This book explores the discourse pragmatics of reportive evidentiality in Macedonian, Japanese and English through an empirical study of evidential strategies in narrative retelling. The patterns of evidential use (and non-use) found in these languages are attributed to contextual, cultural and grammatical factors that motivate the adoption of an 'epistemological stance' - a concept that owes much to recent trends in Cognitive Linguistics. The patterns of evidential strategies found in the three languages provide a fine illustration of the balancing act between speakers' expressions of their own subjectivity, their motivations to tell a coherent and exciting story, and their motivations to be faithful retellers of someone elses' story. These pressures are further complicated by the grammatical and pragmatic conventions that are particular to each language. Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance: narrative retelling will appeal to those interested in evidentiality, grammar and pragmatics, cross-linguistics discourse analysis, linguistic subjectivity and narrative.

Stories told within institutions play a powerful role, helping to define not only the institution itself, but also its individual members. How do institutions use stories? How do those stories both preserve the past and shape the future? To what extent does narrative construct both collective and individual identity? Charlotte Linde's unique and far-reaching study addresses these questions by looking at the interplay of narratives, memory, and identity in a large insurance company. Her detailed ethnography looks at the role of stories within the institution and how they are employed by its members in both private and group settings. Analyzing the re-telling of certain key stories, she shows how the formation of "core" stories and their multiple re-tellings and modifications provide a means of formulating and promoting a cohesive group identity - which in turn shapes the stories and identities of the individuals within the collective. Linde also looks at silences, and how stories not told also convey their version of the past. Working the Past shows how stories that might otherwise be seen as part of mundane daily life are in fact utterly essential to the formation and maintenance of individual and group identity. Her original research will appeal to those interested in narrative studies, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and institutional memory.

This important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. There has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based on data taken out of context. This book is a detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy.

Using the intriguing stories and words of a Quechua-speaking woman named Luisa Cadena from the Pastaza Province of Ecuador, Janis B. Nuckolls reveals a complex language system in which ideophony, dialogue, and perspective are all at the core of cultural and grammatical communications among Amazonian Quechua speakers. This book is a fascinating look at ideophones—words that communicate succinctly through imitative sound qualities. They are at the core of Quechua speakers’ discourse—both linguistic and cultural—because they allow agency and reaction to substances and entities as well as beings. Nuckolls shows that Luisa Cadena’s utterances give every individual, major or minor, a voice in her narrative. Sometimes as subtle as a barely felt movement or unintelligible sound, the language supports an amazingly wide variety of voices. Cadena’s narratives and commentaries on everyday events reveal that sound imitation through ideophones, representations of dialogues between humans and nonhumans, and grammatical distinctions between a speaking self and an other are all part of a language system that allows for the possibility of shared affects, intentions, moral values, and meaningful, communicative interactions between humans and nonhumans.

This volume presents an entirely new, expanded cognitive view of language by examining linguistic structure and its use in communication from the point of view of memory, thus providing a novel way of analysing language. The fourteen chapters, authored by linguists and psychologists, show the need for such an approach and illustrate that the properties of numerous linguistic structures reflect those of memory in various ways. Many different methodologies are presented because of the interdisciplinary nature of the volume, without reducing the comprehensibility and comparability of the contributions. Core linguistic areas are discussed in the contributions embracing syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis; psychological aspects are restricted to memory systems and their properties. The introduction provides a concise overview of memory, and then three sections examine linguistic phenomena from various angles relating them to memory. In the first section, the contributions emphasize the issue of syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic organization in various linguistic phenomena with a focus on syntax and their locus in memory. The contributions in the second part investigate structures with non-fixed functions showing that they tend to be connected to a certain submemory sharing their features such as subjectivity and evaluation. The concern of the last section is discourse comprising coherence, evidentiality, politeness, and persuasion. The book should be stimulating for researchers and students of linguistic core areas as well as those occupied with developmental aspects and theoretical aspects of language. It also provides new insights into methods of analysis both in linguistics and in cognitive psychology. The individual chapters are comprehensible to linguists who have no background in psychology and to psychologists who have to background in linguistics.