Clause chaining in Toposa: A pragmatic approach
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Helga Schröder
Helga Schröder received her Ph.D. from the University of Nairobi, Kenya, where she is currently senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Languages. She is also a member of SIL International, an organization for which she is doing extensive consulting and conducts workshops in the area of morpho-syntax and discourse of African languages. Her research interests revolve around the morpho-syntax-discourse features of African languages and their interface with pragmatics. She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes and is working on ergativity, antipassive, clause chaining and pragmatics in Nilotic languages.
Abstract
This paper explores the pragmatic routines that occur in clause 2 chaining. It demonstrates that the tense-aspect dependency markers in Toposa texts not only combine chained clauses with an initial clause, but also guide the audience to understand information in texts as foregrounded. The understanding of which information is foregrounded is achieved through pragmatic routines that cut the comprehension process short because of frequently encountered inferential processes occurring in repeatedly accessed contextual environments. The pragmatic routines are explained as part of the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic. It will also be shown how these routines apply to narratives, and procedural texts.
About the author
Helga Schröder received her Ph.D. from the University of Nairobi, Kenya, where she is currently senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Languages. She is also a member of SIL International, an organization for which she is doing extensive consulting and conducts workshops in the area of morpho-syntax and discourse of African languages. Her research interests revolve around the morpho-syntax-discourse features of African languages and their interface with pragmatics. She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes and is working on ergativity, antipassive, clause chaining and pragmatics in Nilotic languages.
©[2013] by De Gruyter Mouton Berlin
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Editorial
- Analyzing jokes with the Intersecting Circles Model of humorous communication
- Clause chaining in Toposa: A pragmatic approach
- Where next for comrade? On the use of ideology-based address forms in post-Communist societies (with reference to modern-day Serbia)
- Online communication and students’ pragmatic choices in English
- Conflict talk and argumentative strategies in highly adversarial talk shows: The case of Al-Jazeera’s The Opposite Direction
- Indexing in fairy tales: Evidence for the role fairy tales play in children’s concept formation
- Review of Pragmatism. An Introduction by Michael Bacon
