Publications

Publication details [#48333]

Schneider, Klaus P. and Anne Barron, eds. 2008. Variational Pragmatics. A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 178). John Benjamins. vi+371 pp.
Publication type
Book – edited volume
Publication language
English
Language as a subject

Annotation

This collection of papers is designed to establish variational pragmatics. This new field is situated at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology and aims at systematically investigating the effect of macro-social pragmatic variation on language in action. As such, it challenges the widespread assumption in the area of pragmatics that language communities are homogeneous and also addresses the current research gap in sociolinguistics for variation on the pragmatic level. The introductory chapter establishes the rationale for studying variational pragmatics as a separate field of inquiry, systematically sketches the broader theoretical framework and presents a framework for further analysis. The papers which follow are located within this framework. They present empirical variational pragmatic research focusing on regional varieties of pluricentric languages. Speech acts and other discourse phenomena are addressed and analysed in a number of regional varieties of Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish.

Articles in this volume