Literary data is supposed to reflect real life situations and is at the same time written in a style of writing that is considered as highly elevated. Such reasons have prompted the contributors to this book to deal with this type of data. Such attempts range from semantics to stylistics and pragmatics. This book introduces linguistic analyses of literary data from different points of view. This involves dealing with various linguistic topics and different types of literary data. Hence, many models are presented to analyze the linguistic aspects of those topics in the light of the genre in which those topics are undertaken. Accordingly, different results are yielded from those analyses and this makes each type of analysis distinct from the other ones.
It is hoped that this work will be a useful source to all those - whether theoretically, practically, or both - interested in linguistics, pragmatics of literature, applied linguistics and literary stylistics.

Autorentext

This book deals with an important topic in linguistics. It tackles different aspects of linguistic analyses of literary data. As such, it presents various treatments of several literary genres such as short stories, drama and novels. The current book examines literary data in terms of stylistics, semantics and pragmatics. It is hopefully supposed to be of significance to those interested in linguistics, literary pragmatics, semantics, stylistics and applied linguistics.

Leseprobe
Text Sample:
Chapter Two Semantic Clause Relations in Literary Discourse:
2.1. Literature Review:
2.1.1 Introduction:
Every language has a limited number of expressions and words part of whose function is to make explicit the semantic relationships between units in a discourse. These words and expressions act as signals of those relationships between units which are the basis of the realization of active contextual meanings. Recently, much attention has been given to the role of these words and expressions in signaling not only the relations between clauses and sentences in different kinds of discourse or texts, but also in unfolding the underlying rhetorical organization of these texts and discourses.
As such, highlighting these lexical signals is considered to be the first step towards unfolding the underlying rhetorical and relational organization of texts (Hoey, 1983:85). Therefore, words are no longer viewed as having stable meaning; rather, they have dynamic and creative meaning contextually negotiable between the encoder and the decoder throughout the communication process (ibid: 86).
Therefore, this study aims at identifying vocabulary 3 items in a corpus of a literary text as a means of signalling the clause relations that hold between different parts of the text. This study also aims at classifying these lexically signalled clause relations. It is hypothesized that the different types of clause relations which are used in literary texts help the reader to interpret the message being communicated by the writer about the way in which the literary discourse should be interpreted. The writer is telling his/her reader to interpret the juxtaposition of the parts of his/her discourse in a particular way.
2.1.2 Winter's (1977) Semantic Theory of Clause Relations:
Winter's semantic theory of clause relations is based on the notion that adjacent clauses and sentences complement the meaning of each other. That is to say, the semantics of one sentence is completed by the semantics of another which constitute the contextual significance of both sentences. The process of interpreting one sentence depends to a greater extent on the meaning of the preceding sentence or group of sentences.
According to Winter (1977: 37), clause relations refer to "a system of predictability of context; That is, given a sentence with its preceding context, the lexical selection of the next sentence is frequently predictable". Therefore, the existence of a preceding context of a given sentence is a crucial factor in the process of interpreting that sentence.
Following Winter (1977: 38), these lexical items can be divided according to their clause-relating function into three groups; voc.1, voc.2, and voc.3. The first two groups are grammatical, the third is lexical. The first includes subordinators, the second sentence connectors or conjuncts, the third includes lexical items which Winter calls 'lexical signals'.
Winter (1982) rephrases his definition of clause relations as:
"A clause relation is the shared cognitive process whereby we interpret the meaning of a clause or a group of clauses in the light of their adjoining clause or group of clauses." Where the clauses are independent we can speak of 'sentence relation'." (p: 178).
Consequently, Winter's developed definition has resolved the conflation between the sentence and the clause, because independence is the first grammatical requirement of the sentence, in the traditional definition, though not enough for its meaning in a complete utterance unit. And since the sentence in Winter's (ibid.) definition consists of more than one clause grammatically grouped together by subordination, it follows that the clause in its independent form contains inadequate information and requires lexical realization by adjoining clauses to be fully understood.
As an illustration, Winter (ibid:185) asserts that though the clause 'There is a problem' is perfectly grammatical, it remains incomprehensible a