Gunter Senft

Publications

Displaying 1 - 12 of 12
  • Senft, G. (2015). Tales from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea: Psycholinguistic and anthropological linguistic analyses of tales told by Trobriand children and adults. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate which topics and themes constitute the content of the stories, but also by the psycholinguistic and textlinguistic questions of how children acquire linearization and other narrative strategies, how they develop them and how they use them to structure these texts in an adult-like way. The tales are presented in morpheme-interlinear transcriptions with first textlinguistic analyses and cultural background information necessary to fully understand them. A summarizing comparative analysis of the texts from a psycholinguistic, anthropological linguistic and philological point of view discusses the underlying schemata of the stories, the means narrators use to structure them, their structural complexity and their cultural specificity. The e-book is made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
  • Senft, G. (2015). The Trobriand Islanders' concept of karewaga. In S. Lestrade, P. de Swart, & L. Hogeweg (Eds.), Addenda. Artikelen voor Ad Foolen (pp. 381-390). Nijmegen: Radboud University.
  • Senft, G., Östman, J.-O., & Verschueren, J. (Eds.). (2014). Culture and language use (Repr.). Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
  • Senft, G. (2014). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Routledge.

    Abstract

    Understanding Pragmatics takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide an accessible introduction to linguistic pragmatics. This book discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, social and interpersonal contexts, as well as to culture specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this book: • debates the core issues of pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, deixis, gesture, interaction strategies, ritual communication, phatic communion, linguistic relativity, ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, languages and social classes, and linguistic ideologies • incorporates examples from a broad variety of different languages and cultures • takes an innovative and transdisciplinary view of the field showing linguistic pragmatics has its predecessor in other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, ethology, ethnology, sociology and the political sciences. Written by an experienced teacher and researcher, this introductory textbook is essential reading for all students studying pragmatics.
  • Brown, P., Senft, G., & Wheeldon, L. (Eds.). (1992). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual report 1992. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
  • Levinson, S. C., Brown, P., Danzinger, E., De León, L., Haviland, J. B., Pederson, E., & Senft, G. (1992). Man and Tree & Space Games. In S. C. Levinson (Ed.), Space stimuli kit 1.2 (pp. 7-14). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.2458804.

    Abstract

    These classic tasks can be used to explore spatial reference in field settings. They provide a language-independent metric for eliciting spatial language, using a “director-matcher” paradigm. The Man and Tree task deals with location on the horizontal plane with both featured (man) and non-featured (e.g., tree) objects. The Space Games depict various objects (e.g. bananas, lemons) and elicit spatial contrasts not obviously lexicalisable in English.
  • Senft, G. (1992). Bakavilisi Biga - or: What happens to English words in the Kilivila Language? Language and Linguistics in Melanesia, 23, 13-49.
  • Senft, G. (1992). Das System der Klassifikationspartikeln im Kilivila: Habilitationsschrift vorgelegt für die Habilitation (Allgemeine Linguistik) im Fachbereich I - Kommunikations- und Geschichtswissenschaften der Technischen Universität Berlin. Mimeo: Berlin.

    Abstract

    German Version of (1996) Classificatory particles in Kilivila. New York: Oxford University Press
  • Senft, G. (1992). As time goes by..: Changes observed in Trobriand Islanders' culture and language, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. In T. Dutton (Ed.), Culture change, language change: Case studies from Melanesia (pp. 67-89). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
  • Senft, G. (1992). [Review of the book The Yimas language of New Guinea by William A. Foley]. Linguistics, 30, 634-639.
  • Senft, G. (1992). Everything we always thought we knew about space - but did not bother to question. Working Papers of the Cognitive Anthropology Research group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics, 10.
  • Senft, G. (1992). What happened to "the fearless tailor" in Kilivila: A European fairy tale - from the South Seas. Anthropos, 87, 407-421.

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