Presentation in Language

This book offers the first coherent theory of presentation in language, i.e. stylistic choices that are used to facilitate or influence the decoding of verbal messages in the spoken and the written medium. It explores systematically the relations between the abstract language system and its manifestations in speech and writing. Challenging the phonocentricity of many structuralist approaches, it argues for medium-independent word-forms and structures. These carriers of propositional and presentational information are supplemented by medium-dependent expression systems, notably intonation and typography, which present the medium-independent structure in concrete communicative settings.