Lieven Vandelanotte - Böcker

Internet memes have been studied widely for their role in establishing and maintaining social relationships, and shaping public opinion, online. However, they are also a prominent and fast evolving multimodal genre, one which calls for an in-depth linguistic analysis. This book, the first of its kind, develops the analytical tools necessary to describe and understand contemporary 'image-plus-text' communication. It demonstrates how memes achieve meaning as multimodal artifacts, how they are governed by specific rules of composition and interpretation, and how such processes are driven by stance networks. It also defines a family of multimodal constructions in which images become structural components, while making language forms adjust to the emerging multimodal rules. Through analysis of several meme types, this approach defines the specificity of the memetic genre, describing established types, but also accounting for creative forms. In describing the 'grammar of memes', it provides a new model to approach multimodal genres.

This volume aims to arrive at a fine-grained and grammar-based understanding of the notions of (inter-)subjectivity and (inter-)subjectification in their application to grammaticalization research. In terms of linguistic theory, position is taken vis-à-vis existing approaches to (inter-)subjectification which are either too narrow or too general by addressing two questions: (i) what is the relation between (inter-)subjectivity and pragmatics, and (ii) on what grounds can subjective and intersubjective meanings be distinguished?In the descriptive sections of the volume, these theoretical considerations are confronted with extensive analytical, and often also quantitative, study of empirical data mainly from English but also from Romance languages. The focus in these case studies is on the analytical and diachronic relations between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, with particular emphasis on the question how linguistic syntagms may shift towards the expression of meanings of which the hearer is an essential part. The domains covered include adverbials and modals, but also the noun phrase, to date a relatively under-researched area in grammaticalization studies. Together these three areas ensure broad verification of existing hypotheses about the relative order in which subjectification and intersubjectification take place.This volume is mainly of interest to researchers and graduate students with a special interest in subjectification, intersubjectification and grammaticalization, and with a general interest in language change. The volume will also be welcomed by functional linguists (in a broad sense), since it is the first to bring eclectic functionalists' reflections to bear so explicitly on grammaticalization.

This book aims to provide a new, linguistically grounded typology of speech and thought representation in English on the basis of the systematic study of deictic, syntactic and semantic properties of authentic examples drawn from literary as well as non-literary sources.In the area beyond direct and indirect speech or thought, ‘free indirect discourse’ has often been implicitly treated as a residual category that can accommodate anything that is neither one nor the other. This book takes a fresh look at the evidence in the area of deixis, particularly through a close study of pronoun and proper name use, and proposes to distinguish the more character-oriented free indirect type from a narrator-oriented ‘distancing’ indirect type, which is grammatically wholly structured from the narrator’s deictic standpoint. Unlike free indirect representations, which coherently represent the character’s viewpoint, the distancing indirect type sees narrators appropriating character discourse for their own purposes, which may for instance be ironic. The distinctions thus drawn shed new light on the much debated ‘dual voice’ approach to free indirect discourse. Included in the scope of this book are subjectified uses of clauses such as I think, which no longer primarily construe a cognition process, but rather come to function as hedges. Such speaker-encoding uses are argued to involve an interpersonal type of structure, not based on complementation, whereas the non-subjectified cases receive an interclausal complementation analysis which does not have recourse to the problematic notion of ‘reporting verb’.This monograph is mainly of interest to researchers and graduate students interested in the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of reported speech viewed from a constructional perspective.