Typological Discourse Analysis

This book gives the first account of a field of fast increasing importance in both theoretical and descriptive linguistics. The aim of Typological Discourse Analysis is to establish a universally valid framework for the objective description of linguistic function and so make it possible to compare directly the functions of constructions in different languages. For linguists working on grammars of specific languages this book provides both methodological tools for objective description and a wealth of ideas about functional parameters which have been found to be significant in the languages of the world. For linguists interested in language typology, this book gives data from a wide variety of languages which allow for a more direct cross-linguistic comparison of function than is possible from consulting reference grammars alone. For qualitative discourse analysts, this book describes in basic terms some quantitative methods of linguistic analysis, and includes discussion of word order and voice alternations, grammaticalization, aspect, topic and focus marking, clause-chaining and noun incorporation.

This volume combines papers selected for their affinity with work on discourse analysis and language typology. The methodological platform is the authors' conviction that all linguistic work needs to be empirical in the sense that (1) generalizations are to be made on the basis of spoken texts in larger contexts, (2) generalizations are correct only as long as pertinent linguistic material does not contradict them, and (3) that linguistic categories and rules are of a temporal nature. In this sense, the contributions represent 'functional typological' comparison, often of languages not frequently investigated. The papers are arranged in 5 groups: Transitivity and voice; Clausal modality; Typology and discourse categories; Language and Culture; Functionality.

This book aims at investigating discourse phenomena (i.e., linguistic elements and constructions that help to manage the organization, flow, and outcome of communication) from a typological and cross-linguistic perspective. Although it is a well-established idea in functional-typological approaches that grammar is shaped by discourse use, systematic typological cross-linguistic investigations on discourse phenomena are relatively rare. This volume aims at bridging this gap, by integrating different linguistic subfields, such as discourse analysis, pragmatics, and typology. The contributions, both theoretically and empirically oriented, focus on a broad variety of discourse phenomena (ranging from discourse markers to discourse function of grammatical markers, to strategies that manage the discourse and information flow) while adopting a typological perspective and considering typologically distant languages.

Holistic Discourse Analysis Robert E. Longacre and Shin Ja J. Hwang The central idea of this volume is the simple insistence that the structure of a part of a discourse (or text) needs to be explained in light of the structure of the whole. This thesis needs to be repeated anew to every generation of students of linguistics as a warning against analytic nearsightedness-the fixation on particular parts of a text without regard to the whole. Holistic discourse analysis is not a plea to abandon the analysis of lower levels of grammar but to enrich the study of them by putting them in broader perspective. The book includes chapters addressing subjects like discourse analysis and its purpose, text typology, and constituent-based charting with an analysis of a story in terms of peak and profile. It discusses functions of different verb types and their tense/aspect/modality, of noun phrases, and of clause combining in discourse. It also includes a chapter with a layman's introduction to discourse analysis which addresses and illustrates its crucial concerns, and another discusses ways to represent combinations of sentences in a paragraph. The last three chapters deal with non-narrative discourses: procedural, hortatory, and expository. This book offers itself both as a classroom text and a field manual for discourse analysis. It can also serve as an introduction to the more theoretically oriented volume, Longacre's The Grammar of Discourse (1996). Robert Longacre joined the Summer Institute of Linguistics in 1946. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He and his wife Gwen translated the New Testament into Trique, a Mexican Otomanguean language. From 1972 to 1991 he taught linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington and also served as a linguistic consultant for SIL. At the present time, he is researching the discourse structure of biblical Hebrew and also the theory and practice of discourse analysis in general. Shin Ja Hwang, originally from Korea, was a student of Robert Longacre in her M.A. and Ph.D. studies and has worked with him as a colleague, sometimes team-teaching, co-authoring articles, and serving on thesis and dissertation committees together. She has taught graduate courses on discourse analysis, functional grammar, language universals and typology, and sociolinguistics at Texas SIL, the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, and the University of Texas at Arlington.

This is the first full study of how people refer to entities in natural discourse. It contributes to the understanding of both linguistic diversity and the cognitive underpinnings of language and it provides a framework for further research in both fields. Andrej Kibrik focuses on the way specific entities are mentioned in natural discourse, during which about every third word usually depends on referential choice. He considers reference as an overt representation of underlying cognitive processes and combines a theoretically-oriented cognitive approach with empirically-based cross-linguistic analysis. He begins by introducing the cognitive approach to discourse analysis and by examining the relationship between discourse studies and linguistic typology. He discusses reference as a linguistic phenomenon, in connection with the traditional notions of deixis, anaphora, givenness, and topicality, and describes the way his theoretical approach is centered on notions of referent activation in working memory. He argues that the speaker is responsible for the shape of discourse and that referential expressions should be understood as choices made by speakers rather than as puzzles to be solved by addressees. Kibrik examines the cross-linguistic aspects of reference and the typology of referential devices, including referring expressions per se, such as free and bound pronouns, and referential aids that help to tell apart the concurrently activated entities. This discussion is based on the data from about 200 languages from around the world. He then proposes a comprehensive model of referential choice, in which he draws on concepts from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, and applies this to Russian and English. He also draws together his empirical analyses in order to examine what light his analysis of discourse can shed on the way information is processed in working memory. In the final part of the book Andrej Kibrik offers a wider perspective, including deixis, referential aspects of gesticulation and signed languages. This pioneering work will interest linguists and cognitive scientists interested in discourse, reference, typology, and the operations of working memory in linguistic communication.

In this book, Cinque takes a generative perspective on typological questions relating to word order and to the syntax of relative clauses. In particular, Cinque looks at: the position of the Head vis à vis the relative clause in relation to the position of the verb vis à vis his object; a general cross-linguistic analysis of correlatives; the need to distinguish a sentence-grammar, from a discourse-grammar, type of non-restrictives (with languages differing as to whether they possess both, one, the other, or neither); a selective type of extraction from relative clauses; and a tentative sketch of a more ample work in progress on a unified analysis of externally headed, internally headed, and headless relative clauses.

Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This collection of new typological and case studies is the first book-length investigation of semantically aligned languages for three decades. Leading international typologists explore thedifferences and commonalities of languages with semantic alignment systems and compare the structure of these languages to languages without them. They look at how such systems arise or disappear and provide areal overviews of Eurasia, the Americas, and the south-west Pacific, the areas wheresemantically aligned languages are concentrated. This book will interest typological and historical linguists at graduate level and above.

The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered, traditionally, from two distinct drawbacks. First, it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second, quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major departure from past practices, without rejecting both their intuitive appeal and the many good results yielded by them. First, “topic” and “topicality” are re-analyzed as a scalar property, rather than as an either/or discrete prime. Second, the graded property of “topicality” is firmly connected with sensible cognitive notions culled from gestalt psychology, such as “predictability” or “continuity”. Third, we develop and utilize precise measures and quantified methods by which the property of “topicality” of clausal arguments can be studied in connected discourse, and thus be properly hinged in its rightful context, that of topic identification, maintenance and recoverability in discourse. Fourth, we show that many grammatical phenomena which used to be studied by linguists in isolation, all partake in one functional domain of grammar, that of topic identification. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of this new approach to the study of “topic” and “topicality” by applying the same text-based quantifying method to a number of typologically-diverse languages, in studying actual texts. Languages studied here are: Written and spoken English, spoken Spanish, Biblical Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa, Japanese, Chamorro and Ute.

This volume presents revised versions of papers originally presented at the Colloquium in Linguistic Typology, held in Moscow in 1985. The organizers and participants of the colloquium considered it of great importance to come to terms on primary principles, in order to be able to build on previous research and to determine the place of typology in linguistics. The papers in this volume reflect that goal.

An overview of the major grammatical categories and constructions in the world's languages, Introduction to Typologyprovides a thorough and comprehensive coverage of typology in the areas of morphology and syntax, while underscoring the similarities and differences that underlie the vast array of human languages. Pedagogically sound, this introductory text includes a glossary and highlights and defines each new term as it appears. Each chapter concludes with a summary of new terminology and concepts as well as a list of additional, related readings. Introduction to Typology assumes neither prior knowledge of typology nor extensive background in linguistics, making it useful as a primary or supplementary text for a variety of courses, particularly those dealing with grammatical structure and linguistic universals.