LINGUIST List 7.857

Sun Jun 9 1996

Books: Text & Discourse, Functional & Systemic Ling

Editor for this issue: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselinemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Paul Peranteau, New books - Text & Discourse, Functional & Systemic Ling

New Books from John Benjamins

TEXT AND DISCOURSE

Discourse and Meaning.
Papers in honor of Eva Hajicova.
BARBARA PARTEE and PETR SGALL (eds.)

A collection of papers in honor of Eva Hajicova, who represents the
continuation of the Prague School tradition in the methodological
context of formal and computational linguistics. Her broadly
acknowledged contribution to syntax, topic-focus studies, discourse
analysis and natural language processing is reflected in the papers by
30 authors, divided in five sections (Discourse, Meaning, Focus,
Translation, Structure).Contributions by: Andrzej Boguslawski,
Wolfgang U. Dressler, Jan Firbas, Jan Horeck=FD, Akira Ikeya, Milka
Ivic, Maghi King, Eva Koktova, Oldrich Leska, Philip Luelsdorff, Pavel
Materna, James McCawley, Makoto Nagao, Elena Paducheva, Jarmila
Panevova, Barbara H. Partee, Jaroslav Peregrin, Rudolf Razicka, Anna
Sagvall Hein, Helmut Schnelle, Petr Sgall, Bengt Sigurd, Marie
Tesitelova, Bozena Thompson, Olga Tomic, Charles Townsend,
E.M. Uhlenbeck, Josef Vachek, Yorick Wilks, Olga Yokoyama.xiv, 430 pp.

US & Canada:Hb: 1 55619 499 4 US$100.00
Rest of World: 90 272 2146 4 Hfl.180,00

***

Status and Power in Verbal Interaction.
A study of discourse in a close-knit social network.
JULIE DIAMOND

Status and Power in Verbal Interaction is a sociolinguistic study of
conversation in a social context. Using an ethnographic methodology
and a network analysis of the social roles and relationships in a
particular language community, the book explores how speakers
negotiate status, relationship, and ultimately contest power through
discourse. Of chief concern to the study is how speakers manage to
negotiate relationship roles -- which here consists of institutional
status as well as the more variable social standing -- using
conversation. Discourse is seen to be not only what people say, but
how they say it -- how speakers take the floor, bring a new topic to
the floor, interrupt each other, and become a resource person in a
conversation. The study revolves around the idea that power, while
intricately tied to social standing and institutional status, is more
than the sum of ones' institutional standing, age, education, race and
gender. Though these factors convey rank, conversants nonetheless use
discourse to jockey for position and contest their relational role
vis-a-vis their discourse partners. While institutional standing may
be more or less fixed, power of relational roles fluctuates greatly
because, as the study shows, power is accorded through a process of
ratifying the positive self-image of a speaker. Thus, one's standing
in a group is a community negotiation. By investigating power in
community at a micro-level of analysis, this study adds a new
dimension to existing understandings of power.

Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, 40 viii, 184 pp. + index
US & Canada:HB: 1 55619 801 9 US$55.00
Rest of World: 90 272 5052 9 Hfl.95,00


Academic Writing.
Intercultural and textual issues.
EIJA VENTOLA and ANNO MAURANEN (eds.)

Writing is crucial to the academic world. It is the main mode of
communication among scientists and scholars and also a means for
students for obtaining their degrees. The papers in this volume
highlight the intercultural, generic and textual complexities of
academic writing. Comparisons are made between various traditions of
academic writing in different cultures and contexts and the studies
combine linguistic analyses with analyses of the social settings in
which academic writing takes place and is acquired. The common
denominator for the papers is writing in English and attention is
given to native-English writers' and non-native writers' problems in
different disciplines. The articles in the book introduce a variety of
methodological approaches for analyses and search for better teaching
methods and ways of Improving the syllabi of writing curricula. The
book as a whole illustrates how linguists strive for new research
methods and practical applications in applied linguistics.

Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, 41 xiv, 258 pp.
US & Canada:Hb: 1 55619 802 7 US$69.00
Rest of World: 90 272 5053 7 Hfl.120,00

***

Modality in Grammar and Discourse
JOAN BYBEE and SUZANNE FLEISCHMAN (eds.)

This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers that look into
the expression of modality in the grammars of natural languages, with
an emphasis on its manifestations in naturally occurring
discourse. Though the individual contributions reflect a diversity of
languages, of synchronic and diachronic foci, and of theoretical
orientations=97all within the broad domain of functional linguistics
=97they nonetheless converge around a number of key issues: the
relationship between 'mood' and 'modality'; the delineation of modal
categories and their nomenclature; the grounding of modality in
interactive discourse; the elusive category 'irrealis'; and the
relationship of modal notions and categories to other categories of
grammar.Contributions by: Edith Bavin; Joan Bybee; Wallace Chafe;
Soonja Choi; Jennifer Coates; Suzanne Fleischman; Zygmunt Frajzyngier;
Jiansheng Guo; John Haiman; Bernd Heine; Franticek Lichtenberk;
Patricia Lunn; Marianne Mithun; John Myhill; Frank Palmer; Suzanne
Romaine; Carmen Silva-Corvalan; Laura Smith; Phyllis and Sherman
Wilcox.

Typological Studies in Language, 32 vii, 552 pp.
US & Canada:HB: 1 55619 639 3 US$125.00/Pb: 1 55619 640 7 US$37.00
Rest of World:HB: 90 272 2878 7 Hfl.215,00/Pb: 90 272 2877 9 
 Hfl.55,00

***

Word Order in Discourse
PAMELA DOWNING and MICHAEL NOONAN (eds.)
(University of Wisconsin Milwaukee)

This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the
problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has
often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon, a
matter of selecting randomly one set of possible orders generated by
the grammar. However, as the papers in this collection show, word
order variation is not random, but rather is governed by principles
which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to
all languages. The papers in this volume discuss word order variation
in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of
perspectives, including experimental and quantitative, text-based
studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which
order is 'basic' among the alternatives.Contributions by: Ron Cowan;
Susanna Cumming; Michael Darnell; Pamela Downing; Matthew Dryer; Bruce
Harold; Susan Herring & John Paolillo; Alan Hyun-Oak Kim; Kyu-Hyun
Kim; Randy LaPolla; Robert Longacre; Silvia Luraghi; Marianne Mithun;
Francisco Ocampo; Doris Payne; Ronald Schaefer; Russell Tomlin; Maura
Velasquez-Casfillo. 

Typological Studies in Language, 30 ix, 595 pp.
US & Canada:Hb: 1 55619 424 2 US$135.00/Pb: 1 55619 636 9 US$37.95
Rest of World:HB: 90 272 2921 x Hfl.250,00/Pb: 90 272 2922 8 
 Hfl.75,00

***

Units in Mandarin Discourse and Grammar
HONGYIN TAO (National University of Singapore)

This book provides a new way of studying grammar. The basic thrust of
the book is to investigate grammar based on a prosodic unit, the
intonation unit (IU), in spontaneous speech. The author challenges the
dominant practice in the study of syntax, which has been to focus on
the unit of the artificially constructed sentence. The book shows that
some basic notions developed from sentence-level data often do not
account well for speech data. For example, in many versions of
syntactic theory, the basic syntactic structure of any sentence is
assumed to comprise both an NP and a VP (with variations in
terminology). However the author shows that a Mandarin sentence in
spoken discourse can consist of a lone NP or a transitive verbal
expression without any explicit argument (which is not due to
anaphora). Although the book concerns Mandarin discourse and grammar,
it will be of interest to students of a wide range of fields,
including discourse analysis, syntax, conversation analysis, prosodic
studies, and typological studies.

Studies in Discourse and Grammar. 5 xvi 226 pp.
U S & Canada:Hb: 1 55619 371 8 US$79.00
Rest of World: 90 272 2615 6 Hfl.135,00


Studies in Stemmatology

PIETER VAN REENEN and MARGOT VAN MULKEN (eds.) with the assistance of
Janet Dyk

Stemmatology, the study of the relations between texts, is one of the
two sciences basic to the study of older languages. The other is the
study of the linguistic variation found within and between texts,
concerning not only phonology and syntax, but also genre and the
location in time and space of the language of these texts. Together
the two are fundamental to text history.Since the 1970s, new
initiatives have been taken to renew interest in Stemmatology,
especially with the use of computers, and this volume can be seen as a
working atelier, in which several workers exhibit the state of the
art.

xvi, 311US & Canada:Hb: 155 619 507 9 US$79.00Rest of World: 90 272
2153 7 Hfl.140,00



FUNCTIONAL & SYSTEMIC LINGUISTICS

On Subject and Theme.
A discourse functional perspective.
Ruqaiya HASAN, and Peter H. FRIES (eds)

The ten papers in this volume focus on Subject and Theme. Theme began
its life as a semantic notion in the work of Vilem Mathesius, while
Subject has traditionally been seen as just a syntactic entity. More
recently two related perspectives on these concepts have attracted
linguists' attention: the formal criteria for their recognition and
the relations between the two concepts. Using the systemic functional
model as their point of departure, the papers in the present volume
consider the two notions in a wider context by relating them to the
interpersonal and textual metafunctions of language. By contrast with
the current linguistic approaches, the primary focus here is neither
simply on formal recognition criteria nor on the relation of these
elements to each other; instead, the notions of Subject and Theme are
examined from the point of view of their function in the economy of
discourse, with studies of their significance in English and French,
as well as in a range of non-Indo-European languages. Definitions of
the concepts are offered on the basis of their discourse functions,
which are also important in selecting the formal recognition criteria
and in understanding their mutually supportive role vis a vis each
other.Most of the papers in the volume are a selection from
presentations made at the 19th International Systemic Functional
Congress at Macquarie University.Contributions by: Maurice Boxwell;
Alice Caffarel; Carmel Cloran; Michael Cummings; Fang Yan, Edward
McDonald & Cheng Musheng; Peter Fries; Motoko Hori; William McGregor;
Louise Ravelli; Paul Thibault.

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, No. 118 xii, 414 pp.
US & Canada: Hb 1 55619 572 9 US$95.00
Rest of World: 90 272 3621 6 Hfl. 160,00



Paul Peranteau (paulbenjamins.com)
John Benjamins searchable ONLINE catalogue:
*via WWW -- gopher://Benjamins.titlenet.com:6400
*via gopher -- gopher Benjamins.titlenet.com 6400