This book deals with synchronic variation in Chinese through a diachronic lens, based on the evidence from a quantitative, longitudinal corpus study. Departing from the traditional analysis in diachronic changes in Chinese linguistics, the cognitive constructionist approach employed in this book is able to capture incremental changes by combining syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Topics such as word order, focus, scopes of quantifiers, information structure, and negation have been important issues in linguistics, but they are rarely integrated as a whole. The book makes their diachronic interactions available to the students and researchers in the fields of general and Chinese linguistics.

Cognitive linguists and biblical and patristic scholars have recently given more attention to the presence of conceptual blends in early Christian texts, yet there has been so far no comprehensive study of the general role of conceptual blending as a generator of novel meanings in early Christianity as a religious system with its own identity. This monograph points in that direction and is a cognitive linguistic exploration of pastoral metaphors in a wide range of patristic texts, presenting them as variants of THE CHURCH IS A FLOCK network. Such metaphors or blends, rooted in the Bible, were used by Patristic writers to conceptualize a great number of particular notions that were constitutive for the early church, including the responsibilities of the clergy and the laity, morality and penance, church unity, baptism and soteriology. This study shows how these blends became indispensable building blocks of a new religious system and explains the role of conceptual blending in this process. The book is addressed to biblical and patristic scholars interested in a new, unifying perspective for various strands of early Christian thought and to cognitive linguists interested in the role of conceptual integration in religious language. Produced with the support of the Faculty of Philology, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

This book traces the development of the ideal of sincerity from its origins in Anglo-Saxon monasteries to its eventual currency in fifteenth-century familiar letters. Beginning by positioning sincerity as an ideology at the intersection of historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, the author demonstrates how changes in the relationship between outward expression and inward emotions changed English language and literature. While the early chapters reveal that the notion of sincerity was a Christian intervention previously absent from Germanic culture, the latter part of the book provides more focused studies of contrition and love. In doing so, the author argues that under the rubric of courtesy these idealized emotions influenced English in terms of its everyday pragmatics and literary style. This fascinating volume will be of broad interest to scholars of medieval language, literature and culture.

Although there is no shortage of definitions for pragmatics the received wisdom is that 'pragmatics' simply cannot be coherently defined. In this groundbreaking book Mira Ariel challenges the prominent definitions of pragmatics, as well as the widely-held assumption that specific topics - implicatures, deixis, speech acts, politeness - naturally and uniformly belong on the pragmatics turf. She reconstitutes the field, defining grammar as a set of conventional codes, and pragmatics as a set of inferences, rationally derived. The book applies this division of labor between codes and inferences to many classical pragmatic phenomena, and even to phenomena considered 'beyond pragmatics'. Surprisingly, although some of these turn out pragmatic, others actually turn out grammatical. Additional intriguing questions addressed in the book include: why is it sometimes difficult to distinguish grammar from pragmatics? Why is there no grand design behind grammar nor behind pragmatics? Are all extragrammatical phenomena pragmatic?

This innovative edited collection presents new insights into emerging debates around digital communication practices. It brings together research by leading international experts to examine methods and approaches, multimodality, face and identity, across five thematically organised sections. Its contributors revise current paradigms in view of past, present, and future research and analyse how users deploy the wealth of multimodal resources afforded by digital technologies to undertake tasks and to enact identity. In its concluding section it identifies the ideologies that underpin the construction of digital texts in the social world. This important contribution to digital discourse studies will have interdisciplinary appeal across the fields of linguistics, socio-linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, gender studies, multimodality, media and communication studies.

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 handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the pragmatics of social media, i.e. of digitally mediated and Internet-based platforms which are interactively used to share and edit self- and other-generated textual and audio-visual messages. Its five parts offer state-of-the-art reviews and critical evaluations in the light of on-going developments: Part I The Nature of Social Media sets up the conceptual groundwork as it explores key concept such as social media, participation, privacy/publicness. Part II Social Media Platforms focuses on the pragmatics of single platforms such as YouTube, Facebook. Part III Social Media and Discourse covers the micro-and macro-level organization of social media discourse, while Part IV Social Media and Identity reveals the multifarious ways in which users collectively (re-)construct aspects of their identities. Part V Social Media and Functions/Speech Acts surveys pragmatic studies on speech act functions such as disagreeing, complimenting, requesting. Each contribution provides a state-of-the-art review together with a critical evaluation of the existing research.

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.

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.

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 argues that traditions in philosophy of language have mistakenly focused on highly idealized linguistic contexts. Instead, it presents a non-idealcfoundational theory of language that contends that the essential function of language is to direct attention for the purpose of achieving diverse social and political goals.

This book argues that traditions in philosophy of language have mistakenly focused on highly idealized linguistic contexts. Instead, it presents a non-idealcfoundational theory of language that contends that the essential function of language is to direct attention for the purpose of achieving diverse social and political goals.

This book traces the evolutionary trajectory of language and teaching from the earliest periods of human evolution to the present day. The author argues that teaching is unique to humans and our ancestors, and that the evolution of teaching, language, and culture are the inextricably linked results of gene-culture coevolutionary processes. Drawing on related fields including archaeology, palaeontology, cultural anthropology, evolutionary psychology and linguistics, he makes the case that the need for joint attention and shared goals in complex adaptive strategies is the underlying driver for the evolution of language-like communication. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of these disciplines, as well as lay readers with an interest in human origins.

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 Handbook introduces neurosemiotics, a pluralistic framework to reconsider semiosis as an emergent phenomenon at the interface of biology and culture. Across individual and interpersonal settings, meaning is influenced by external and internal processes bridging phenomenological and biological dimensions. Yet, each of these dyads has been segregated into discipline-specific topics, with attempts to chart their intersections proving preliminary at best. Bringing together perspectives from world-leading experts, this volume seeks to overcome these disciplinary divides between the social and the natural sciences at both the empirical and theoretical levels. Its various chapters chart the foundations of neurosemiotics; characterize linguistic and interpersonal dynamics as shaped by neurocognitive, bodily, situational, and societal factors; and examine other daily neurosemiotic occurrences driven by faces, music, tools, and even visceral signals. This comprehensive volume is a state-of the-art resource for students and researchers interested in how humans and other animals construe experience in such fields as cognitive neuroscience, biosemiotics, philosophy of mind, neuropsychology, neurolinguistics, and evolutionary biology.

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 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.

Edited by Lancelot Hogben

Here is an informative introduction to language: its origins in the past, its growth through history, and its present use for communication between peoples. It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages—Teutonic, Romance, Greek—helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a languages as it is actually used in everyday life.

But this book is more than a guide to foreign languages; it goes deep into the roots of all knowledge as it explores the history of speech. It lights up the dim pathways of prehistory and unfolds the story of the slow growth of human expression from the most primitive signs and sounds to the elaborate variations of the highest cultures. Without language no knowledge would be possible; here we see how language is at once the source and the reservoir of all we know.

"Makes language study more hopeful and exciting than anything I have read before." —Lewis Gannett

"Rewarding and delightful . . . for everyone who has the slightest curiosity or ambition in self expression, this is a book that contains months or years of pleasurable profit." —Christopher Morley

Are the past participial forms that occur in passive and perfect periphrases substantially identical or should they rather be distinguished into accidentally homophonous passive and perfect(ive) participles? This book discusses the long-standing mystery of past participial (non-)identity on the basis of a broad range of synchronic data from Germanic and Romance, eventually focussing on German and English as these draw the most relevant distinctions (e.g. auxiliary alternation, a passive auxiliary that is not BE). Together with some contrastive insights from Slavic as well as the diachrony of passive and perfect periphrases, this clearly points to an identity-view. The novel approach that is laid out suggests that past participles conflate diathetic and aspectual properties. The former cause the suppression of an external argument, whereas the latter impose event-structure sensitive perfectivity, which only induces the completion of a situation if the underlying eventuality denotes a simple change of state. An approach along these lines sheds light on the intricate properties of past participles and the auxiliaries they occur with, the determinants of auxiliary selection as well as the interplay of argument and event structure.

Thorough case studies help to provide a solid grounding for the discussion of pragmatic meanings, which could otherwise easily become overly theoretical. There has recently been widespread media exposure of criticism of translations from Korean to English in particular (notably with respect to Squid Game). Given that much of the criticism has related to address terms and an improper reflection of interpersonal relations, this is a timely discussion of the core problem. Reference to popular media (including Harry Potter and The Hobbit, as well as manga, manhwa, webtoons, anime, and cinema) enhance accessibility, as well as providing scope for further research on translations into other languages. Discussion of translation in both directions (from English to Korean and Japanese, and from Korean and Japanese to English) helps to provide a more rounded view.

Thorough case studies help to provide a solid grounding for the discussion of pragmatic meanings, which could otherwise easily become overly theoretical. There has recently been widespread media exposure of criticism of translations from Korean to English in particular (notably with respect to Squid Game). Given that much of the criticism has related to address terms and an improper reflection of interpersonal relations, this is a timely discussion of the core problem. Reference to popular media (including Harry Potter and The Hobbit, as well as manga, manhwa, webtoons, anime, and cinema) enhance accessibility, as well as providing scope for further research on translations into other languages. Discussion of translation in both directions (from English to Korean and Japanese, and from Korean and Japanese to English) helps to provide a more rounded view.

Together with the volume "Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues," this book provides a journey through the more recent developments of pragmatics, considering both its philosophical and linguistic nature. This first volume is devoted to the theoretical models developed from a philosophical perspective, including both the newest advances of the classical theories and approaches, and pioneering and interdisciplinary ideas proposed to face the challenges of the fields and areas of practice and analysis. The topics investigated, which include implicatures, reference, presupposition, speech acts, metaphor, relevance, and common ground, represent the core of the state of the art in philosophical pragmatics. Research on these matters have been continuously changing the way that we can look at them. This book serves as a collection of works from the most eminent authors who represent the theoretical developments of the approaches that defined this field, together with the new philosophical insights coming from more applied disciplines such as argumentation, discourse analysis, or linguistics. The combination of these two perspectives provides a unique outline of the current research in pragmatics.

This book offers a distinct exploration of Chinese English - which has the largest rising population of speakers in the World Englishes (WE) family. Xu focuses on the fundamental issues of "names" and "norms" that are closely related to Chinese English and the "narratives" of the speakers of Chinese English. In addition to current approaches to WE research, this book proposes a novel theoretical and analytical framework based on classical Chinese and Western philosophies. The volume has an empirical basis, drawing upon interview and questionnaire survey data from proficient speakers of Chinese English. It is also based on an extensive review of the relevant literature on both WE and Chinese English, and it draws upon the author's research experience of over two decades on the subject. This is the third research book on Chinese English that the author has contributed to WE literature and it will be a valuable read for students and scholars alike.

Interaction in Mandarin Chinese and English as a Multilingua Franca: Context, Practice, and Perception proposes a model of context, practice, and perception and raises awareness of the importance of understanding language use and perception in context in order to avoid intercultural communication misunderstandings. This book provides an overview of previous research on the pragmatics of Chinese and English as a multilingua franca in multilingual contexts. It argues that context is socioculturally shaped, interactionally constructed, and personally related. Context can influence and be established by the practice and perception of communicative acts. This book also combines the proposed model with the discursive-interactional approach to uncover the interplay of context, practice, and perception of extended concurrent speech for strong disagreement by native Chinese speakers in spontaneous conversations in Mandarin and English as a multilingua franca.

Most of the innovative and exciting work done by East Asian pragmaticians on their languages, past and present alike, is written and published in local languages. As a result, research published in and about a particular East Asian language has been largely unavailable to those who do not speak the language. The contributors seek to present a comprehensive survey of existing outputs of pragmatics research on three major East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean). The survey concentrates on a number of core pragmatic topics such as speech acts, deixis, discourse markers, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and face/(im)politeness. To complement and compare with the picture of research work published in the local languages, the volume also includes a survey of internationally published, English-mediated articles and books studying the regional languages or contrasting them with other languages. A rivetting discourse on pragmatics research, it will be a valuable read for students and scholars alike.