Logics of Conversation


Book Description

Table of contents




Argumentation Schemes


Book Description

This book provides a systematic analysis of many common argumentation schemes and a compendium of 96 schemes. The study of these schemes, or forms of argument that capture stereotypical patterns of human reasoning, is at the core of argumentation research. Surveying all aspects of argumentation schemes from the ground up, the book takes the reader from the elementary exposition in the first chapter to the latest state of the art in the research efforts to formalize and classify the schemes, outlined in the last chapter. It provides a systematic and comprehensive account, with notation suitable for computational applications that increasingly make use of argumentation schemes.




The Grammar of Discourse


Book Description

In that The Anatomy of Speech Notions (1976) was the precursor to The Grammar of Discourse (1983), this revision embodies a third "edition" of some of the material that is found here. The original intent of the 1976 volume was to construct a hierarchical arrangement of notional categories, which find surface realization in the grammatical constructions of the various languages of the world. The idea was to marshal the categories that every analyst-regardless of theoretical bent-had to take account of as cognitive entities. The volume began with a couple of chapters on what was then popularly known as "case grammar," then expanded upward and downward to include other notional categories on other levels. Chapters on dis course, monologue, and dialogue were buried in the center of the volume. In the 1983 volume, the chapters on monologue and dialogue discourse were moved to the fore of the book and the chapters on case grammar were made less prominent; the volume was then renamed The Grammar of Discourse. The current revision features more clearly than its predecessors the intersection of discourse and pragmatic concerns with grammatical structures on various levels. It retains and expands much of the former material but includes new material reflecting current advances in such topics as salience clines for discourse, rhetorical relations, paragraph structures, transitivity, ergativity, agency hierarchy, and word order typologies.




Discourse Phenomena in Typological Perspective


Book Description

This book aims at investigating discourse phenomena (i.e., linguistic elements and constructions that help to manage the organization, flow, and outcome of communication) from a typological and cross-linguistic perspective. Although it is a well-established idea in functional-typological approaches that grammar is shaped by discourse use, systematic typological cross-linguistic investigations on discourse phenomena are relatively rare. This volume aims at bridging this gap, by integrating different linguistic subfields, such as discourse analysis, pragmatics, and typology. The contributions, both theoretically and empirically oriented, focus on a broad variety of discourse phenomena (ranging from discourse markers to discourse function of grammatical markers, to strategies that manage the discourse and information flow) while adopting a typological perspective and considering typologically distant languages.




The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction


Book Description

This edited volume showcases new work on discourse analysis by big names in the field and promising early-career researchers. Arising from the latest in the series of IWoDA workshops in Santiago de Compostela, it provides novel insights into both the explicit and the implicit characteristics of discourse as used in verbal interaction. Discourse markers, as their name indicates, are among the explicit signals of coherence, while discourse relations may be either explicit or implicit. Similarly, the discourse used for purposes of evaluation, stance-taking and interpersonal engagement is either overt or covert, as is also true of the expression of emotions and empathy. This, in general terms, is the challenging terrain into which the contributors to this volume have ventured. The book combines theoretical issues with a practical orientation, comparing languages, analysing different registers, studying the openings of Skype conversations, and much more besides; it will prove highly relevant for postgraduate and advanced practitioners of discourse analysis, interaction studies, semantics and pragmatics.




Discourse Analysis


Book Description

A clear and lively introduction to current trends in the theory, method and tools of discourse studies, this book is a valuable guide for students and teachers of linguistics as well as for those with an interest in the linguistic methods of analysing discourse (media, rhetoric and stylistics, pragmatics, communication studies scholars etc).* Comprehensive, accessible, state-of-the-art textbook * Close analyses of a wide range of narrative and non-narrative texts, both spoken and written* Emphasis on practical text analysis: includes guided activities for self-study or use in a classroom* Suggestions for further reading in each chapter.This revised second edition registers key changes in a rapidly expanding area and thoroughly updates suggestions for further reading and the bibliography.




A Concise Introduction to Logic


Book Description




Discourse and Technology


Book Description

The overarching theme of Discourse and Technology is cutting-edge in the field of linguistics: multimodal discourse. This volume opens up a discussion among discourse analysts and others in linguistics and related fields about the two-fold impact of new communication technologies: The impact on how discourse data is collected, transcribed, and analyzed—and the impact that these technologies are having on social interaction and discourse. As inexpensive tape recorders allowed the field to move beyond text, written or printed language, to capture talk—discourse as spoken language—the information explosion (including cell phones, video recorders, Internet chat rooms, online journals, and the like) has moved those in the field to recognize that all discourse is, in various ways, "multimodal," constructed through speech and gesture, as well as through typography, layout, and the materials employed in the making of texts. The contributors have responded to the expanding scope of discourse analysis by asking five key questions: Why should we study discourse and technology and multimodal discourse analysis? What is the role of the World Wide Web in discourse analysis? How does one analyze multimodal discourse in studies of social actions and interactions? How does one analyze multimodal discourse in educational social interactions? and, How does one use multimodal discourse analyses in the workplace? The vitality of these explorations opens windows onto even newer horizons of discourse and discourse analysis.




Analyzing Everyday Texts


Book Description

In Analyzing Everyday Texts, author Glenn F. Stillar provides a comprehensive and well-illustrated framework for the analysis of everyday texts by outlining and integrating three different perspectives: discoursal, rhetorical, and social. First, the tools of each perspective are carefully explicated in chapters on the resources of discoursal, rhetorical, and social theory. These three perspectives are then brought together in extensive analyses of various everyday texts. Finally, the book reflects on the principles and consequences of conducting theoretically informed critical textual analysis. For researchers analyzing everyday texts and for scholars teaching theories and methods of analysis, Analyzing Everyday Texts will be an invaluable addition to the current literature.




Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse


Book Description

Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse presents a novel framework and analysis of the ways we refer to abstract objects in natural language discourse. The book begins with a typology of abstract objects and related entities like eventualities. After an introduction to `bottom up, compositional' discourse representation theory (DRT) and to previous work on abstract objects in DRT (notably work on the semantics of the attitudes), the book turns to a semantic analysis of eventuality and abstract object denoting nominals in English. The book then substantially revises and extends the dynamic semantic framework of DRT to develop an analysis of anaphoric reference to abstract objects and eventualities that exploits discourse structure and the discourse relations that obtain between elements of the structure. A dynamic, semantically based theory of discourse structure (SDRT) is proposed, along with many illustrative examples. Two further chapters then provide the analysis of anaphoric reference to propositions VP ellipsis. The abstract entity anaphoric antecedents are elements of the discourse structures that SDRT develops. The final chapter discusses some logical and philosophical difficulties for a semantic analysis of reference to abstract objects. For semanticists, philosophers of language, computer scientists interested in natural language applications and discourse, philosophical logicians, graduate students in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and artificial intelligence.