LUCL Colloquium 29 October 2010

Prof. Bernd Heine (Universität Köln/Institut für Afrikanistik) will give a presentation. He has done extensive research on African languages. His work covers aspects such as grammaticalization, typology, contact linguistics, descriptive linguistics and language history.

Abstract

Elements of discourse grammar
Most frameworks of linguistic analysis tend to highlight phenomena of language use and/or language knowledge such as sentence and word structure, while backgrounding or ignoring other phenomena that tend to be considered to be of more marginal interest for the linguist. Among the latter there are information units such as conceptual parentheticals, formulae of social exchange, interjections, etc. Such units do not conform to canonical principles of sentence grammar but, as is argued in this talk, they play an important role in discourse organization, rather than being located at the periphery of language use.

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