Thematics: Interdisciplinary Studies

Front Cover
Max Louwerse, Willie Van Peer
John Benjamins Publishing, 2002 M01 1 - 448 pages
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.
 

Contents

Theoretical approaches
19
Situation models and themes
35
Conditions of updating during reading
55
Experimental and corpus linguistic approaches
77
cohesion foregrounding and thematic
91
The definite article as cue to map thematic information
119
Thematic management in Korean narrative
137
Computational approaches
157
Seven trends in recent thematics and a case study
237
Where do literary themes come from?
253
Interpretive approaches
283
Themes of nation
301
The theme of war in contemporary German prose fiction
321
Literary knowledge
341
Inferring the meaning of narratives
377
Prototype effect versus rarity effect in literary style
397

Themes and hierarchical structure of written texts
171
Computational retrieval of themes
189
Content and context
217
Author index
433
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Page 430 - Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything...

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