This paper reviews the role of discourse in law and public life and identifies threats to the polity from malicious forms of communication In addition to its role in legal argument, communication is fundamental to public debate in the formation of laws and policies, and it constitutes the social and political fabric through the use of forms of address and recognition of others This argument builds on aspects of discourse theory and feminist and other critiques of it that suggest that it applies to a narrow community of discourse, and so excludes other cultures It takes a broad view of participants in public debate, which necessarily crosses national and cultural borders Responsible communication demands that we argue in good faith, truthfully and coherently, and that we recognize our partners in discussion, both for who they are and for their place in a shared community The paper argues that public discourse has sunk to dangerous levels in the present century, citing examples of bad faith, provocation and insult from Australian prime ministers (2002, 2015) and presidential candidates in France (2005) and the United States (2016) It concludes that lying, incoherence, self-contradiction, insult and injury fall outside the bounds of public discourse Rapid communicative intervention is needed to identify each of these malicious forms of communication as a betrayal of the civic public, before it provokes the next vicious response

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Problèmes de linguistique générale

Law and Argument for a Culturally Diverse World: How not to Communicate

Samuel Beckett, in his famous letter to Axel Kaun, denounced grammar as "irrelevant," yet the third novel of the Trilogy, L'Innommable, is characterized by a style that frequently mimics the forms and formulations of the grammar drill. This article examines the function of such grammatical formalism in the context of the speaker's sense of imprisonment within an alien and alienating language and argues that Beckett here makes use of the discourse of language learning for subversive intent. The ostensible function of grammar is to prevent confusion, to ensure clarity; in L'Innommable, however, repetition and rote learning tend to empty words of meaning, and the grammar drill is as much a source of confusion as of clarity. Indeed, as this article demonstrates, Beckett in this novel might be seen to be subverting grammatical form not only to undermine language, but in order to work towards his aim "[t]o find a form that accommodates the mess."

Imperfect Mastery:The Failure of Grammar in Beckett'sL'Innommable

Structuralist and poststructuralist psychoanalytic and Marxist theories

This contribution explores the role of discourse markers in signaling enunciative responsibility (ER) (i.e. a mechanism that allows evaluating the degree of authorship displayed in texts) in a particular genre – Portuguese stand-up comedy. The research is situated within Text Linguistics; specifically, on Textual Analysis of Discourses (Adam 2008). The main interest lies within the scope of markers of ER, which attribute different points of view (PoV) to various parts of texts and include three categories: marker-mediators (“de acordo com” according to, “segundo” conforming to, etc.), markers of reformulation (“isto e” that is, “em outras palavras” in other words, etc.), and markers of conversational structure (“bom” well, “voce ve/tu ves” you see, “voce sabe/tu sabes” you know, etc.). Applying both quantitative and qualitative methods to a collected corpus, not only are the frequency and the distribution of different categories of markers of ER analyzed, but the equivalence of the degree of responsibility in all the three categories is questioned. The results of the analysis show an uneven distribution among the three categories of discourse markers of ER: while the markers of conversational structure are highly present in the oral data, marker-mediators are almost absent. The paper then looks at the category of ER in terms of qualitative analysis, and verifies that for marker-mediators the responsibility is not assumed by the comedian, while in the case of the markers of reformulation there is a partial assumption of responsibility. As for the markers of conversational structure, although all the three categories are included in the group called “markers of ER”, conversational structure is less perceivable and would benefit from a recategorization or another theory to account for it.

/pdf/discourse-markers-of-enunciative-responsibility-in-4pv3r6jji6.pdf

Discourse markers of enunciative responsibility in Portuguese stand-up comedy

This dissertation challenges the commonly held belief that subject pronouns are always optional in the Romance languages. Through empirical data collected on Brazilian Portuguese, European Peninsular Spanish, Catalan, European Portuguese, Italian, and Puerto Rican Spanish, it investigates the effects of gender, number, and person as distinguishing features between antecedents; the topichood of the antecedent; the distance between a subject and its antecedent; and gender-inherent predicates, on the obligatoriness of overt subject pronouns. There are four primary goals of this work. First, it surveys a selected sample of treatments of the pro-drop phenomenon in various grammars and syntactic textbooks to examine the extent to which the claim that subject pronouns are never required has pervaded discussions of Romance null subject usage. Second, it attempts to show how several phenomena that could be expected to affect pro-drop, such as grammatical relations, thematic roles, the animacy hierarchy, and distinguishing verbal desinences, do not in fact have any direct relevance. Third, it offers a systematic account, modelled primarily on work done by Samek-Lodovici (1996) and Cole (2000), of when overt subject pronouns are required in the various linguistic environments of the six Romance varieties under consideration. Fourth, it proposes, based on the data provided, that Optimality Theory (OT) is the best approach in which to describe Romance null subjecthood. It is argued that the traditional Principles and Parameters Theory (PPT) framework, in both its Government and Binding (GB) and Minimalist Program (MP) formats, is largely inadequate in explaining the microvariation witnessed in Romance subject pronoun requirements, both language-internally and cross-linguistically. Whereas the customary approach in PPT is to label languages as either [+pro-drop] or [-pro-drop], it is asserted that a more accurate representation of the null subject phenomenon is achieved in OT by postulating that the various interactions of the competing core constraints DROP and PARSE are best able to reflect the observed differences in overt subject pronoun usage. This is particularly evident intralinguistically, but is equally true of inter-linguistic comparisons as well.

Explaining the null subject in the Romance languages: finding a suitable framework.

Communication using symbols (such as words) structured with grammar

Problèmes de linguistique générale

Citations

Law and Argument for a Culturally Diverse World: How not to Communicate

Imperfect Mastery:The Failure of Grammar in Beckett'sL'Innommable

Structuralist and poststructuralist psychoanalytic and Marxist theories

Discourse markers of enunciative responsibility in Portuguese stand-up comedy

Explaining the null subject in the Romance languages: finding a suitable framework.

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