Much public debate today is carried out on Twitter (now X), where the participants employ a range of diverse resources to convey their ideas effectively. Disentangling the resources into clear and understandable struc...
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Much public debate today is carried out on Twitter (now X), where the participants employ a range of diverse resources to convey their ideas effectively. Disentangling the resources into clear and understandable structures and patterns presents a fresh challenge for discourse pragmatics. This article addresses that challenge methodologically by evaluating existing methods for identifying and classifying pragmatic patterns, revealing their drawbacks, and advocating for a new coding system. This categorizes tweets based on a post's primary pragmatic function (informing, appealing, or expressing emotivity), considering subsidiary functions. The study then applies this new scheme to analyze the Twitter debate on the Polish Turow lignite mine, which became a subject of international dispute as the Czech and European authorities sought the mine's closure to eliminate its negative environmental impact. The debate unfolds mainly in Polish, Czech, and English, each language being associated with a distinct discourse. The English discourse emphasizes a transnational appeal for widespread decarbonization, contrasting with the predominantly oppositional, national political perspectives in the Polish and Czech discourses. These rely heavily on emotivity directed, in the Polish case, primarily against the country's ruling party, and in the Czech one against the deal eventually reached with Poland to mitigate the problems. (c) 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.
This paper combines the findings of a detailed corpus study and the results of a small-scale experiment in an attempt to support the idea that grammatical knowledge includes knowledge of usage patterns. The linguistic...
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This paper combines the findings of a detailed corpus study and the results of a small-scale experiment in an attempt to support the idea that grammatical knowledge includes knowledge of usage patterns. The linguistic structures investigated are English not that sentences of the type Other people have friends. I have enemies. Not that I care (example taken from the British National Corpus). An in-depth investigation of 1,759 uses of this structure extracted from the British National Corpus reveals that neither their lexico-grammatical environments nor the pragmatic functions they serve are distributed in a random or unpredictable way, but rather pattern to an astonishing extent. This finding prompts the question as to whether the observed patterns are merely a matter of repeated usage driven by recurring pragmatic needs, or instead are represented as part of the linguistic knowledge of individual speakers, i.e., as a part of grammar. In order to answer this question a simple experiment was designed aiming to investigate whether there is a match between the data observed in the corpus (reflecting usage) and the knowledge-based behavior of individual speakers in an offline task (tapping into grammar). 30 native speakers of English participated in a test which put them under severe time pressure while they filled in gaps in short texts. Four gaps targeted uses of not that representing patterns with different frequencies in the corpus. The results of the experiment indicate that the participants were faster and found it easier to activate the structure not that for stimuli targeting frequent patterns than for those targeting very rare types of usage. This is interpreted as evidence for the assumption that frequency-related knowledge about lexico-grammatical and even pragmatic patterns is a part of grammatical knowledge.
During recent years, corpus-based phraseology has brought new insights to the study of language use and in particular to the role of evaluation in language. New quantitative studies (e.g. Stubbs, 2001b) reveal that ra...
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During recent years, corpus-based phraseology has brought new insights to the study of language use and in particular to the role of evaluation in language. New quantitative studies (e.g. Stubbs, 2001b) reveal that rather than choosing individual words and their meanings, the average writer/speaker often chooses larger building blocks, so to speak, as the meanings of words are much more intrinsically connected than is traditionally assumed. A given word is statistically likely to trigger other words and frequently also a set of connotations, as evidenced by the concept of semantic prosody (Louw, 1993). From the point of view of meaning, it makes more sense to talk about extended units of meaning (Sinclair, 1996) than about the syntagmatically more limited concept of lexical meaning. This article discusses the implications of these new insights on the semantics/pragmatics boundary, in particular the claim that the traditionally primarily pragmatic concept of evaluation is part of the language system to a much larger degree than hitherto presumed. It offers Danish language analyses which corroborate English and Italian findings within the area of semantic prosody;these analyses are furthermore used to argue for the existence of inherent evaluative meaning and pragmatic evaluative meaning. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
By studying Wang Xifeng's expression from the perspective of pragmatics,the paper finds Xifeng always puts herself in the center of conversation by the use of self-referential"I".Based on four basic type...
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By studying Wang Xifeng's expression from the perspective of pragmatics,the paper finds Xifeng always puts herself in the center of conversation by the use of self-referential"I".Based on four basic types of Xifeng's self-referential patterns,the paper compares two translated versions on these pragmatic patterns,and concludes that the best way of translation on subject focalization is to combine four types of translating techniques.
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