Sentence and Discourse Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics Series, Vol. 60

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.

Jacqueline Guéron is Emeritus Professor at the Université Paris 3. She holds a Ph.D in French Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and a Doctorat d'Etat from the Université Paris 7. She has co-edited a number of works on subjects dealing with syntax and construal, most recently on tense, modality, and Creole syntax. She is co-author, with Liliane Haegeman, of English Grammar: A Generative Perspective (Wiley-Blackwell 1999), and, with Jacqueline Lecarme, of Time and Modality (Springer, 2008). Her publications are devoted to sentence grammar - extraposition, focus, anaphora, inalienable possession, tense, aspect, and modality - as well as to language and literature, including literary criticism, metrical theory and Free Indirect Discourse.