36.2206, Books: Discourse Structure and Narration: Demske, Bloom (eds.) (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2206. Fri Jul 18 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2206, Books: Discourse Structure and Narration: Demske, Bloom (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 17-Jul-2025
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [support at langsci-press.org]
Subject: Discourse Structure and Narration: Demske, Bloom (eds.) (2025)


Title: Discourse structure and narration
Subtitle: A diachronic view from Germanic
Series Title: Open Germanic Linguistics
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/503

Editor(s): Ulrike Demske, Barthe Bloom

eBook

Abstract:

The volume Discourse structure and narration: A diachronic view from
Germanic deals with questions of information structuring at discourse
level, focusing on narrative discourses. More precisely, it is about
the contribution of grammatical devices to the organization of texts
as well as their diagnostic potential for the narrative text type.
Although it is well-known that information packaging had a much
greater impact on the distribution of grammatical patterns in
historical stages of a language than it does today, so far many
studies on the relationship between information structure and
grammatical patterns do not go beyond the sentence level, in other
words, they do not take into account the possible influence of the
text type on the manifestation of certain grammatical patterns. How
and to which degree changes in grammatical patterns correlate or are
affected by changes in either discourse and/or narrative structure,
how the two layers interact with each other and affect each other, and
how such issues can be operationalized are still understudied. This
volume aims to shed more light on these issues by presenting eight
papers, which address these questions more or less explicitly. As the
research questions imply, the papers all take a historical or
diachronic perspective. Another commonality between the studies is
that they all focus on data from Germanic languages, as we assume that
by comparing closely related languages, the relationships in question
become more pronounced. Specifically, the languages in question are
German, Dutch, English and Icelandic. Understandably, the
contributions in this volume can only highlight some aspects of the
complex relationship between grammar and narration(s). Addressing
among others questions of narrative progression, temporal structure,
reference tracking and discourse functions, the contributions discuss
phenomena such as temporal adverbials at the left periphery as well as
later in the clause, left dislocation structures, fronting of the
finite verb in dependent and independent clauses, linguistic means to
express aspectual and tense information, and the distribution of
nominalization patterns across text types.

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis

Language Family(ies): Germanic

Written In: English (eng)



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