Conditional structures lie at the heart of the sciences, humanities, and everyday reasoning. This is why conditional logics - logics specifically designed to account for natural language conditionals - are an active, interdisciplinary area. Discussing a wide range of topics, this book gives a formal and a philosophical account of indicative and counterfactual conditionals in terms of Chellas-Segerberg semantics.

This book explores communication in emergency call and response centers, taking an approach drawn from Conversation Analysis to examine how call-takers answer calls and the ways in which dispatch is issued in different contexts. It offers an original contribution to the study of the organization of emergency calls, the ways such calls are treated, and some of the practical problems that emerge when dealing with them. The author offers a systematic review of studies in the international field of the organization of emergency calls, while at the same time providing fresh case studies, illustrated with empirical materials, taken from audio- and video- recordings of the everyday activities of call and response centers. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social interaction and may be appreciated by all scholars and practitioners working on the social management of emergency situations, including in fields such as Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics.

This book explores heterogeneity in the Indian academic setting. Presenting a study on the performance of Bachelor of Engineering students from various parts of the county, it analyzes the subjects' language skills on the basis of selected sociolinguistic variables and examines the possible role/impact of using multiple languages in the communicative setting described. In turn, the book investigates the differences between the way language is viewed in the Orient and in the Western world, and how, despite their differences, these views lead to similar language teaching methods in both worlds. It also highlights the limitations of current theories and frameworks in terms of accommodating modern methods of assessing language skills. Addressing socio-pragmatic issues in terms of English proficiency and language assessment, it is the first book to offer such a focused and detailed discussion of these varied but related issues, making it a valuable resource for all scholars and researchers working in the areas of socio-pragmatics, language assessment, and intercultural communication.

Critics shudder at mixed metaphors like 'that wet blanket is a loose cannon', but admire 'Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player', and all the metaphors packed into Macbeth's 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow' speech. How is it that metaphors are sometimes mixed so badly and other times put together so well? In Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse, Karen Sullivan employs findings from linguistics and cognitive science to explore how metaphors are combined and why they sometimes mix. Once we understand the ways that metaphoric ideas are put together, we can appreciate why metaphor combinations have such a wide range of effects. Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse includes analyses of over a hundred metaphors from politicians, sportspeople, writers and other public figures, and identifies the characteristics that make these metaphors annoying, amusing or astounding.

By reconceptualizing successful communication in a foreign language as an enjoyable and uplifting experience, this volume moves beyond a focus on grammatical accuracy and fluency to foreground the ways in which foreign language learners can be encouraged to build on previous achievements and communicative successes in the target language and so develop confidence, commitment and cross-cultural relational ability. Building on Mugford's previous volume, Addressing Difficult Situations in Foreign-Language Learning (2019), this text draws on grounded qualitative data collected through questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and conversations with Spanish-speaking learners of English, to illustrate how learners' experiences and insights can be used to inform a productive pedagogy centred around language users' communicative objectives and interactional successes. Chapters highlight bilingual speakers' conscious language use, practices and choices in the target language and the reasons and implications for such deliberate communicative practices and relational behaviour. In doing so, Mugford is able to outline a critical relational pedagogy designed to better equip language learners with the confidence and pragmatic resources they require to engage in positive cross-cultural relational work. As a valuable, student-centred contribution to teaching and learning of modern foreign languages, this volume will be key reading for researchers, scholars and educators with an interest in language education, TESOL, World Language teaching and Applied Linguistics.

"The Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics" addresses the interface between the two disciplines and offers a platform to scholars who combine both methodologies to present rigorous and interdisciplinary findings about language in real use. Corpus linguistics and Pragmatics have traditionally represented two paths of scientific thought, parallel but often mutually exclusive and excluding. Corpus Linguistics can offer a meticulous methodology based on mathematics and statistics, while Pragmatics is characterized by its effort in the interpretation of intended meaning in real language. This series will give readers insight into how pragmatics can be used to explain real corpus data and also, how corpora can illustrate pragmatic intuitions.

The present volume, "Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2014: New Empirical and Theoretical Paradigms in Corpus Pragmatics, " proposes innovative research models in the liaison between pragmatics and corpus linguistics to explain language in current cultural and social contexts.

This collection calls greater attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the role of discourse in the process of placemaking in the digital age and the increasing hybridisation of physical and virtual worlds. The volume outlines a new conceptualisation of place in the time of smartphones, whose technological and social affordances evoke placemaking as a collaborative endeavour which allows users to create and maintain a sense of community around place as shareable or collective experience. Taken together, chapters argue for a greater emphasis on the ways in which users employ discourse to manage this physical-virtual interface in digital interactions and in turn, produce "remixed" cultural practices that draw on diverse digital semiotic resources and reflect their everyday experiences of place and location. The book explores a wide range of topics and contexts which embody these dynamics, including livestreaming platforms, mourning in the digital age, e-service encounters, and Internet forums. While the overlay of physical and virtual information on location-based media is not a new phenomenon, this volume argues that, in the face of its increasing pervasiveness, we can better understand its unfolding and future directions for research by accounting for the significance of place in today's interactions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in discourse analysis, digital communication, pragmatics, and media studies.

This volume takes up the challenge of surveying the present state of a variety of approaches to the identification, analysis and interpretation of metaphor across communication channels, situational contexts, genres and social spheres. It reflects three foremost trends of present metaphor research, namely the communicative approach, the cognitive modelling approach and the multimodality approach. These trends are considered as areas of research emerging on the ground of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, initiated by Lakoff. The book intends to show their concomitances as well as mark their diversifying paths. The aim is to bring about and make apparent the many connections among assumingly different trends stemming from CMT. Whereas discrepancies between communicative and conceptual perspectives might seem irredeemable, the book emphasizes and claims that the background framework of CMT provides a solid foundation for collaboration and mutual influence. Consequently, the analysis of metaphor usage in context may provide insights for cognitive modelling proposals. The analysis of cognitive configuration of conceptual domains may, in turn, illuminate our understanding of communicative decisions in discourse. The integration of multimodal metaphor analysis puts forward the idea that diverse modal manifestations of metaphor reveal the symbiosis between communicative and cognitive stances. The various subject areas and methodologies illuminate the scene of current research in the field. The poignant contributions open far reaching avenues into the realm of human thought and discourse.

Atypical demonstratives have not received adequate attention in the literature so far, or have even been completely neglected. By providing fresh insights and discussing new facets, this volume contributes to the better understanding of this group of words, starting from specific empirical phenomena, and advances our knowledge of the various properties of demonstratives, their syntactic multi-functionality, semantic feature specifications and pragmatic functions. In addition, some of the papers discuss different grammaticalization processes involving demonstratives, in particular how and from which lexical and morphosyntactic categories they originate cross-linguistically, and which semantic or pragmatic mechanisms play which role in their emergence. As such, the different contributions guide the readers on an adventurous journey into the realm of different exotic species of demonstratives, whose peculiar properties offer new exiting insights into the complex nature of demonstrative expressions themselves.

This book deals with intercultural pragmatics and how both nonnative teachers (NNTs) and native teachers (NTs) may enhance their classroom instruction regarding target language (TL) pragmatics. It focuses primarily on the experiences of instructors as they teach their learners about the pragmatics of the TL, both in second and foreign language learning settings. It makes clear that there are aspects of teaching pragmatics where it may help to be an NT and other areas where it may help to be an NNT and proposes creative ideas that both sets of teachers may draw on to compensate for gaps in their knowledge. Further themes in the book include ideas for motivating students who want to learn about pragmatics, the role of technology in teaching and learning pragmatics, the role of learning strategies, the assessment of pragmatics and ways to research pragmatics. The book will be of interest to teachers, teacher educators and students interested in researching and improving the teaching of pragmatics.

This book introduces ideas about word meaning in the context of law. It analyzes cases from common law jurisdictions that concern the meaning, definition and legal status of individual words, labels and categories. The focus is on the question of how law assigns authority over word meaning in different circumstances and in different domains of law.

The realization of information structural units has been intriguing as information packaging has reflections in the semantic, pragmatic, syntactic and prosodic domains. This book extends the investigation by bringing data from all these domains and presenting an analysis for the model of grammar. Based on three-way classification for information packaging, semantic investigation presents insights on compositionality and positional restrictions for topic, focus and discourse anaphoric phrases. The prosodic experimental studies reveal how focus shapes prosody and how diverse languages encode such information packaging. Drawing on the findings of experimental studies reflecting the interaction of information structure with quantifier scope, negation and aspectual markers,clause internal functional projections and scope domains are proposed in the syntactic analysis. The analysis offers new perspectives for movement operations, functional categories, phases which are central themes for the Minimalist Program. Building on the investigation of information structure within semantic, prosodic, syntactic perspectives, the book will appeal to researchers working on either of these domains or their interfaces.

This book tackles the interface between translation and pragmatics. It comprises case studies in English, Greek, Russian and Chinese translation practice, which highlight the potential of translation to interact with pragmatics and reshape meaning making in a target language in various pragmatically relevant ways. Fiction and non-fiction genres merge to suggest a rich inventory of interlingual transfer instances which can broaden our perception of what may be shifting in translation transfer. Authors use an emic approach (in addition to an etic one) to confirm results which they often present graphically. The book has a didactic perspective in that it shows how pragmatic awareness can regulate translator behaviour and is also useful in foreign language teaching, because it shows how important implicit knowledge can be, in shaping the message in a foreign language.

This volume comprises a selection of contributions to the theorizing about argumentation that have been presented at the 9th conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), held in Amsterdam in July 2018. The chapters included provide a general theoretical perspective on central topics in argumentation theory, such as argument schemes and the fallacies. Some contributions concentrate on the treatment of the concept of conductive argument. Other contributions are dedicated to specific issues such as the justification of questions, the occurrence of mining relations, the role of exclamatives, argumentative abduction, eudaimonistic argumentation and a typology of logical ways to counter an argument. In a number of cases the theoretical problems addressed are related to a specific type of context, such as the burden of proof in philosophical argumentation, the charge of committing a genetic fallacy in strategic manoeuvring in philosophy, the necessity of community argument, and connection adequacy for arguments with institutional warrants. The volume offers a great deal of diversity in its breadth of coverage of argumentation theory and wide geographic representation from North and South America to Europe and China.

Obana and Haugh question the extent to which commonly accepted theories in pragmatics can readily explain sociopragmatic phenomena in Japanese. Studies of Japanese in pragmatics have often challenged the cross-linguistic relevance of dominant theories. However, they have also inadvertently perpetuated stereotypes about the Japanese. It is often been assumed, for instance, that Japanese people are less strategic, more polite and more reliant on tacit forms of communication than speakers of other languages. But the Japanese are not as polite as one might think. The aim of this book is thus to question those folk assumptions around politeness, impoliteness, irony and indirectness while at the same time emphasizing that close examination of sociopragmatic phenomena in Japanese yields important empirical insights that combat common theoretical assumptions in pragmatics. The content is structured in three parts, in which the authors highlight a key building block of a theory of sociopragmatics. Part I focuses on indexing through the lens of chapters on honorifics, routine formula and politeness strategies. Part II focuses on evaluating through the lens of chapters on giving/receiving expressions and honorific irony. Finally, Part III focuses on relating through the lens of chapters on joint utterances and off record requests. Throughout the chapters the authors draw attention to ways in which these three dimensions are invariably intertwined in various ways. This book is not simply a collection of studies that promotes our understanding of the sociopragmatics of a particular language, but goes deeper and challenges what many have taken for granted in pragmatics. It proposes a framework for exploring sociopragmatic phenomena, building on the key sociopragmatic axes of indexing, evaluating and relating, and offers fresh new perspectives on time-honoured phenomena in pragmatics. It will interest scholars and postgraduate students in pragmatics, particularly those specializing in: politeness, impoliteness, indirectness and irony. The book explains what Japanese terms mean, and all the Japanese examples are morphologically-glossed. Therefore, teachers (and advanced learners) of Japanese at all levels will benefit from the book as it will enrich their knowledge of the Japanese language.

This book explores the use of discourse markers - lexical items where drawing a distinction between propositional and non-propositional, syntactically-semantically integrated and discourse-pragmatic uses is especially relevant. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, descriptive and critical (CDA) perspectives, and manual annotation and automatized analyses, the author argues that Discourse Markers (DMs) cannot be effectively studied in isolation, but must instead be contextualised with reference to other discourse-pragmatic devices and their language and genre backgrounds. This book will be of interest to students and academics working in the fields of DM research and critical discourse studies, and will also appeal to scholars working in areas such as genre studies, second language acquisition (SLA), literary analysis, contemporary cinematography, Tolkien scholarship, and Bible studies.

This innovative book examines the discourse of reality television, and the elasticity of language in the popular talent show The Voice from a cross-cultural perspective. Analysing how and why elastic language is used in persuasion and comforting, a comparison between Chinese and English is made, and the authors highlight the special role that elastic language plays in effective interactions and strategic communication. Through the lens of the language variance of two of the world's most commonly spoken languages, the insights and resources provided by this book are expected to advance knowledge in the fields of contrastive pragmatics and cross-cultural communication, and inform strategies in bridging different cultures. This study highlights the need to give the elastic use of language the attention it deserves, and reveals how language is non-discrete and strategically stretchable. This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students engaged in elastic/vague language studies, cross-cultural pragmatics, media linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and communication studies.

This book provides a refreshingly new perspective for investigating linguistic texts, which foregrounds models of the human. It presents a close reading of major linguistic theories in the twentieth century with a focus on three main themes: linguistic system and the individual speaker; social order; and linguistic creativity. The examination of these three fundamental themes concerning language and human nature, on the one hand, provides a fine-textured exposition on the implicit and explicit models of human nature endorsed by major theorists; on the other, it reveals the methodological dilemmas faced by linguistics. In light of the fact that the importance of considering posthumanist ideas is increasingly being underscored today, both within and outside linguistics, this focus on the human makes the book highly topical.

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world's languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque.

Communicative competence is an essential language skill, the ability to adjust language use according to specific contexts and to employ knowledge and strategies for successful communication. This unique text offers a multidisciplinary, critical, state-of-the-art research overview for this skill in second language learners. Expert contributors from around the world lay out the history of the field, then explore a variety of theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and empirical findings, and authoritatively set the agenda for future work. With a variety of helpful features like discussion questions, recommended further reading, and suggestions for practice, this book will be an invaluable resource to students and researchers of applied linguistics, education, psychology, and beyond.

This book offers a systematic, bottom-up account of irony across both everyday contexts and literary and linguistic texts, using an empirically rigorous approach in distinguishing between central irony, non-central ironies, and non-ironies and highlighting a new way forward for irony research. The volume considers the current landscape of irony, in which the term is used with increasing frequency with the knock-on effect of a loosening of its meaning. Pattison addresses this challenge by applying a systematic form of analysis, rooted in frameworks from pragmatics and complementary disciplines, to a database of over 500 irony candidates from a wide range of sources. The book uses these examples to illustrate the features of central ironies as well as the attributes used to differentiate between central ironies, non-central ironies, and non-ironies. These attributes are mapped across four key domains, including: difference and opposition; the role of context; how ironies are signaled; and speaker attitude and intention. Taken together, the volume puts forth a credible account for more clearly characterizing examples of irony and equips researchers with a comprehensive step-by-step method for undertaking future research. This book is key reading for scholars in stylistics, pragmatics, literary studies, and psycholinguistics.

This book examines how foreign language speakers establish and maintain social and transactional relationships in their target language, and how pedagogic intervention can help learners implement practices that will allow them to participate and react in both socially acceptable and individualistically empowering ways. Arguing that 'doing' foreign-language politeness and culture does not simply involve the indiscriminate and uncritical adoption and implementation of target-language patterns and practices, the author advocates instead for active, judicious and even critical social action. As such, the book presents a dynamic and vibrant dimension to target language politeness and cultural practices, demonstrating that raising learners' critical language awareness in identifying productive communicative resources and assets can lead to successful interpersonal and transactional communication. Building on this notion of a 'positive' pedagogy, Halliday's model of ideational, interpersonal and textual is utilised as a framework for exploring how foreign language users can approach target language politeness in terms of prosocial, interpersonal and contested politeness, with reference to a study of Mexican speakers of English as a foreign language. Heightening awareness of foreign language politeness patterns and practices, as well as presenting knowledge and resources for overcoming challenges and accentuating benefits of a nuanced learning scheme for politeness in foreign language, this book will appeal to language educators, researchers and bilingual speakers. It will also benefit those working across pragmatics, sociolinguistics, TESOL, cultural studies.

This book contains papers that were written to honor Professor Lyn Frazier on the occasion of her retirement from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Some were presented at the Lynschrift on May 19-20, 2018; others were written especially for this volume. The papers report original research on, or research-based theoretical analyses of, several of the domains that Professor Frazier contributed to during her career. The volume begins with a brief overview of Professor Frazier's research contributions and an appreciation of the contributions she has made to the field of psycholinguistics and to her students and colleagues. The next several chapters discuss the roles that prosody plays in language processing, and the volume continues with chapters on the topic that established Professor Frazier as a major psycholinguistic theorist, syntactic processing. The volume then explores the roles semantics and pragmatics play in language comprehension, and concludes with reports of applications and extensions of research on language processing. All chapters were contributed by current and former students and colleagues of Professor Frazier in gratitude for the impact she has had on their lives and careers.

This book illustrates the potential of Relevance Theory (RT) in offering a cognitive-pragmatic, cause-effect account of translation and interpreting (T&I), one which more closely engages T&I activity with the mental processes of speakers, listeners, writers, and readers during communicative acts. The volume provides an overview of the cognitive approach to communication taken by RT, with a particular focus on the distinction between explicit and implicit content and the relationship between thoughts and utterances. The book begins by outlining key concepts and theory in RT pragmatics and charting the development of their disciplinary relationship with work from T&I studies. Chapters draw on practical examples from a wide range of T&I contexts, including news media, scientific materials, literary translation, audiovisual translation, conference interpreting, and legal interpreting. The book also explores the myriad applications of RT pragmatics-inspired work and future implications for translation and interpreting research. This volume will be of interest to scholars in T&I studies and pragmatics.

Heidegger characterizes the relationship between language and Being as "language is the house of Being", negating the idea that language is merely a tool ready to be used at hand. Drawing on this idea, as well as ideas from anthropology, pragmatics, and folklore studies, the author argues that "language is the last homestead of human beings", meaning that mankind lives within language, has to live within language, and lives in formulaic speech events. The author takes Western classic works on the philosophy of language and his own insights of language use, rooted in traditional Chinese culture, in order to develop his own localized theory. In this title, the author explores the philosophical aspect of man's survival by presenting day-to-day exchange routines such as weddings and fortune-telling dialogues in the Chinese context. Awarded the first prize for Academic Excellence in Philosophy and Social Sciences in Guangdong Province, and second prize in the second Xu Guozhang Award for Foreign Language Studies, this is a must-read for researchers interested in philosophy of language and pragmatics.