Peter de Swart

Contrast in Discourse : Guest Editors' Introduction

Contrast is a discourse relation that involves a comparison between two situations that are similar in one way, but different in another. In this special issue on the relation of Contrast in discourse the following questions are explored. How is Contrast marked (by the speaker) and how is it identified (by the hearer)? What is the discourse function of establishing Contrast? How do we account for the similarities as well as the differences between different types of linguistic tools and what cross-linguistic variation do we find? The present article serves as a brief introduction to the studies presented in this special issue on Contrast. 1 INTERPRETATION OF CONTRAST IN DISCOURSE Consider the following fragment (boldface is ours): (1) The buildings are all two and three stories running half a block deep with brick and glass fronts. Most were built together, a few have narrow alleys between them. Many are still boarded up, a couple were burned out years ago. (John Grisham, The Rainmaker) In (1), the incomplete noun phrases introduced by the determiners in boldface are anaphorically linked to the discourse topic the buildings. There is yet another meaning effect here. The pairs of predicates in the second and third sentence are interpreted contrastively. The interpretation that emerges is that buildings are either built together or have narrow alleys between them, and they are either still boarded up, or burned out years ago. Where does this reading come from? Contrast is defined in Mann & Thompson (1988) as a multinuclear rhetorical relation with no more than two nuclei such that Journal of Semantics, Vol. 21, No. 2, c

Linguistic concepts in L1 grammar education: a systematic literature review

ABSTRACT Teaching grammar has always constituted a major part of language education in curricula around the world, although it has also been heavily debated. Most of the debate on grammar teaching focused on the rationales for teaching it, rather than on the linguistic content that should be taught. At the same time, there appears to be a renewed interest in restoring the bond between linguistic theory and grammar education. Previous research has suggested that it would be highly desirable to gain a clearer picture of this content. Which concepts are being discussed in the literature on grammar education, and to what extent are these compatible with modern linguistics, in other words: is the literature on grammar teaching up-to-date? This systematic literature review is the first to dive into these questions. Results indicate: (1) most of the concepts in the literature on grammar teaching are from traditional grammar. To a limited extent, there are also concepts from modern linguistic theory that are being discussed, but mostly implicitly; (2) most concepts are not being motivated because they are meaningful in modern theoretical linguistics, but because they reflect traditional classroom practices and policy. It can consequently be concluded that education on linguistic analysis is not up-to-date, which potentially has severe consequences: implementing insights from modern linguistics is likely to provide students with deeper insights, and teachers with a better equipped pedagogy.

Chapter 8 – Noun Phrase Resolution: The Correlation between Case and Ambiguity

Publisher Summary This chapter examines how ambiguities of grammatical function can arise in languages and, more importantly, how they can be avoided. A strategy to reduce potential ambiguity is setting up rigid argument hierarchies. A special case of interest in the investigation of the relation between ambiguity and case is formed by languages that exhibit the so-called differential object marking. In such languages, direct objects receive case depending on the semantic features of the object. In Malayalam, animate objects receive accusative case whereas inanimate ones usually stay unmarked. In Malayalam, the accusative case is not dependent on the dimension of animacy per se but rather on a principle called “minimal semantic distinctness.” The two arguments of a transitive relation must be minimally semantically distinct or, if not, they must be marked in a morphologically distinct way. In languages that have the morphological case, there is less danger of ambiguity of grammatical relations. The morphological case in itself is a means of ambiguity avoidance; through its case marking, the function of a noun phrase (NP) is recoverable from the NP itself.