Books in the RLE: Discourse Analysis series

First published in 1990, this collection investigates grammatical categories associated with the verb as they are used by speakers and writers in real discourses and texts. Focusing on tense, aspect, mood, and voice in French, Spanish, and Italian, each chapter underscores the importance of context in our understanding of how grammatical categories work.

First published in 1979, this book starts from the perspective that dealing with anaphoric language can be decomposed into two complementary tasks: 1. identifying what a text potentially makes available for anaphoric reference and 2. constraining the candidate set of a given anaphoric expression down to one possible choice. The author argues there is an intimate connection between formal sentential analysis and the synthesis of an appropriate conceptual model of the discourse. Some of the issues with the creation of this conceptual model are discussed in the second chapter, which follows a background to the thesis that catalogues the types of anaphoric expression available in English and lists the types of things that can be referred to anaphorically. The third and fourth chapters examine two types of anaphoric expression that do not refer to non-linguistic entities. The final chapter details three areas into which this research could potentially be extended. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics.

First published in 1993, this book provides clear illustrations of discourse analytic work and empirical critiques of the traditional psychological approaches. Drawing on a range of examples, the contributors argue that identity, deeply felt emotions, prejudice, and attitudes to social issues are created by the language that describes them rather than being intrinsic to the individual. In illustrating the variety of methods available through their studies of punk identity, sexual jealousy, images of nature, political talk, sexism in radio, education case conferences and occupational choice, the contributors provide a challenging presentation of discourse analysis in a psychological context.

First published in 1988, this book focuses on diversity and discourse, and collects contemporaneous research across a wide range of topics including: description, polemic, narrative analysis, DJ talk, philosophical history, conversation, childrenΓÇÖs books and nuclear deterrence. The essays demonstrate analyses of discourse in the service of stylistic inquiry, exploring relationships of text and context. This reflects the overall argument that discourse analyses aiming to represent diversity of social context will necessarily approach the task selectively, since all dimensions are of potential relevance to any and every communicative manifestation. Some of contextual dimensions that are addressed include: interpersonal, socio-structural, modal, ideological, and pragmatic.

First published in 1992, this wide-ranging collection of essays focuses on the principle of contextualisation as it applies to the interpretation, description, theorising and reading of literary and non-literary texts. The collection aims to reveal the interdependencies between theory, analysis, text and context by challenging the myth that stylistics entails a fundamental separation of text from context, linguistic description from descriptive interpretation, or language from situation. The essays cover a historically diverse set of texts, from Puttenham to Colemanballs, and a number of language-sensitive topics such as post-modernism, irony, newspaper representations, gender and narrative.

First published in 1984, this book examines a number of questions on the boundary of competence and performance ΓÇö whose solutions have implications for linguistic theory in general. In particular, the form of grammatical statements, the relationship between various rules of grammar, the interaction between sentence in a sequence, and the inferences to be drawn from linguistic behaviour to linguistic knowledge. The author argues that many grammatical processes, inadequately handled by conventional sentence-grammars, require a text grammar in which the basic constitutive processes of information and deixis can be specified. They ago further to investigate the novel hypothesis that emphatic structure provides a crucial condition for the application of transformational rules, paying particular attention to the ΓÇÿmovement-rulesΓÇÖ using mostly data culled from actual usage.