21.4291, Diss: Disc Analysis: Nir: 'Clause Packages as Constructions in ...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-21-4291. Thu Oct 28 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.4291, Diss: Disc Analysis: Nir: 'Clause Packages as Constructions in ...'

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1)
Date: 26-Oct-2010
From: Bracha Nir [bnir at univ.haifa.ac,il]
Subject: Clause Packages as Constructions in Developing Narrative Discourse
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2010 10:06:41
From: Bracha Nir [bnir at univ.haifa.ac,il]
Subject: Clause Packages as Constructions in Developing Narrative Discourse

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Institution: Tel-Aviv University 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2008 

Author: Bracha Nir

Dissertation Title: Clause Packages as Constructions in Developing Narrative
Discourse 

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     Hebrew (heb)


Dissertation Director(s):
Ruth A. Berman

Dissertation Abstract:

The study investigates the interaction between form and function in constructing
the cohesive texture of personal-experience narrative texts from a multi-faceted
perspective.  To this end, quantitative, functionally-motivated analyses are
applied to the linguistic domains of referential choice, syntactic connectivity,
temporal organization, and narrative informativeness. Each of the four domains
is analyzed within and across the boundaries of 'Clause Packages', detailed and
specified as an innovative unit of discourse segmentation. The Clause Package is
a discourse construct evolving out of Berman and Slobin's (1994) insight that 'a
skillful narrative does not simply consist of a linear chain of successive
events? Rather, events must be packaged into hierarchical constructions' (p.
13). In my analysis, the Clause Package constitutes a holistic unit of text that
reflects both the syntactic and logico-temporal relations between clauses - as
clearly defined units of semantic content and syntactic structure - as well as
how information is packaged in a given piece of discourse.

The study devolves around an extensive database of 312 authentic (unpublished
and non-edited) personal-experience narrative texts. Carefully controlled
methods of data elicitation focused the entire database of texts around the
shared, socially relevant discourse topic of 'problems between people'.  These
features of the corpus used for analysis yielded a database that enabled
detailed empirical examination of the key research questions confronted in the
study.  This took the form of qualitative, functionally motivated analyses
supported by extensive quantitative investigations, which were applied to
parallel corpora of speaker-writers in two different languages (Hebrew and
English) and four different age-groups (from middle childhood to adulthood).
Importantly, the study employs these carefully comparable language samples as a
basis for application of psycholinguistically motivated, explicit, and
operationalizable criteria for the conceptual units of analysis. 

The segments of text specified in this study include two major units of
analysis:  the clause as previously shown to be a viable element for linguistic
analysis in different languages, genres, and modalities - here re-analyzed and
re-defined in fully explicit terms for both Hebrew and English;  and the Clause
Package as a unit devised and motivated specifically in the present context. The
notion of Clause Packages is based on an innovative typology of clause-combining
relations, taking into account criteria of levels of assertion (Cristofaro,
2003), dependency (Lyons, 1968; Halliday, 1994), and integration (Givón, 1980;
1990). A range of analyses across the domains focused on in the study reveal
these criteria as both cross-modally and cross-linguistically robust elements of
analysis.

The study characterizes these units of discourse as 'constructions', in the
sense this term is used in current advances in the framework of Construction
Grammar, relating them to patterns of usage in text-embedded contexts. The
analyses it provides of form-function patterns of usage reveal consistent
relationships between clauses and between Clause Packages. Taken together, they
motivate a particularly challenging proposal emerging from this study: that
Clause Packages are themselves constituents of an even larger construction - the
(narrative) text as a whole.





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