This book investigates Chinese comprehension and treatment of the relationship between language and reality. The work examines ancient Chinese philosophy through the pair of concepts known as ming-shi. By analyzing the pre-Qin thinkers’ discourse on ming and shi, the work explores how Chinese philosophers dealt with issues not only in language but also in ontology, epistemology, ethics, axiology, and logic. Through this discourse analysis, readers are invited to rethink the relationship of language to thought and behavior.
Over the past four decades, discourse coherence has been studied from linguistic, psycholinguistic, computational, and applied perspectives. This volume identifies current issues and under-researched topics in the pragmatics of discourse coherence. Nine studies from various disciplines address the realization and signalling of coherence relations in various genres and languages, their acquisition and use by first- and second-language learners and university students, the relationship between coherence relations and genre-specific discourse structure, and extensions of the coherence paradigm to multimodal discourse and visual art.
This volume gathers together for the first time contributions from the most relevant approaches in discourse segmentation developed in the last fifteen years in Romance languages. All these approaches share the assumption that discourses (either oral or written) can be fully divided into units and subunits: just like sentences are fully analyzed with the help of Syntax, discourse can be fully analyzed with the help of Pragmatics. In this sense, the approaches in this volume represent a step forward with respect to the issues in segmentation addressed by Conversational Analysis or by Discourse Analysis.
Corpus linguistics is often regarded as a methodology in its own right, but little attention has been given to the theoretical perspectives from which the subject can be approached. The present book contributes to filling this gap. Bringing together original contributions by internationally renowned authors, the chapters include coverage of the lexical priming theory, parole-linguistics, a four-part model of language system and language use, and the concept of local textual functions. The theoretical arguments are illustrated and complemented by case studies using data from large corpora such as the BNC, smaller purpose-built corpora, and Google searches.
Discourse Theory and Critical Media Politics offers a systematic examination of the relationship between post-Marxist discourse theory and critical media politics.
