Pichler The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation

Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-90-272-7218-8
Verlag: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 13, 298 Seiten

Reihe: Studies in Language Variation

Everyday language use overflows with discourse-pragmatic features. Their frequency, form and function can vary greatly across social groups and change dramatically over time. And yet these features have not figured prominently in studies of language variation and change. The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation demonstrates the theoretical insights that can be gained into both the structure of synchronic language variation and the interactional mechanisms creating it by subjecting discourse-pragmatic features to systematic variationist analysis. Introducing an innovative methodology that combines principles of variationist linguistics, grammaticalisation studies and conversation analysis, it explores patterns of variation in the formal encoding of I DON’T KNOW, I DON’T THINK and negative polarity tags in a north-east England interview corpus. Speakers strategically exploit the formal variability of these constructions to signal subtle meaning differences and to index social identities closely linked to the variables’ and their variants’ functional compartmentalisation in the variety. The methodology, results and implications of this study will be of great interest to scholars working throughout variationist sociolinguistics, grammaticalisation and discourse analysis.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pichler, Heike

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Dialektologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Soziolinguistik
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Textlinguistik, Diskursanalyse, Stilistik
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Einzelne Sprachen & Sprachfamilien
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of figures
List of tables
List of abbreviations and typographical conventions
Key to transcription conventions
Glossary of dialect words
Acknowledgements
Part I
1. Introduction
2. Data, methodology and theoretical framework
3. The BwE verb negation system
Part II
4. The construction i don’t know
5. The construction i don’t think
6. Negative polarity question tags (neg-tags)
Part III
7. Discussion & conclusion
8. Challenges for the future
References
Appendices
Index