01 / Reading Guide
Reading Guide
Who this book is for
For graduate linguists and advanced students studying the grammar-discourse interface. The volume offers a specialised discourse-analysis route. It is useful when a form’s spatial meaning does not explain its use in conversation or narrative, and when an analysis must account for participants’ shared knowledge and attention.
Prerequisites
Syntax, semantics and pragmatics are recommended, with experience reading glossed examples and connected discourse. A basic understanding of deixis and reference tracking is especially useful. The collection assumes enough linguistic training to compare analytical categories across languages rather than translate every form directly into English this or that.
What it covers
Twelve chapters compare demonstratives across languages from several regions and families, including manner expressions, recognition, reference shifts, contrast and clause linking. Some contributions investigate non-deictic functions that cannot be reduced to physical distance. The cross-linguistic design helps separate a general discourse problem from the particular forms a language uses to solve it.
How to use it
Begin with the introduction and one language chapter. Annotate each demonstrative in a short passage with its referent, prior mention, contrast and interactional context. Compare your analysis with another chapter using different data, and ask whether the same functional label requires the same evidence. Include cases that resist your preferred classification. Explain what a connected passage reveals that isolated elicited sentences would miss before proposing a general pattern.
Edition and sources
The publisher’s complete volume and PDF identify the 2020 book, PDF ISBN 9783961102860 and CC BY 4.0. Catalogue fields show different 2020 release dates; no exact day is asserted here. It is a research collection, with methods and assumptions to assess chapter by chapter.
