Exemplifications, Selections and Argumentations: The Use of Example Markers in English and German

This linguistic research monograph focuses primarily on the uses of example markers or connectors in English (for example, for instance, such as etc.) and, to a lesser extent, in German ([so] zum Beispiel, beispielsweise etc.). It analyses these uses not only from a linguistics viewpoint (syntax, semantics, pragmatics, information and text structure, intonation) but also integrates issues of rhetoric, philosophy and, in particular, of argumentation theory. This approach leads to the distinction of three main uses of example markers - exemplification, selection, argumentation - and thus entails the abandonment of the traditional grammatical approach, which only recognizes exemplifying use, and of the more recent approach in computational linguistics, which only distinguishes selective use.