This book investigates the semantics and pragmatics of a representative sample of parenthetical constructions. Todor Koev argues that these constructions fall into two major classes: pure and impure. Pure parentheticals comment on some part of the descriptive content of the root sentence but are otherwise relatively independent of it. Impure parentheticals modify components of the illocutionary force and affect the felicity or the truth of the root sentence. The book studies parentheticals from three theoretical viewpoints: illocutionary effects, scopal properties, and discourse status. It establishes and explicates the notion of parenthetical meaning in a formally precise and predictive dynamic-semantic model. As a result, parentheticality is brought to bear on linguistic phenomena such as entailment and presupposition, binding and anaphora, evidentiality and modality, illocutionary force, and polarity.

A collection of papers on discourse markers in different languages, presented at the fifth conference of the International Pragmatics Association, Me×ico, in the summer of 1996.

A state-of-the-art overview of English historical pragmatics, covering topics such as speech representation, politeness, and address terms.

This volume represents a timely collective review and assessment of what it is we do when we do English historical pragmatics or historical discourse analysis. The context for the volume is a critical assessment of the assumptions and practices defining the body of research conducted on the history of the English language from the perspective of historical pragmatics, broadly construed. The aim of the volume is to engage with matters of approach and method from different perspectives; accordingly, the contributions offer insights into earlier communicative practices, registers, and linguistic functions as gleaned from historical discourse. The essays are grouped according to their orientations within the scope of the study of language and meaning in historical texts, both literary and non-literary. The structure of the volume thus represents a critical convergence of traditions of reading texts and analyzing discourse and this in turn exposes key questions about the methods and the outcomes of such readings or analyses. The volume contributes to the growing maturity of historical pragmatic research approaches as it exemplifies and extends the range of approaches and methods that dominate the research enterprise. Contributors are prominent international scholars in the fields of linguistics, literature, and philology: Dawn Archer, Birte Bös, Laurel Brinton, Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti, James Fitzmaurice, Susan Fitzmaurice, Monika Fludernik, Andreas Jucker, Thomas Kohnen, Ursula Lenker, Lynne Magnusson, and Irma Taavitsainen.

This book addresses a general phenomenon in the European languages: verb second. The articles provide a comprehensive survey of synchronic vs. diachronic developments in the Germanic and Romance languages. New theoretical insights into the interaction of the properties of verbal mood and syntactic structure building lead to hypotheses about the mutual influence of these systems. The diachronic change in the syntax together with changes in the inflectional system show the interdependence between the syntactic and the inflectional component. The fact that the subjunctive can license verb second in dependent clauses reveals further dependencies between these subsystems of grammar. "Fronting finiteness" furthermore constitutes an instance of a main clause phenomenon. Whether "assertion" or "at-issueness" are encoded through this grammatical process will be a matter in the debates discussed in the book. Moreover, information structure appears to be directly related to the fronting of other constituents in front of the finite verb. Questions concerning the interrelations between these various subcomponents of the grammatical system are investigated.

This manual is intended to fill a gap in the area of Romance studies. There is no introduction available so far that broadly covers the field of Catalan linguistics, neither in Catalan nor in any other language. The work deals with the language spoken in Catalonia and Andorra, the Balearic Islands, the region of Valencia, Northern Catalonia and the town of l'Alguer in Sardinia. Besides introducing the ideologies of language and nation and the history of Catalan linguistics, the manual is divided into separate parts embracing the description – grammar, lexicon, variation and varieties – and the history of the language since the early medieval period to the present day. It also covers its current social and political situation in the new local and global contexts. The main emphasis is placed on modern Catalan. The manual is designed as a companion for students of Catalan, while also introducing specialists of other languages into this field, in particular scholars of Romance languages.