Subjectivity in Language and in Discourse deals with the linguistic encoding and discursive construction of subjectivity across languages and registers. The aim of this book is to complement the highly specialized, parallel and often separate research strands on the phenomenon of subjectivity with a volume that gives a forum to diverse theoretical vantage points and methodological approaches, presenting research results in one place which otherwise would most likely be found in substantially different publications and would have to be collected from many different sources. Taken together, the chapters in this volume reflect the rich diversity in contemporary research on the phenomenon of subjectivity. They cover numerous languages, colloquial, academic and professional registers, spoken and written discourse, diverse communities of practice, speaker and interaction types, native and non-native language use, and Lingua Franca communication. The studies investigate both already well explored languages and registers (e.g. American English, academic writing, conversation) and with respect to subjectivity, less studied languages (Greek, Italian, Persian, French, Russian, Swedish, Danish, German, Australian English) as well as many different communicative settings and contexts, ranging from conference talk, promotional business writing, academic advising, disease counselling to internet posting, translation, and university classroom and research interview talk. Some contributions focus on individual linguistic devices, such as pronouns, intensifiers, comment clauses, modal verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and their capacity of introducing the speaker's subjective perspective in discourse and interactional sequence; others examine the role of larger functional categories, such as hedging and metadiscourse, or interactional sequencing.

This book investigates the notion of subjectivity from a pragmatic point of view. There have been attempts to reduce the notion of the speaker or subjectivity as a syntactic category, or to seek an explanation for it in semantic terms. However, in order to understand the vast range of subjectivity phenomena, it is more fruitful to examine how the attributes and the experience of the real speaker affect language. The volume provides a theoretical/methodological basis for the study of various aspects of language and discourse and applies these specifically to Japanese spoken discourse, for which the data are added in an appendix.

The emotional aspects of language have so far not received the attention they deserve. This study focuses on nonpropositional, i.e. expressive and interactional meanings of Japanese signs, with special emphasis on understanding their cognitive, psychological and social meanings. It shows how the Japanese language is richly endowed to express personal voice and emotive nuances, and confronts the theoretical issues related to this. The author proposes a new theoretical framework for Discourse Modality, a primary concern for Japanese speakers, to analyze the 'expressiveness' of language.

Recent years saw a growing interest in the study of subjectivity, as the linguistic expression of speaker involvement. Intersubjectivity, defined by Traugott as "the linguistic expression of a speaker/writer's attention to the hearer/reader", on the other hand, has so far received little explicit attention in its own right, let alone systematic definition and operationalization. Intersubjectivity and seemingly related notions such as interpersonal meaning, appraisal, stance and metadiscourse, frequently appear in cognitive-functional accounts, as well as historical and more applied approaches. These domains offer (partly) conflicting uses of 'intersubjectivity', differ in the overall scope of the concept and the phenomena it may cover.This book brings together contributions from a variety of different approaches, with the aim of disentangling the current web of intertwined notions of intersubjectivity. Rather than focusing on the potentially conflicting views, the volume aspires to resolve some of the conceptual puzzle by cross-fertilization between the different views, and spark discussion on how to operationalize 'intersubjectivity' in linguistic research. Originally published in English Text Construction 5:1 (2012).

An incisive account of the relationship between language and identity, illuminating the role of language in racism, sexism, colonialism and similar social forces.

The ten papers in this volume focus on Subject and Theme. Theme began its life as a semantic notion in the work of Vilém Mathesius, while Subject has traditionally been seen as just a syntactic entity. More recently two related perspectives on these concepts have attracted linguists' attention: the formal criteria for their recognition and the relations between the two concepts. Using the systemic functional model as their point of departure, the papers in the present volume consider the two notions in a wider context by relating them to the interpersonal and textual metafunctions of language. By contrast with the current linguistic approaches, the primary focus here is neither simply on formal recognition criteria nor on the relation of these elements to each other; instead, the notions of Subject and Theme are examined from the point of view of their function in the economy of discourse, with studies of their significance in English and French, as well as in a range of non-Indo-European languages. Definitions of the concepts are offered on the basis of their discourse functions, which are also important in selecting the formal recognition criteria and in understanding their mutually supportive role vis à vis each other. Most of the papers in the volume are a selection from presentations made at the 19th International Systemic Functional Congress at Macquarie University.

Over the last forty years, the functionalist approach to linguistic description and explanation has given rise to several major schools of thought that share two crucial assumptions: (i) form is not independent of meaning/function or language use; and (ii) linguistic description and explanation need to take into account the communicative function of language. This volume offers readers interested in functional linguistics a selected sample of studies that jointly prove the efficacy of the analytical tools and procedures broadly accepted within the functionalist tradition in order to investigate language and discourse, with special focus on key pragmatic/discourse notions such as contextualization, grammaticalisation, reference, politeness, (in-)directness, discourse markers, speech acts, subjective evaluation and sentiment analysis in texts, among others. In addition, this volume offers specific corpus-based techniques for the objective contextualisation of linguistic data, which is crucial given the central role allotted to context in both functional linguistics and pragmatics/discourse analysis.

The book examines the development and maintenance of a minority language, engaging on both micro and macro levels to address open questions in the field. Guardado provides a history of the study of language maintenance, including discussion of language socialization, cosmopolitan identities, and home practices. In particular, the author uses 'discourse' as a primary tool to understand minority language development and maintenance.

In this collection of carefully selected papers connectivity is looked at from the vantage points of language contact, language change, language acquisition, multilingual communication and related domains based on various European and Non-European languages. From typological and multilingual perspectives the focus of investigation is on the grammatical architecture of a number of linguistic devices that interconnect units of text and discourse. The volume is organized along central concepts: A general section deals with connectivity in language change and language acquisition, subdivisions are devoted to pronouns, topics and subjects, the role of finiteness in text and discourse, coordination and subordination and particles, adverbials and constructions. The editors’ preface introduces connectivity as an object of linguistic research.

This book investigates phenomena at the grammar–discourse interface with a strong focus on discourse markers, whose development and concrete uses in a given language tend to be based on a close interplay of grammatical and discourse-related forces. The topics range from the transition of linguistic signs “out of” sentence grammar and “into” the domain of discourse to differences between more grammatical vs. more discourse-pragmatic expressions in terms of structural behavior and cognitive processing, and the different, intricate ways in which the usage conditions and meanings of grammatical constituents or structural units are affected by the discourse context in which they are used. The twelve studies in this book are based on fresh empirical data from languages such as English, Basque, Korean, Japanese and French and involve the study of linguistic expressions and structures such as pragmatic markers and particles, comment clauses, expletives, adverbial connectors, and expressives.