Stein D. (ed.) Cooperating with Written Texts - The Pragmatics and Comprehension of Written Texts

Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992. — VIII, 708 p. — Reprint 2011 Edition. — (Studies in Anthropological Linguistics Series, Volume 5).This volume contains the body, and a few more, of the papers from the conference on "Cooperating with written texts: the pragmatics and comprehension of written texts", held at Rauischholzhausen castle, the conference site of Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, West Germany, September 5 - 9 , 1989.There are two connected motivations for having a conference and a volume of papers with such a topic. The first is a unanimous tenor in the current research on written language that there is a fundamental lack of basic research in this field. The reason for this is that the extension from morpheme and sentence into discourse meant primarily spoken natural discourse. This is where the bulk of discourse analysis was concentrated as a reaction to both philology based on written texts and to language theories often drawing on "unnatural", made-up examples.Primarily two factors have conspired to make the lack of research in written discourse keenly felt. The first was brought up in discussions of problems of language standardization. What emerged was a close connection between standardization and written language. This factor and others, such as the discussion centred on the question of a cognitive divide, and educational problems associated with the acquisition of literacy in Western countries under the impact of other media, moved written language into focus. This lack of research meant that urgent problems on the applied side (language planning, educational and psychological) could not be tackled in a promising way. The second motivation is connected to both the theoretical and the applicational deficit.It is the characteristic of this volume that it does not focus on any particular subject worthy of a study in its own right, such as educational issues connected to the acquisition of written language (Whiteman, 1981). The scope and range of content and contributions is rather determined by what could be considered the prototypical course content of a university course in text science, such as developed in Glessen.The important element of the scientific underpinning of such a science is the bringing (back) together what has long drifted apart, linguistics and literature. Under this general perspective of a text science, the literary text — provocative as this may sound to more conservative ears — is simply a special case of a text type under the more general aegis of a matrix science of (discourse) linguistics.Cooperating with written texts: Towards a science of the text. Issues and overviewWriting, literacy, and comprehension: psycholinguistic aspects
On the relationship between writing system, written language, and text processing
Pause and intonation contours in written and oral discourse
Aspects of writing development in argumentative texts
Psycholinguistic processes in the comprehension of written texts
Coherence and coordination in written text: Reading time studies
Levels of language comprehension and systems of information-processingDevelopmental aspects: the evolution of written texts
The pragmatics of medieval texts
The impact of sudden literacy on text comprehensibility: Mohawk
Scientific texts and deictic structures
Immediacy and displacement in consciousness and languageLiterary texts: inferring meaning(s)
Fictional conversation and its pragmatic status
Presupposition and pragmatic inference in a literary text
How to cope with dramatic texts including avant-garde playscripts
The pragmatics of literary texts
“Deep structure signals” in fiction
The pragmatics of poetic discourse
A pragmatic role for inserted clauses in literary textsPragmatics and comprehension of individual text types
Teaching conscientious resistance to cooperation with text: The role of pragmatics in critical thinking
From private writing to public oration: The case of Puritan wills. Cognitive discourse analysis applied to the study of genre change
Parallelism in advertising copy
Notice is hereby given to hide ulterior motives
Renarration: Oral L1 and L2 narrations as bases of written narratives
Strategies in text production and text comprehension: A new perspective
The axiological structure of discourseAt the interface of linguistics and pragmatics: individual linguistic structures
On the (In)dependence of syntax and pragmatics: Evidence from the postposition -rá in Persian
VP inversion and aspect in written texts
Scope in discourse: Pragmatics or syntax?Computational modeling of text comprehension
‘Parsing’ procedures for stories
Convergent evidence for a set of coherence relations
Text pragmatics and computational modeling
Integrating knowledge sources for the generation of referential expressionsSubject index