This book investigates phenomena at the grammar–discourse interface with a strong focus on discourse markers, whose development and concrete uses in a given language tend to be based on a close interplay of grammatical and discourse-related forces. The topics range from the transition of linguistic… read more
Edited by Alexander Haselow and Gunther Kaltenböck
This volume brings together linguistic, psychological and neurological research in a discussion of the Cognitive Dualism Hypothesis, whose central idea is that human cognitive activity in general and linguistic cognition in particular cannot reasonably be reduced to a single, monolithic system of… read more
This study explores the ability of advanced adolescent German learners of English to optimize turn design for talk-in-interaction, focusing on collaborative turn constructions and ellipses. Data deriving from recorded conversations conducted in the foreign language among German learners of… read more
This paper studies the long-term diachronic development of the speech act of expressing gratitude in the history of English in Britain. The speech act underwent a considerable transformation from a religious-devotional practice and an expressive act with a high illocutionary weight addressed to… read more
This paper deals with the features of the system of other-initiated repair in different varieties of English, and thus in different cultural settings in which English is spoken. Corpus-based data are used to investigate whether and how repair practices, which are essential to the human… read more
This chapter contributes to recent lines of research proposing right-hemisphere dominance of discourse-related language tasks using neurolinguistic data on the incidence of discourse markers in the speech of unilaterally brain-damaged speakers (left- and right-hemispheric damage) compared to data… read more
Based on the relatively broad evidence for the assumption that language structure and linguistic cognition are organized in a dualistic way, this chapter follows proposals for a distinction between microstructures and macrostructures in language. While the first serve the establishment of… read more
This paper discusses utterance-final uses of intensifying adverbs (absolutely, definitely, really and totally), which are often ambiguous in terms of their syntactic status between postposed clausal constituents and extra-clausal units. These adverbs are analyzed as macrogrammatical elements… read more
This article explores the extent to which present-day written news discourse has
become more speech-like regarding the structure of sentences. Three features
will be analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively: the use of conjunctions as
extra-clausal linking devices, the occurrence of disintegrated… read more
Ways of identifying functional differences between elements in the left and the right periphery of an utterance after grammaticalization processes are discussed using data from the history and present-day use of anyway. This element developed from a clause-internal adverbial into a… read more
Using the rise of three final particles in spoken English (then, though, anyway) as a case study it will be shown that dialogic interaction is an important domain of grammaticalization. The central idea is that grammaticalization may be induced by the regularization of interactive sequences which,… read more
The present article deals with the origin of utterance-final then and the functional changes of then related to this development. Based on a corpus study of historical texts it will be shown that final then acquired a variety of functions at the illocutionary level from the Middle English period… read more
The case of Iceland shows that linguistic variation and the formation of a multilingual community are not always seen as an enrichment for speakers that act in an increasingly globalized world, but sometimes suppressed by means of a rigid language policy. The negative attitude towards the use of a… read more
