LINGUIST List 13.3062

Fri Nov 22 2002

Qs: Text Analysis, The 'Utterance'

Editor for this issue: Renee Galvis <reneelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Monika Bednarek, text analysis: evaluative language in the press
2. Kevin Watson, The utterance as a phonological domain

Dear linguists,



I'm writing my Ph.D. thesis on evaluative language in the British
(quality and popular) press. Evaluative language includes epistemic,
deontic and emotive modality (i.e. modality and affect in Hunston and
Thompson's 2000 sense), so I am faced with a wealth of possibly
relevant literature.

I was wondering whether you could help me to locate the most important
literature about

- the most recent developments in the analysis of the language of the
news

- evaluative language (modality and affect)

- a sum-up of the most important arguments in favour of/against
Critical Discourse Analysis

- differences between the language of the ''tabloids'' and
''broadsheets''



I am NOT looking for work done on emotive langauge in the field of
cognitive linguistics (i.e. concerning the
categorisation/lexicalisation of emotions, Wierzbicka's semantic
primitives etc), rather, I am interested in evaluative language in
connection with pragmatics/text linguistics.

Thank you very much for your help. I will post a summary as soon as
possible.



References:

Hunston, S. and G. Thompson 2000. Evaluation in Text. Oxford: OUP. 

Subject-Language: English; Code: ENG 

Hello,

I'm currently working on my PhD thesis, on lenition in the variety of
English spoken in Liverpool, UK. One particularly interesting feature
of the variety is that /t/ may be realised as [h], under certainly
tight constrained conditions. One of these conditions is that /t/
must be word-final, and pre-pausal (e.g. what?[h], but[h]?). The
issue of pre-pausality has led me to then notion of
utterance-finality, and to definitions of 'utterance' in terms of the
prosodic hierarchy (particularly the interaction between utterance
boundaries and pauses).

I was wondering if anyone knows of other phonological process (not
specifically lenition process, although that would be nice!) which
seem to be conditioned by the utterance, (or by the pause). Or if
there is any discussion in the literature of the existence of the
'utterance' as a domain at all, and of its place in the prosodic
heirarchy? I am aware of the discussion in Nespor and Vogel 1986, and
in the Proceedings of LP 98 (Fujimura et. al.), but any further
sources of information would be very useful. I will post a summary to
the list if there is sufficient response.

Thanks,
Kevin Watson.
Edge Hill College of Higher Education.