Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative: The case of English and Catalan: 122 (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series) - Hardcover

Gonz�lez, Montserrat

9789027253644: Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative: The case of English and Catalan: 122 (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9027253641 ISBN 13: 9789027253644

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004

This book presents the multifunctional nature of pragmatic discourse markers in English and Catalan oral narratives from the point of view of text linguistics and contrastive analysis. It is argued that English and Catalan markers are distributed and operate differently at four different levels in the varied discourse structures of the text, i.e. at the ideational, the rhetorical, the sequential, and the inferential levels. The results confirm the distinctions in functional-systemic levels, and indicate that the nature of the two languages has a direct influence on the presence and nature of markers in the texts. The study is built up on a corpus of English and Catalan elicited narratives of native speakers, adopting the sociolinguistic Labovian framework adapted to the situation of educated adults.
The study results in a better understanding of the contribution of pragmatic markers to the organization and the interpretation of oral texts, bringing insights from relevance and cognitive approaches to text structure, and moving from descriptive to theoretical levels of analysis and discussion.

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Synopsis:

Chapter 1; Introduction; This study deals with the use of pragmatic markers in English and Catalan oral narrative (Labov and Waletzky 1967), a monologued text-genre that presents a regular structural pattern. The main aim is to try to show that pragmatic markers play a decisive role in the telling of the events. In order to be able to cope their significance within the text, the overall structure of English and Catalan narratives is also going to be analyzed and compared.

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