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The purpose of this book is to explore the overlapping area of study that discourse linguists and cognitive linguists are interested in. In doing so, the volume contributes to bridging the gap between these two large groups of linguists who share an interest in discourse processing but approach the area from very different perspectives and frames of reference.
The starting point of this volume is text and discourse. The book includes an overview section and a number of carefully selected contributions which highlight central issues in the study of text and discourse attempting to give them cognitive explanations. In responding to the current interest in the area of discourse and cognition, the volume has adopted a wide scope which allows its individual chapters to focus on textual and situational contexts as well as the context of culture and society at large. The volume also provides its readership with a useful selection of methods used in the studies which form the basis of its chapters. The contributions, all by established linguists with highest qualifications, present new findings which have important theoretical implications. They offer unique and fresh analyses of central discourse phenomena in cognitive light and revealing discussions of the avenues opened to us at this stage of the development of the study of discourse and cognition.
This accessible research volume will be essential reading for scholars and advanced students of linguistics and languages.
List of contents
Text, discourse and cognition: An introduction Tuija Virtanen
Language, discourse, and cognition: Retrospects and prospects Robert de Beaugrande
On the discourse basis of person agreement Anna Siewierska
The information structure of bilingual meaning: A constructivist approach to Californian Finnish conversation M.M. Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest
Point of departure: Cognitive aspects of sentence-initial adverbials Tuija Virtanen
What is foregrounded in narratives? Hypotheses for the cognitive basis of foregrounding Brita Wårvik
From legal knowledge to legal discourse - and back again Lita Lundquist
Conditionals: Your space or mine? Anne Marie Bülow-Møller
Communicative fragments and the interpretation of discourse Martina Björklund
Drawing the line: A contested conceptual model in Danish 'child care talk' Peter Harder
About the author
Tuija Virtanen is Professor at Abo Akademi University, Finnland.
Report
"The volume represents an important contribution to the development of both text/discourse linguistics and cognitive linguistics. The emphasis on 'distributed cognition' in serveral articles makes possible the focus on the cultural dimension of cognitve sciences and the elaboration of a semiotics of cultur."Joszef Nagy in:Linguist List 16.2190
