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Focus-on issue: The pragmatics of discourse management
Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 473–474 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Editorial
Focus-on issue: The pragmatics of discourse management
This issue focuses on the means that speakers and writers have at their disposal to organize and manage their own and others’ discourse. Jin Tao Lu¨, in his ‘Unidirectional Floating of Information: A case study of polylogue in a commercial colloquium’, bases himself on the theory of ‘polylogue’, as propounded in an earlier issue of this Journal by Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2004a,b); the author argues that the ‘floating’ of information that takes place in multi-party discourse is essential for a smooth transmission of the relevant information to all participants. Zuraidah Mohd Don and Gerry Knowles, in ‘Prosody and turn-taking in Malay broadcast interviews’, examine the ways prosodic features, such as are pitch height and loudness, contribute to the organization of conversation, especially in the assignment and construction of turns as they occur in Malay broadcast interviews. Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Bill Jirsa write on ‘The principle of indirect means in language use and language structure’. In their view, this principle is not only able to explain the use of indirect means, as it happens in the well-known case of indirect speech acts; it can also account for phenomena such as grammaticalization, and is thus a very powerful general principle that contributes to a wide range of linguistic phenomena, among others politeness. ‘Analyzing discontinuous speech in EU conversations: A methodological proposal’ by Annalisa Sannino, shows how, contrary to the established opinion that conversation always is ordered and sequentially bound, disorder and discontinuity can be qualified as ‘foundational features’ of conversation. The author illustrates her thesis by providing ample sketches of parliamentary debate, taken from deliberations in EU fora. Finally, Maite Taboada, in her contribution ‘Discourse markers as signals (or not) of rhetorical relations’, looks for discourse markers than can (but do not necessarily) function as (obligatory) signals of the ‘rhetorical relations’ (such as causality, circumstance, etc.) that Mann and Thompson (1988) have examined under the label of their Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The investigation was carried out on two corpora: one of conversations, the other of newspaper articles. In both cases, a high percentage of rhetorical relations turned out not to be signaled explicitly by any discourse markers.
0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2006.02.002
474
Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 473–474
References Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Cathe´rine, 2004a. Introducing polylogue. Journal of Pragmatics 36, 1–24. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Cathe´rine (Ed.), 2004b. Polylogue. Journal of Pragmatics 36 Special Issue. Mann, William C., Thompson, Sandra A., 1988. Rhetorical structure theory: toward a functional theory of text organization. Text 8 (3), 243–281.
Editor-in-Chief, JoP Jacob L. Mey* 1100 West 29th Street, Austin, Texas, TX 78703-1915, United States *Fax: +1 512 482 0226
Editorial
Focus-on issue: The pragmatics of discourse management
This issue focuses on the means that speakers and writers have at their disposal to organize and manage their own and others’ discourse. Jin Tao Lu¨, in his ‘Unidirectional Floating of Information: A case study of polylogue in a commercial colloquium’, bases himself on the theory of ‘polylogue’, as propounded in an earlier issue of this Journal by Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2004a,b); the author argues that the ‘floating’ of information that takes place in multi-party discourse is essential for a smooth transmission of the relevant information to all participants. Zuraidah Mohd Don and Gerry Knowles, in ‘Prosody and turn-taking in Malay broadcast interviews’, examine the ways prosodic features, such as are pitch height and loudness, contribute to the organization of conversation, especially in the assignment and construction of turns as they occur in Malay broadcast interviews. Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Bill Jirsa write on ‘The principle of indirect means in language use and language structure’. In their view, this principle is not only able to explain the use of indirect means, as it happens in the well-known case of indirect speech acts; it can also account for phenomena such as grammaticalization, and is thus a very powerful general principle that contributes to a wide range of linguistic phenomena, among others politeness. ‘Analyzing discontinuous speech in EU conversations: A methodological proposal’ by Annalisa Sannino, shows how, contrary to the established opinion that conversation always is ordered and sequentially bound, disorder and discontinuity can be qualified as ‘foundational features’ of conversation. The author illustrates her thesis by providing ample sketches of parliamentary debate, taken from deliberations in EU fora. Finally, Maite Taboada, in her contribution ‘Discourse markers as signals (or not) of rhetorical relations’, looks for discourse markers than can (but do not necessarily) function as (obligatory) signals of the ‘rhetorical relations’ (such as causality, circumstance, etc.) that Mann and Thompson (1988) have examined under the label of their Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The investigation was carried out on two corpora: one of conversations, the other of newspaper articles. In both cases, a high percentage of rhetorical relations turned out not to be signaled explicitly by any discourse markers.
0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2006.02.002
474
Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 473–474
References Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Cathe´rine, 2004a. Introducing polylogue. Journal of Pragmatics 36, 1–24. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Cathe´rine (Ed.), 2004b. Polylogue. Journal of Pragmatics 36 Special Issue. Mann, William C., Thompson, Sandra A., 1988. Rhetorical structure theory: toward a functional theory of text organization. Text 8 (3), 243–281.
Editor-in-Chief, JoP Jacob L. Mey* 1100 West 29th Street, Austin, Texas, TX 78703-1915, United States *Fax: +1 512 482 0226