Focus, Coherence and Emphasis

Download or read book Focus, Coherence and Emphasis written by Paul Werth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1984, this book examines a number of questions on the boundary of competence and performance — whose solutions have implications for linguistic theory in general. In particular, the form of grammatical statements, the relationship between various rules of grammar, the interaction between sentence in a sequence, and the inferences to be drawn from linguistic behaviour to linguistic knowledge. The author argues that many grammatical processes, inadequately handled by conventional sentence-grammars, require a text grammar in which the basic constitutive processes of information and deixis can be specified. They ago further to investigate the novel hypothesis that emphatic structure provides a crucial condition for the application of transformational rules, paying particular attention to the ‘movement-rules’ using mostly data culled from actual usage.