sprachvergleichende Studie mit Schwerpunkt auf Englisch, Deutsch und Rumänisch, wird die Analyse der Funktionen unterschiedlicher indefiniten Nominalphrasen empirisch gestützt und weiterentwickelt. Damit wird die Arbeit zu einem besseren Verständnis von Textstruktur, den kognitiven Grundlagen von Textproduktion und Textverständnis, sowie den allgemeinen Prinzipien der Kommunikation zwischen Gesprächsteilnehmern beitragen.
The papers in this volume in honor of Sandra Annear Thompson deal with complex sentences, an important topic in Thompson's career. The focus of the contributions is on the ways in which the grammatical properties of complex sentences are shaped by the communicative context in which they are produced, an approach to grammatical analysis that Thompson pioneered and developed in the course of her distinguished career.
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.
Read this book to get a deeper understanding of a wide range of semantics research on complex sentences and meaning in discourse. These in-depth articles from leading names in their fields cover the core concepts of sentential semantics such as tense, modality, conditionality, propositional attitudes, scope, negation, and coordination. The highly cited material, covers questions, imperatives, copular clauses, and existential sentences. It also includes essential research on sentence types, and explains central concepts in the theory of information structure and discourse structure, such as topics, cohesion and coherence, accessibility and discourse particles.
This text looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. Experts in the field make use of data from a variety of languages to examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply.
In the light of growing insights into the universal temporal-semantic nature of aspectual distinctions, today's aspectology has broadened its attention from restrictedly event-defining functions of aspect on the sentence level towards its primary perspectival functions on the discourse/situation level. Hereby it attempts to relate these functions to each other in ways that stimulate consistently language processing on a more solid perceptual-conceptual and pragmatic basis. Reflecting in various ways this general tendency. The 13 papers collected in this volume are oriented to four fields of research: (1) Developmental properties of aspect and tense; (2) Ideo-pragmatic and conceptual-semantic correlates of aspect and the perspectival organisation of discourse; (3) Aspect, case and discourse; (4) and Aspect in literary discourse. The editor's Introduction gives a comprehensive survey of contemporary aspectology and its development towards a proper integration of discourse/situation conditions. Besides cross-linguistic considerations (including English), the languages analyzed specifically are Russian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, French and Finnish.
Discourse Syntax is the study of syntax that requires an understanding of the surrounding text and the overall discourse situation, including considerations of genre and modality. Using corpus data and insights from current research, this book is a comprehensive guide to this fast-developing field. It takes the reader 'beyond the sentence' to study grammatical phenomena, like word order variation, connectives, ellipsis, and complexity. It introduces core concepts of Discourse Syntax, integrating insights from corpus-based research and inviting the reader to reflect on research design decisions. Each chapter begins with a definition of learning outcomes, provides results from empirical articles, and enables readers to critically assess data visualization. Complete with helpful further reading recommendations as well as a range of exercises, it is geared towards intermediate to advanced students of English linguistics and it is also essential reading for anyone interested in this exciting, fast-moving discipline.
