Previous works on Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics have either been dominantly focused on theory or on practice without much balance and attention to both theory and analysis. The present volume seeks to strike a balance between the two closely related disciplines on the one hand, and between the study of theory in the two disciplines and on issues of methodology and application in specific areas of enquiry on the other. The book seeks to provide a cross-sectional view of scholarship in these areas, specifically from the perspective of how the intersection of theory and practice enables Nigerian scholars of Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics to understand and analyse texts that have pan-Nigerian peculiarities.

Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

This Handbook brings together major aspects of Japanese linguistics, presenting overviews, current concerns and future directions of each topic. The areas included are phonology, syntax, semantics, morphology, language acquisition, sentence processing, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. This Handbook is for those who are familiar with the topic at the basic level and wish to investigate it in more detail, but it also can be used as a language-specific and typological reference. Written by leading scholars in the field Provides a unique and authoritative survey of Japanese linguistics Each chapter presents an overview of the topic and discusses current concerns and future directions

Everyday language use overflows with discourse-pragmatic features. Their frequency, form and function can vary greatly across social groups and change dramatically over time. And yet these features have not figured prominently in studies of language variation and change. The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation demonstrates the theoretical insights that can be gained into both the structure of synchronic language variation and the interactional mechanisms creating it by subjecting discourse-pragmatic features to systematic variationist analysis. Introducing an innovative methodology that combines principles of variationist linguistics, grammaticalisation studies and conversation analysis, it explores patterns of variation in the formal encoding of I DON’T KNOW, I DON’T THINK and negative polarity tags in a north-east England interview corpus. Speakers strategically exploit the formal variability of these constructions to signal subtle meaning differences and to index social identities closely linked to the variables’ and their variants’ functional compartmentalisation in the variety. The methodology, results and implications of this study will be of great interest to scholars working throughout variationist sociolinguistics, grammaticalisation and discourse analysis.

Pragmatics and Discourse, 2nd edition: has been revised and reorganised to place more emphasis on pragmatics covers the core areas of the subject: context and co-text, Speech Act Theory, Conversation Analysis, Exchange Structure, Interactional Sociolinguistics, the Cooperative Principle, Politeness Theory and extends to more applied areas: Corpus Linguistics & Communities of Practice, and Intercultural Pragmatics, Interlanguage Pragmatics & language learning draws on a wealth of texts: from Bend it Like Beckham and The Motorcycle Diaries to political speeches, newspaper extracts and blogs. provides classic readings from the key names in the discipline, from Sperber and Wilson to Fairclough, Wodak and Gumperz is accompanied by a supporting website Key features of the new edition include: two new strands on Corpora & Communities and Culture & Language Learning; the merging of two strands on Context and Co-text; new material from speaker-based cognitive linguistics; updated references; and fresh examples and exercises. Written by an experienced teacher and author, this accessible textbook is an essential resource for all students of English language and linguistics.

This volume will give readers insight into how genres are characterised by the patterns of frequency and distribution of linguistic features across a number of European languages. The material presented in this book will also stimulate further corpus-based contrastive research including more languages, more genres and different types of corpora. This is the first special issue of the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, a publication that addresses the interface between the two disciplines and offers a platform to scholars who combine both methodologies to present rigorous and interdisciplinary findings about language in real use. Corpus linguistics and Pragmatics have traditionally represented two paths of scientific thought, parallel but often mutually exclusive and excluding. Corpus Linguistics can offer a meticulous methodology based on mathematics and statistics, while Pragmatics is characterized by its effort in the interpretation of intended meaning in real language.