Sentence and DiscourseJacqueline Guéron This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences. |
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Common terms and phrases
acquisition adverbial Aktionsart analysis anaphoric anchoring argument clause Asher aspect aspectual aveir Baudolino Bulgarian causo-temporal Chinese cognitive complement clauses construal construed contrast coordinates coreference counterfactual morphology deictic denotes deontic derived dicto discourse relations Discourse Representation Theory discourse structure embedded English entail epistemic epistemic modals event example expressed FID sentence French function Gianni Giorgi Guéron imparfait IMPERF verb imperfective implicatures inchoative inchoative resultative indirect discourse intensional subjunctives internal source interpretation Italian John read languages late perfectivization hypothesis lexical linguistic literary text Madrid markers Mary modal base modal verbs N.pl Narration narrative non-finite non-monotonic logic past temporal orientation past tense Pedro PERF verb perfective perfective aspect person pronoun pragmatic properties proposed proposition reference reported reporter’s Russian SDRT Section semantic sentence grammar settled in Madrid situation speaker speech subjunctives syntactic syntax telic temporal-aspectual topic verbal form verbal morphology versus volitionals