The foundation of most intellectual discourse is Western-centric to the exclusion of other views. This includes ideal patterns of social interaction, preference for aesthetic, accepted norms and values, and the concepts of dignity, respectability, morality and ethics. Such a position is culturally myopic. Western cultural influence colors all of them including moral precepts. The assumption is ...

Context is a central concept in the analysis of discourse and interaction in all the major research traditions in applied and sociolinguistics. Early linguistics did not display much sensitivity to it (Scollon, 1998, p. 80) and tended to study utterances in isolation and without reference to context. Today, however, there seems to be a general consensus around the idea that we understand uttera...

Information structure has been assumed to be an autonomous part of grammar for more than 100 years. It is represented as a partition of the sentence into two units, e.g., focus background, topic comment, focus topic, focus presupposition etc.1 Even though information structure is sometimes understood as textual or discourse structure, its organizational level is still defined with respect to th...

Discourse unfolds in time, giving rise to a cascade of belief changes in the listener. Yet this temporal evolution of discourse and belief is typically ignored in theoretical treatments of discourse. It has been claimed (see Soames Soames, 1989]) that Heim's Heim, 1983] theory of discourse context accounts for non-implicative discourse updating. We will present a new non-implicative discourse t...

The position that the structure of a language has an impact on the cognition of its speakers is a venerable, if controversial, one in both linguistics and anthropology (see Gumperz and Levinson 1996 and Lucy 1992 for recent overviews). Over the last 60 years, a wide range of theories about the relationship between language and thought have been developed and disputed. The theories that posit so...

BACKGROUND GP receptionists are the first point of contact with the NHS for most patients and have an important role in facilitating access to healthcare services. There is evidence that they are often perceived as impersonal, insensitive, or officious. AIM To analyse the communicative styles of GP receptionists when dealing with patients. DESIGN OF STUDY Ethnographically situated discourse...