Christoph Schubert

Kommunikation und Humor

Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer

Owing to the ever-increasing possibilities of communication, especially with the advent of modern communication technologies, register analysis offers a constantly widening range of research opportunities. Still, research has mainly concentrated on well-established and frequent registers such as newspaper articles, while many descriptive and theoretical issues have not yet been sufficiently investigated. This volume gives a state-of-the-art insight into register studies and points out emerging trends as well as new directions for future research. Furthermore, it provides a forum for the description and discussion of registers which have not received an appropriate amount of attention so far. In particular, it deals with specialized offline and online registers, cross-register comparison as well as regional, contrastive, and diachronic register variation. In parallel to the new discipline of variational pragmatics, this volume aims to foster the discipline of ‘variational text linguistics’ and to initiate fundamental investigations in this area. This field of research provides new insights into the concept of register, since it covers both functional and regional types of textual variation.

Revisiting Register in English

Variational Text Linguistics

Jan Renkema

This new edition of Introduction to Discourse Studies (IDS) is a thoroughly revised and updated version of this successful textbook, which has been published in four languages and has become a must-read for anyone interested in the analysis of texts and discourses. Supported by an international advisory board of 14 leading experts, it deals with all main subdomains in discourse studies, from pragmatics to cognitive linguistics, from critical discourse analysis to stylistics, and many more. The book approaches major issues in this field from the Anglo-American and European as well as the Asian traditions. It provides an ‘academic toolkit’ for future courses on discourse studies and serves as a stepping stone to the independent study of professional literature. The chapters are subdivided in modular sections that can be studied separately. The pedagogical objectives are further supported by over 500 index entries covering frequently used concepts that are accurately defined with examples throughout the text; more than 150 test-yourself questions, all elaborately answered, which are ideal for self-study; nearly 100 assignments that provide ample material for lecturers to focus on specific topics in their courses. Jan Renkema is Emeritus Professor of Discourse Quality at the Department of Communication and Information Sciences at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He is also editor of Discourse, of Course (2009) and author of The Texture of Discourse (2009). In 2009, a Chinese edition of Introduction to Discourse Studies was published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Christoph Schubert is Full Professor of English Linguistics at Vechta University, Germany. He is author of an Introduction to English text linguistics (2nd ed. 2012) and co-editor of Pragmatic Perspectives on Postcolonial Discourse (2016) and Variational Text Linguistics (2016).

New edition

Introduction to Discourse Studies

Die Studie untersucht, wie die lineare Kette sprachlicher Zeichen in Deskriptionssequenzen englischer Texte vor dem ,inneren Auge‘ des Rezipienten einen Vorstellungsraum konstituiert. Sie verbindet damit in neuartiger Weise Kategorien der Textlinguistik mit Ansätzen der Semantik und der Kognitiven Grammatik. Zudem werden Ergebnisse relevanter Nachbardisziplinen wie der Literatur- und Kunstwissenschaft sowie der Wahrnehmungs- und Gestaltpsychologie einbezogen. Auf der Basis eines Korpus von Textsorten mit hohen deskriptiven Anteilen, wie etwa Reiseführern oder geographischen Sachtexten, wird eine Taxonomie von prototypischen ,Blickführungstypen‘ erarbeitet und anhand von zahlreichen exemplarischen Analysen sowie graphischen Darstellungen veranschaulicht. Diese Blickführungstypen werden als spezifische Linearisierungsstrategien definiert, die auf bildschematischen Konfigurationen aus Trajektor und Landmarke beruhen. In diesem Kontext wird analysiert, inwiefern Lokalisierungsausdrücke sowohl durch grammatische und lexikalische Kohäsion wie auch durch ortsdeiktische Situierungen zur Raumkonstitution beitragen. Von besonderem Interesse sind hierbei die textuellen Effekte und Funktionen, die aus der Blickführung resultieren.

Blickführung, Bildschemata und Kohäsion in Deskriptionssequenzen englischer Texte

Raumkonstitution durch Sprache

Laurenz Volkmann

In sociolinguistic research on Englishes world-wide, little has been published on the pragmatics of postcolonial varieties. This interdisciplinary volume closes this research gap by providing integrative investigations of postcolonial discourses, probing the interstices between linguistic methodologies and literary text analysis. The literary texts under discussion are conceptualized as media both reflecting and creating reality, so that they provide valuable insights into postcolonial discourse phenomena. The contributions deal with the issue of how postcolonial Englishes, such as those spoken in India, Nigeria, South Africa and the Caribbean, have produced different pragmatic conventions in a complex interplay of culture-specific and global linguistic practices. They show the ways in which hybrid communicative situations based on ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity result in similarly hybrid social and communicative routines. The central pragmatic paradigms discussed here include im/politeness, speech act conventions, conversational maxims, deixis, humour, code-switching and -mixing, Othering, and linguistic exclusion.

Christoph Schubert

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