Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change: Theory, Innovations, Contact

Description

Discourse-pragmatic markers are central to everyday language, yet many aspects of their use and functions remain elusive or under-investigated. Bringing together a global team of leading scholars, this volume presents a representative showcase of work currently being conducted in the field of discourse-pragmatic variation and change, including investigations of features such as uh/um, please, sentence-final is all, and discourse-pragmatic features from a number of languages. The book emphasizes that not only have researchers answered the call to address complex issues such as cross-linguistic reliability, extending research across languages, and expanding and improving on methods and analysis, but that they continue to address perennial questions in the field of language variation and change. With sections on theoretical and methodological issues, innovative variables, and language contact situations, the volume offers a robust overview of best practices for both new and experienced researchers.

Elizabeth Peterson is a sociolinguist based in Finland. She is the author of numerous articles on pragmatic borrowing in Finnish and the 2020 book Making Sense of "Bad English". Turo Hiltunen works as university lecturer in English the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has authored a number of studies on corpus pragmatics, corpus compilation, phraseology, and the language of science and medicine. Joseph Kern is Assistant Professor in Spanish at The University of Virginia's College at Wise, USA. He is the author of several articles on discourse-pragmatic features in Spanish, especially in varieties of Spanish in contact.