Discourse Pragmatics and the Verb

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Fleischman
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Pragmatics

Interactions in psychiatric care consultation in Akan speaking communities

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-52
Author(s):  
Nana Aba Appiah Amfo ◽  
Ekua Essumanma Houphouet ◽  
Eugene K. Dordoye ◽  
Rachel Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Diagnostic Tool ◽  
Psychiatric Care ◽  
Code Mixing ◽  
Therapeutic Benefits ◽  
Patient Interactions ◽  
Health Practitioners ◽  
Care Consultation ◽  
Discourse Pragmatics

The present paper examines interactions in psychiatric care consultation in selected hospital settings in three Akan-speaking communities in Ghana, based on 45 audio-recorded doctor/nurse-patient interactions. Using a discourse pragmatics approach, we note how language is used in the management of communication in psychiatric consultations, and how the dominance of healthcare practitioners is enacted. Specifically, we focus on some of the strategies used by the participants to manage the multilingual communicative settings, such as code-mixing. Our findings also suggest that the use of proverbs as a diagnostic tool in psychiatric consultations in Ghana needs to be reviewed. We propose that in order for patients to experience consultation sessions that are more interactive, with possible therapeutic benefits, health practitioners need to make considerable efforts to involve the patients in decisions regarding their health.

scholarly journals De vrouw in het Friese lexicon

2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-207
Author(s):  
Henk Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Age Groups ◽  
Semantic Space ◽  
Semantic Feature ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Folk Tales ◽  
German Word ◽  
Discourse Pragmatics ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Lexical Items

Abstract1 This article discusses the semantic field in Frisian that is covered by the Dutch word vrouw and the German word Frau in the senses of 'woman' and 'wife'. Data are drawn mainly from the Nederlandse Volksverhalenbank, a large online collection of orally transmitted folk tales. The Frisian cognate frou has retained the semantic feature of respectability. This created semantic space for other lexical items, mainly frommes(ke) and minske. These forms were paradigmatically supported by the suppletive plural froulju. Furthermore, discourse pragmatics in Frisian demands for the transmission of more detailed information about the stages of life people are in than is required in Dutch and German. This demand also influences the lexical choices made by Frisian speakers and has led to the lexicalisation of terms for men and women of different age groups. In the sense of 'wife', frou is in competition with wiif.

Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Discourse Pragmatics ◽  
Indispensable Tool ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
People Today

This volume offers a range of synchronic and diachronic case studies in comparative Germanic and Romance morphosyntax. These two language families, spoken by over a billion people today, have been of central importance throughout the development linguistics, yet many significant questions about the relationship between the two families remain. Following an introduction that sets out the methodological, empirical, and theoretical background to the book, the volume is divided into three parts which deal with the morphosyntax of subjects and the inflectional layer inversion, discourse pragmatics, and the left periphery, and continuity and variation beyond the clause. The approaches used by the authors of individual chapters are diverse, making use of the latest digitized corpora and presenting a mixture of well-known and understudied data from standard and non-standard Germanic and Romance languages. Many of the chapters challenge received wisdom about the relationship between these two important language families. This volume will be an indispensable tool to researchers and students in Germanic and Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, grammatical theory, and language relationships.

Discourse Pragmatics and Semantic Categorization

1989 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Contini-Morava
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Categorization ◽  
Discourse Pragmatics

scholarly journals How to start a V2 declarative clause: Transfer of syntax vs. information structure in L2 German

Nordlyd ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ute Bohnacker ◽  
Christina Rosén
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Control Data ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
L1 Transfer ◽  
Text Corpora ◽  
Discourse Pragmatics ◽  
Linguistic Means

This paper discusses V2 word order and information structure in Swedish, German and non-native German. Concentrating on the clause-initial position of V2 declaratives, the ‘prefield’, we investigate the extent of L1 transfer in a closely related L2. The prefield anchors the clause in discourse, and although almost any type of element can occur in this position, naturalistic text corpora of native Swedish and native German show distinct language-specific patterns. Certain types of elements are more common than others in clause-initial position, and their frequencies in Swedish differ substantially from German (subjects, fronted objects, certain adverbs). Nonnative cross-sectional production data from Swedish learners of German at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels are compared with native control data, matched for age and genre (Bohnacker 2005, 2006, Rosén 2006). The learners’ V2 syntax is largely targetlike, but their beginnings of sentences are unidiomatic. They have problems with the language-specific linguistic means that have an impact on information structure: They overapply the Swedish principle of “rheme later” in their L2 German, indicating L1 transfer at the interface of syntax and discourse pragmatics, especially for structures that are frequent in the L1 (subject-initial and expletive-initial clauses, and constructions with <em>så</em> (‘so’) and object <em>det</em> (‘it/that’)).

scholarly journals Estonian Middle Semantics with Evidence from Discourse

Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.29 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Virve-Anneli Vihman
Keyword(s):  
Middle Voice ◽  
Discourse Patterns ◽  
Discourse Pragmatics ◽  
Intransitive Verbs ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Middle Constructions

This paper presents arguments for recognizing a middle voice in Estonian. The claim that the semantics of middle-marked verbs differs in a substantial way from the semantics of other intransitive constructions leads to the examination of the discourse pragmatics of these constructions, and the relationship between discourse patterns and their valency and argument properties. Various topicality measures show that the argument participant in middle clauses lies between that of the sole participant (S) in intransitive clauses and the O of active transitive clauses. The results regarding the discourse behaviour of middle arguments constitute new evidence for the view that middle constructions differ from ordinary intransitive verbs, despite structural similarities, and mark a unique range on the scale of transitivity exhibited by verbs in Estonian.

scholarly journals Prosodic effects on L2 grammars

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 769-808 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Goad ◽  
Lydia White
Keyword(s):  
L1 Transfer ◽  
Prosodic Transfer ◽  
Discourse Pragmatics ◽  
Over Time

Abstract This paper provides an overview of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH), which accounts for certain difficulties that learners experience with L2 morphosyntax. We focus on inflection and articles, which have often been accounted for through defective syntactic representations or problems with the interface between morphology and syntax (inflection) and between semantics or discourse/pragmatics and syntax (articles). We argue that some problems in these domains reflect transfer of L1 prosodic constraints: certain forms cannot be prosodically represented as target-like and hence are omitted or mispronounced. We trace how the PTH has developed over time, from its initial instantiation as involving permanent L1 transfer, to currently, where L1 representations are seen as adaptable to the needs of the L2, and new representations can in fact be acquired. We provide an overview of work conducted in this framework and discuss how the theory has been extended beyond production to encompass comprehension and processing.

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