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Description:
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The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on
the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide
interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other
volumes select philosophical, cognitive, cultural, social, variational,
interactional, or discursive points of view, this fifth volume looks at the
field of linguistic pragmatics from a primarily grammatical angle. That is,
it asks in which particular sense a variety of older and more recent
functional (rather than generative) models of grammar relate to the study
of language in use: how this affects their general outlook on language
structure, whether issues of language use inform the very makeup of these
models or are merely included as possible research themes, and how far the
actual integration of pragmatics ultimately goes (is it a module/layer or
is the model truly 'usage-based'?). Each of the authors presenting these
models has taken systematic care to highlight the relevant problems and
focus on the implications of considering pragmatic phenomena from the point
of view of grammar. Furthermore, a limited number of chapters deal with
traditional topics in the grammatical literature, and specifically those
which are called pragmatic because they either are not strictly concerned
with truth (semantics), or receive their (truth) value only from an
interaction with context. In the introduction, these theories and topics
are set up against the historical background of a gradually changing
attitude, on the part of grammarians, towards questions of linguistic
knowledge and behavior, and the role of learning in their relationship.
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