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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Korangy and Sharifian's groundbreaking book offers the first in-depth study into cultural linguistics for the Persian language. The book highlights a multitude of angles through which the intricacies of Persian and its many dialects and accents, wherever spoken, can be examined. Linguistics with cultural studies as its backdrop is not a new phenomenon; however, with this text we are afforded an insight into the complex relationship that exists between human cognizance and human expression in this ancient civilization. This study helps develop an innovative understanding of history, intent, and meaning as understood by a culture and by a people, in this case the Persian-speaking folk of Iran. The chapters are insightful resources for analyzing and augmenting our knowledge of linguistics under the rubric of Persian culture but also for proposing and foregrounding new ideas in this field of study.

Although the Japanese language is one of the most quoted examples in politeness research, extant publications focus on particular areas of politeness, and very few of them enquire into the varied aspects of Japanese politeness. In this book, Yasuko Obana provides an integrated account of what signifies Japanese politeness. By examining how far previous assumptions can apply to Japanese, Obana exposes a variety of characteristics of Japanese politeness. By taking a diachronic approach, she probes into what constitutes politeness, extracts key elements of the term 'polite' in Japanese, and demonstrates how modern honorifics' apparent diverse, divergent uses and effects can be integrated into a systematic matrix. Furthermore, by quoting traditional Japanese language scholars' (kokugo gakusha) studies, Obana brings different views into the open. She also carves out politeness strategies in Japanese that have not been adequately explored to date, and which often conform to the way in which honorifi cs behave because they refl ect social indexicality. This book is a good reference for scholars in pragmatics, particularly for those who are working on politeness. It is useful for Japanese language teachers who want to know how to teach Japanese politeness to non-native learners. Postgraduate students of Japanese or pragmatics may also find this book useful for self-study.

This book showcases new and innovative developments and approaches in pragmatics, spotlighting perspectives from an international range of emerging scholars undertaking cutting-edge research pushing the field in new directions. The volume begins by taking stock of the most up-to-date developments in pragmatics research, as embodied by the work of a newer generation of pragmaticists. Chapters are organized around key areas of development within pragmatics, including intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics, cognitive pragmatics, and new perspectives on referencing, implicating, and inferring, shedding further light on the ways in which pragmatics increasingly interfaces with other linguistic disciplines and on innovative methodologies. The book also places the focus on pragmatics approaches in languages other than than English, further expanding the borders of research. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in pragmatics interested in staying on top of the latest developments and future directions for the field.

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.

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics is the first volume to offer a comprehensive overview of advances in Spanish Pragmatics, addressing different types of interaction and the variables, both social and linguistic, that can affect them. Written by a diverse set of experts in the field, the handbook unifies two major approaches to the study of pragmatics, the Anglo-American and European Continental traditions. Thirty-three chapters cover in detail both pragmatic foundations (e.g. speech act theory, implicature and relevance, deixis) and interfaces with other concepts, including: * Discourse * Variation; Culture and interculture * (Im)politeness; humor * Learning contexts and teaching * Technology This is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, and researchers of Spanish language and linguistics.

This edited collection addresses the link between second language pragmatics (including interlanguage and intercultural) research and English language education. The chapters use different contemporary research methods and theoretical frameworks such as conversation analysis, language-learners-as-ethnographers, discourse and interactional approaches and data in contexts (either in the region or overseas). The content explores and discusses the significance of learning and teaching of second language (L2) pragmatics in language education for learners who use English as a lingua franca for academic and intercultural communication purposes with native and non-native speakers of English, focusing on pragmatic actions, social behaviours, perceptions and awareness levels in three regions in East Asia - China, Japan and South Korea. It is an important contribution to the area of second language pragmatics in language education for East Asian learners. It recommends research-informed pedagogies for the learning and teaching of interlanguage or intercultural pragmatics in regions and places where similar cultural beliefs or practices are found. This is an essential read for researchers, language educators, classroom teachers, readers who are interested in second language pragmatics research and those interested in second language acquisition and English language education in the East Asian context.

This book examines the origins of populism in Canada and the United States and its development into a powerful and at times disturbing political force. Focus is on five historical periods: The Populist Party of the United States in the 1890s, Prairie Populism in Canada during the early and mid-20th century, the Reform Party of Canada in the 1980s and 90s, the 'left' and 'right' populism of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the early 21st century, and the phenomenon of Ford Nation in modern day Ontario, Canada. The author extends Ernesto Laclau's analysis of populism as a 'logic' in On Populist Reason (2005) to explore how a 'people' come into being in their conflict or clash with an 'elite,' defined by Chartists in the 19th century as "idlers," providing a contrast between 'producers' and 'non-producers.' The author examines the linguistic media (speeches, books, radio, twitter, Facebook) used in populist discourse to convey a political message and to articulate the needs, wishes and will of a newly born 'people' in their numerous guises and expressions, from "the plain people," to "the little guy," or to "brothers and sisters." This volume will be of interest to researchers in an interdisciplinary range of fields, including discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, rhetoric and stylistics, political communication, social movements theory, media studies, and Canadian and American history.

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.

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.

i) This title combines qualitative and quantitative methods to study the new field, multimodal pragmatics. ii) The author offers practical guide of building multimodal corpus and gives new attempt of integrating Simulative Modelling into linguistic study iii) The Chinese version was a bestseller in China.

This book systematically examines the linguistic features and socio-cultural issues of 'Hong Kong English'. The author focuses on authentic data taken from the International Corpus of English (the Hong Kong component) and the Corpus of Global Web-based English to track the ways in which the English language in Hong Kong has been adapted by its users. She also analyses the emergence of new forms and structures in its grammar and discourse. While the phonetic and phonological aspects of this variety of English have been well documented, its grammatical peculiarities and social language use have been hitherto neglected. This book offers original insights into the grammatical and pragmatic/discoursal features of Hong Kong English and will therefore be of interest to those working in fields such as World Englishes and corpus linguistics.

The introduction and tracking of reference to people or individuals, known as referential movement, is a central feature of coherence, and accounts for "about every third word of discourse". Located at the intersection of pragmatics and grammar, reference is now proving a rich and enduring source of insight into second language development. The challenge for second language (L2) learners involves navigating the selection and positioning of reference in the target language, continually shifting and balancing the referential means used to maintain coherence, while remaining acutely sensitive to the discourse and social context. The present volume focuses on how L2 learners meet that challenge, bringing together both eminent and up-and-coming researchers in the field of L2 acquisition. The chapters address a range of problems in second language acquisition (SLA) (e.g., form-function mapping, first language [L1] influence, developmental trajectories), and do so in relation to various theoretical approaches to reference (e.g., Accessibility Theory, Givenness Hierarchy). The global outlook of these studies relates to the L2 acquisition of English, French, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish and covers a diverse range of situational contexts including heritage language learning, English as a medium of instruction, and the development of sociolinguistic competence.

This collection argues for the need to promote intercultural understanding as a clear goal for teaching and learning pragmatics in second and foreign language education. The volume sees the learning of pragmatics as a challenging yet enriching process whereby the individual expands their capacity for understanding how meaning making processes influence social relationships and how assumptions about social relationships shape the interpretation and use of language in context. This locates pragmatics within a humanistically oriented conception of learning where success is defined relative to the enrichment of human understanding and appreciation of difference. The book argues that intercultural understanding is not an "add on" to language learning but central to the learner's ability to understand and construct meaning with individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Chapters analyse teachers' and learners' ways of making sense of pragmatics, how their assumptions about social relationships impact their perceptions of language use, and how reflection on pragmatic judgments opens up possibilities for developing intercultural understanding. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, language education, and applied linguistics.

This collection brings together work from scholars across sociolinguistics, World Englishes and linguistic landscapes to reflect on developments and future directions in Irish English, building on the ground-breaking contributions of Jeffrey Kallen to the discipline. Taking their cue from Kallen's extensive body of work on Irish English, the 20 contributors critically examine advances in the field grounded in frameworks from variationist sociolinguistics and semiotic and border studies in linguistic landscapes. Chapters cover pragmatic, cognitive sociolinguistic, sociophonetic, historical and World Englishes perspectives, as well as two chapters which explore the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland through the lens of perceptual dialectology and linguistic landscape research. Taken together, the collection showcases the significant role Kallen has played in the growth of Irish English studies as a field in its own right and the impact of this work on a new wave of researchers in the field today and beyond. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars of varieties of English, variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic landscape research.

This book proposes a novel theory of truth and falsity. It argues that truth is a form of reference and falsity is a form of reference failure. Most of the philosophical literature on truth concentrates on certain ontological and epistemic problems. This book focuses instead on language. By utilizing the Fregean idea that sentences are singular referring expressions, the author develops novel connections between the philosophical study of truth and falsity and the huge literature in in the philosophy of language on the notion of reference. The first part of the book constructs the author's theory and argues for it in length. Part II addresses the ways in which the theory relates to, and is different from, some of the basic theories of truth. Part III takes up how to account for the truth of sentences with logical operators and quantifiers. Finally, Part IV discusses the applications and implications of the theory for longstanding problems in philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. A Referential Theory of Truth and Falsity will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and linguistics.

This edited volume provides detailed analyses of multifunctional forms in English and offers hands-on approaches exemplifying relevant implications and useful applications to language and literacy educators in TESOL, ESL/EFL/EAL and research students in applied linguistics and education. The chapters cover: The multifunctionality of utterances in spoken and multimodal corpora, the multifunctionality of linguistic creativity in different genres, multifunctional pronouns in hard and soft sciences, and professional discourse in the university and secondary school contexts. The volume also offers a comparison of the multifunctionality of verbs between ESL textbooks, native written and spoken English corpora, and between ESL and L1 university students in writing a particular genre; comparisons of the multifunctionality of discourse markers between different registers and between L1 and L2 English speakers, as well as multifunctional metadiscourse markers in different disciplines and paradigms. With detailed analysis of authentic corpus data representing different varieties of English, specialized use in different contexts and disciplines, and practical teaching and learning applications, the volume bridges theory and practice, providing a creatively designed resource for students, educators and researchers looking to understand multifunctional forms in English.

Pragmatic ability is crucial for second language learners to communicate appropriately and effectively; however, pragmatics is underemphasized in language teaching and testing. This book remedies that situation by connecting theory, empirical research, and practical curricular suggestions on pragmatics for learners of different proficiency levels: It surveys the field comprehensively and, with useful tasks and activities, offers rich guidance for teaching and testing L2 pragmatics. Mainly referring to pragmatics of English and with relevant examples from multiple languages, it is an invaluable resource for practicing teachers, graduate students, and researchers in language pedagogy and assessment.

A research-informed pedagogical approach to L2 pragmatics helps prepare teacher learners for their daily instructional practices. A multilingual approach to instructional pragmatics that reflects today's globalization and can promote linguistic/cultural inclusiveness and legitimacy of pragmatic variation. A sociocultural view of pragmatic development that helps to develop a holistic understanding of pragmatic development and second language acquisition. An interface with peace linguistics which develops an awareness of language as a catalyst for mutual respect, compassion, and dignity. A connection between pragmatics and intercultural communication that connects the two research areas and raises an awareness of the role of pragmatics in intercultural communication.