English Discourse Markers of Reformulation

This book deals with the notion of reformulation and more specifically with a group of lexico-grammatical units which help codify and signal the activity of reformulation in English. While discourse markers in English have been described in detail, the area of reformulation is a relatively unexplored area in comparison with languages such as French or Spanish. In this respect, this book has been conceived as a contribution to the field of Discourse Markers and in particular to the markers that help display the function of reformulation in English. First of all, a definition of the notion of reformulation is provided as a necessary precondition for the elaboration of a taxonomy of English reformulators. These are grouped into different classes and sub-classes on the basis of the type of reformulation effected. Thus, four main types are identified: Expansion, Modification, Reassessment and Compression. After an inductive and interpretive analysis of examples taken from the British National Corpus (BNC), the syntactic and distributional properties of these units, as well as their environments of use are described and discussed.

Autorentext

The Author: Maria Milagros Del Saz Rubio is a lecturer in English at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain). She received her Ph.D. in 2003 in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Valencia (Spain). Her main areas of specialization are in the field of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, especially in the area of reformulation, both in English and Spanish. She is an active member of the Spanish research project «Diccionario de Partículas Discursivas del Español», and is currently working on the translation of several of the Spanish reformulators.

Zusammenfassung
«...the book presents a valuable contribution to the study of discourse markers of reformulation. With its clear classification of English reformulators and the systematic presentation of naturally occurring examples (except for the Reassessment group) it gives a good way of orientation in the vast space of reformulation markers and will serve as an excellent reference source for further theoretical studies, as well as for related work in applied and computational linguistics.» (Katja Jasinskaja, Linguist List)

Inhalt

Contents: Reformulation - Discourse markers - Discourse Analysis - Classes of reformulators.