Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence

This book seeks to explain how discourse types influence the addressee's understanding of the communicator's intention. Examining global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, it argues that the key to a solution lies in the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson.

'This book has thrown a challenge out to linguistics: can any one theory account for the many-faceted nature of a text? Each chapter has been treated with significant depth to explain the author's thesis, to produce a book whose importance extends beyond the specific issues under scrutiny this book is an excellent contribution to scholarship in terms of the global coherence of text interpretation using GT and RT and the hypothesis of the cognitive pragmatic function of genre by Unger opens up many and varied research areas.'

Philippa Mungra, University of Rome, Italy, writing on LINGUIST List

Autorentext
CHRISTOPH UNGER has been working with SIL International since 1992 on linguistic fieldwork and the training and supervision of translators. His research focuses on pragmatic theory and its implications for natural language semantics and cross-cultural communication, particularly translation.

Klappentext

This book seeks to explain how discourse types influence the addressee's understanding of the communicator's intention. Examining global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, it argues that the key to a solution lies in the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson.

Inhalt
Acknowledgements Introduction PART 1: GLOBAL COHERENCE AND GENRE Global Coherence and Global Discourse Relations Topic-based Approaches to Global Coherence Global Coherence and Grounding In Discourse PART 2: EXPECTATIONS OF RELEVANCE AND GENRE Expectations of Relevance Expectations of Relevance, Implicit Questioning in Discourse, and Genre Empirical Issues in Global Coherence and Discourse Typology Genre in Code-based Theories of Communication Conversational Maxims and Genre A Re-analysis of Genre and its Implications for Pragmatics Notes Bibliography Index