New Title: Louwerse/van Peer

[Christopher Bell]

John Benjamins Publishing Company is pleased to announce the publication of
the following title in the field of Discourse Linguistics:

Thematics
Interdisciplinary Studies

Edited by Max Louwerse and Willie van Peer
University of Memphis / University of Munich

Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 3
2002. x, 448 pp.

United States and Canada: Hardbound: 1 58811 107 5 / USD 123.00
Rest of World: Hardbound: 90 272 3888 X / EUR 135.00

Themes play a central role in our everyday communication: we have to know
what a text is about in order to understand it. Intended meaning cannot be
understood without some knowledge of the underlying theme. This book helps
to define the concept of ‘themes’ in texts and how they are structured in
language use.
Much of the literature on Thematics is scattered over different disciplines
(literature, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science), which this
detailed collection pulls together in one coherent overview. The result is
a new landmark for the study and understanding of themes in their everyday
manifestation.

Table of Contents

Preface  ix
Introduction
     Max Louwerse and Willie van Peer  1
Part I. Structure and processing
Section 1. Theoretical approaches
1. Psychological and computational research on theme comprehension
     Arthur C. Graesser, Victoria J. Pomeroy and Scotty D. Craig  19
2. Situation models and themes
     Rolf A. Zwaan, Gabriel A. Radvansky and Shannon Whitten  35
3. Conditions of updating during reading
     Herre van Oostendorp, José Otero and Juan Miguel Campanario  55
Section 2. Experimental and corpus linguistic approaches
4. Evaluation devices as a coordinating mechanism for story points
     Yeshayahu Shen  77
5. Responding to style: cohesion, foregrounding, and thematic
interpretation
     Catherine Emmott  91
6. The definite article as cue to map thematic information
     Morton Ann Gernsbacher and Rachel Robertson  119
7. Thematic management in Korean narrative
     Myung-Hee Kim  137
Section 3. Computational approaches
8. On the notions of theme and topic in psychological process models of
text comprehension
     Walter Kintsch  157
9. Themes and hierarchical structure of written texts
     Elisabeth Le  171
10. Computational retrieval of themes
     Max Louwerse  189
Part II. Content and context
Section 1. Theoretical approaches
11. Thematics today
     Werner Sollors  217
12. Seven trends in recent thematics and a case study
     Bo Pettersson  237
13. Where do literary themes come from?
     Willie van Peer  253
14. Motives and motifs in visual thematics
     Georges Roque  265
Section 2. Interpretive approaches
15. Masking one’s themes: irony and the politics of indirectness
     Rachel Giora  283
16. Themes of nation
     Mette Hjort  301
17. The theme of war in contemporary German prose fiction
     Horst S. Daemmrich  321
18. Why themes matter: Literary knowledge and the thematic example of money
     Phillipp Wolf  341
Section 3. Computational approaches
19. Moving targets: The making and molding of a theme
     Robert Hogenraad  353
20. Quantitative hermeneutics: Inferring the meaning of narratives from
trends in context
     Colin Martindale and Alan N. West  377
21. Prototype effect versus rarity effect in literary style
     Paul A. Fortier  397
22. Parsing for the theme: A computer based approach
     Jan Christoph Meister  407
Author index  433
Subject index  443