This book examines requests for action in everyday contexts by analyzing natural video-recorded data of everyday interaction in British English and Polish families. Requests for carrying out little jobs-passing some object or fetching items from the next room -are pervasively relevant in contexts such as preparing and consuming food, caring for and playing with children. Requests therefore provide a useful window onto general qualities of human sociality as well as on aspects of cultural diversity. Joerg Zinken describes features of interactional context that people across cultures might be sensitive to in designing a request. In particular, the other person's locally observable commitment to a shared task emerges as a quality of context that systematically enters into the way a speaker builds a request. He then analyses the relationship between diversity across the grammatical resources of languages, and diversity in the action affordances provided by these structures. Focusing on grammatical structures that exist in Polish but not in English (impersonal deontic statements, a certain type of double imperative, and a grammaticalized distinction between perfective and imperfective verbal aspect), the analyses show that language-specific turn formats can index and project social orientations within the on-going interaction in culture-specific ways. By examining social actions at a fine level of grain, the book points a way toward an understanding of cultural diversity that avoids the pitfalls of cultural relativism.

The relationship between language and ideology has long been central to research in discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and has also informed other fields such as sociology and literary criticism. This book, by one of the world's leading pragmatists, introduces a new framework for the study of ideology in written language, using the tools, methods and theories of pragmatics and discourse analysis. Illustrations are drawn systematically from a coherent corpus of excerpts from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history textbooks dealing with episodes of colonial history and in particular the 1857 'Indian Mutiny'. It includes the complete corpus of excerpts, allowing researchers and students to evaluate all illustrations; at the same time, it provides useful practice and training materials. The book is intended as a teaching tool in language-, discourse- and communication-oriented programs, but also for historians and social and political scientists.

Over the past twenty years, relevance theory has become a key area of study within semantics and pragmatics. In this comprehensive new textbook, Billy Clark introduces the key elements of the theory and how they interconnect. The book is divided into two parts - the first providing an overview of the essential machinery of the theory, and the second exploring how the original theory has been extended, applied and critically discussed. Clark offers a systematic framework for understanding the theory from the basics up, building a complete picture and providing the basis for advanced research across a range of topics. With this book, students will understand the fundamentals of relevance theory, its origins in the work of Grice, the relationship it has to other approaches, and its place within recent developments and debates.

Over the past twenty years, relevance theory has become a key area of study within semantics and pragmatics. In this comprehensive new textbook, Billy Clark introduces the key elements of the theory and how they interconnect. The book is divided into two parts - the first providing an overview of the essential machinery of the theory, and the second exploring how the original theory has been extended, applied and critically discussed. Clark offers a systematic framework for understanding the theory from the basics up, building a complete picture and providing the basis for advanced research across a range of topics. With this book, students will understand the fundamentals of relevance theory, its origins in the work of Grice, the relationship it has to other approaches, and its place within recent developments and debates.

This edited volume provides new insights into the architecture of Chinese grammar from a comparative perspective, using principles of cartography. Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that is guided by the view that syntactic structures contain grammatical and functional information that is ideal for semantic interpretation - by studying the syntactic structures of a particular language, syntacticians can better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The chapters in this book map out the "topography" of a variety of constructions in Chinese, specifically information structure, wh-question formation, and peripheral functional elements. The syntactic structure of Chinese makes it an ideal language for this line of research, because functional elements are often spread throughout sentences rather than clumped together as is usually dictated by language-specific morphology. Mapping Chinese syntactic structures therefore offers a window into the origin of heavily "scrambled" constructions often observed in other languages. The book includes a preface that will discusses the goal of cartography and explains how the collection contributes towards our understanding of this approach to syntax. The subsequent seven original articles all contain original syntactic data that is invaluable for future research in cartography, and the collection as a whole paints a broader picture of how the alignment between syntax and semantics works in a principled way.

This book presents one of the first attempts at developing a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of conversation motivated by data from real conversations. The theory has descriptive reach from the micro-conversational - e.g. self-repair at the word level - to macro-level phenomena such as multi-party conversation and the characterization of distinct conversational genres. It draws on extensive corpus studies of the British National Corpus, on evidence from language acquisition, and on computer simulations of language evolution. The theory provides accounts of the opening, middle game, and closing stages of conversation. it also offers a new perspective on traditional semantic concerns such as quanitifcation and anaphora. The Interactive Stance challenges orthodox views of grammar by aruging that, unless we wish to excluse from analysis a large body of frequently occurrring words and constructions, the right way to construe grammar is as a system that characterizes types of talk in interaction.

This book investigates the phenomenon of control structures, configurations in which the subject of the embedded clause is missing and is construed as coreferential with the subject of the embedding clause (e.g. John wanted to leave). It draws on data from English, Mandarin Chinese, and Modern Greek to investigate the relationship that control bears both to restructuring - the phenomenon whereby some apparently biclausal structures behave as though they constitute just one clause - and to the meanings of the embedding predicates that participate in these structures. Thomas Grano argues that restructuring is cross-linguistically pervasive and that, by virtue of its co-occurrence with some control predicates but not others, it serves as evidence for a basic division within the class of complement control structures. This division is connected to how the semantics of the control predicate interacts with general principles of clausal architecture and of the syntax-semantics interface. His findings have general implications both for clausal structure and for the relationship between form and meaning in natural language.

This is the first textbook on Functional Discourse Grammar, a recently developed theory of language structure which analyses utterances at four independent levels of grammatical representation: pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological. The book offers a very systematic and highly accessible introduction to the theory: following the top-down organization of the model, it takes the reader step-by-step though the various levels of analysis (from pragmatics down to phonology), while at the same time providing a detailed account of the interaction between these different levels. The many exercises, categorized according to degree of difficulty, ensure that students are challenged to use the theory in a creative manner, and invite them to test and evaluate the theory by applying it to the new data in various linguistic contexts. Evelien Keizer uses examples from a variety of sources to demonstrate how the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar can be used to analyse and explain the most important functional and formal features of present-day English. The book also contains examples from a wide variety of other typologically diverse languages, making it attractive not only to students of English linguistics but to anyone interested in linguistic theory more generally.

This book is an exploration of the syntax of external arguments in transitivity alternations from a cross-linguistic perspective. It focuses particularly on the causative/anticausative alternation, which the authors take to be a Voice alternation, and the formation of adjectival participles. The authors use data principally from English, German, and Greek to demonstrate that the presence of anticausative morphology does not have any truth-conditional effects, but that marked anticausatives involve more structure than their unmarked counterparts. This morphology is therefore argued to be associated with a semantically inert Voice head that the authors call 'expletive Voice'. The authors also propose that passive formation is not identical across languages, and that the distinction between target vs. result state participles is crucial in understanding the contribution of Voice in adjectival passives. The book provides the tools required to investigate the morphosyntactic structure of verbs and participles, and to identify the properties of verbal alternations across languages. It will be of interest to theoretical linguists from graduate level upwards, particularly those specializing in morphosyntax and typology.

This book is an exploration of how knowledge about the reliability of information sources manifests itself in linguistic phenomena and use. It focuses on cooperation in language use and on how considerations of reliability influence what is done with the information acquired through language. E. McCready provides a detailed account of the phenomena of hedging and evidentiality and analyses them using tools from game theory, dynamic semantics, and formal epistemology. Hedging is argued to be a mechanism used by speakers to protect their reputations for cooperativity from damage inflicted by infelicitous discourse moves. The pragmatics of evidential use is also discussed in terms of the histories of interaction that influence reputation: the author argues that past experience with the evidence source indexed by the evidential determines how the process of adding information will proceed. The book makes many new connections between seemingly disparate aspects of linguistic meaning and practice. It will be of interest to specialists in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, as well as those in the fields of philosophy and cognitive science with an interest in language and epistemology.

Up until the mid-1980s most pragmatic analysis had been done on spoken language use, considerably less on written use, and very little at all on literary activity. This has now radically changed.

‘Pragmatics’ could be informally defined as the study of relationships between language and its users. This volume, first published in 1991, seeks to reposition literary activity at the centre of that study. The internationally renowned contributors draw together two main streams. On the one hand, there are concerns which are close to the syntax and semantics of mainstream linguistics, and on the other, there are concerns ranging towards anthropological linguistics, socio- and psycholinguistics.

Literary Pragmatics represents an antidote to the fragmenting specialization so characteristic of the humanities in the twentieth century. This book will be of lasting value to students of linguistics, literature and society.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors; Acknowledgements; Literary Pragmatics: An Introduction Roger D. Sell; 1. On the interpret ability of texts in general and of literary texts in particular Nils Erick Envist 2. Cross-cultural problems in the perception of literature Richard J. Watts 3. Poetic effects: a relevance theory perspective Adrian Pilkington 4. How indirect discourse means: syntax, semantics, poetics, pragmatics Meir Sternberg 5. Poems as text and discourse: the poetics of Philip Larkin Peter Verdonk 6. Understanding metaphor in literature: towards an empirical study Gerard Steen 7. But what is literature? Toward a descriptive definition of literature Willie van Peer 8. Two-way pragmatics: from world to text and back Ziva Ben-Porat 9. On free and latent semantic energy Claes Schaar 10. Textualization Balz Engler 11. What difference do the circumstances of publication make to the interpretation of a literary work? Jerome J. McGann 12. The politeness of literary texts Roger D. Sell 13. How does the writer of a dramatic text interact with his audiences? On communication Ernest W. B. Hess-Luttich; Bibliography; Index

Critical Pragmatics develops three ideas: language is a way of doing things with words; meanings of phrases and contents of utterances derive ultimately from human intentions; and language combines with other factors to allow humans to achieve communicative goals. In this book, Kepa Korta and John Perry explain why critical pragmatics provides a coherent picture of how parts of language study fit together within the broader picture of human thought and action. They focus on issues about singular reference, that is, talk about particular things, places or people, which have played a central role in the philosophy of language for more than a century. They argue that attention to the 'reflexive' or 'utterance-bound' contents of utterances sheds new light on these old problems. Their important study proposes a new approach to pragmatics and should be of wide interest to philosophers of language and linguists.

Imposters are third person DPs that are used to refer to the speaker/writer or addressee, such as : (i) Your humble servant finds the time before our next encounter very long. (ii) This reporter thinks that the current developments are extraordinary. (iii) Daddy will be back before too long. (iv) The present author finds the logic of the reply faulty. This volume explores verbal and pronominal agreement with imposters from a cross-linguistic perspective. The central questions for any given language are: (a) How do singular and plural imposters agree with the verb? (b) When a pronoun has an imposter antecedent, what are the phi-features of the pronoun? The volume reveals a remarkable degree of variation in the answers to these questions, but also reveals some underlying generalizations. The contributions describe imposters in Bangla, Spanish, Albanian, Indonesian, Italian, French, Romanian, Mandarin and Icelandic.

Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than that, it is about a particular way of dealing with those subjects, known as Discourse Representation Theory, or DRT. DRT is an approach towards natural language semantics which, some thirteen years ago, arose out of attempts to deal with two distinct problems. The first of those was the semantic puzzle that had been brought to contempo rary attention by Geach's notorious "donkey sentences" - sentences like If Pedro owns some donkey, he beats it, in which the anaphoric connection we perceive between the indefinite noun phrase some donkey and the pronoun it may seem to conflict with the existential meaning of the word some. The second problem had to do with tense and aspect. Some languages, for instance French and the other Romance languages, have two morphologically distinct past tenses, a simple past (the French Passe Simple) and a continuous past (the French Imparfait). To articulate precisely what the difference between these tenses is has turned out to be surprisingly difficult."

This book presents a comprehensive description of collocation, covering both the theoretical and practical background and the implications and applications of the concept as language model and analytical tool. It provides a definitive survey of currently available techniques and a detailed description of their implementation.

There are in this volume sentences written as long ago/ as 1957. What was then projected as the third part of a modest discussion of then current issues has, through some fifteen revisions, now expanded into its own three parts. Of the project as originally conceived, the first part, itself grown too large, was published (prematurely, I now believe) in 1965 (Stratification of Behaviour). The second part, which was to be on language proper, was abandoned around 1967; such materials on language as I need for the present work are now mostly compressed into Chapter 1, with some scatterings retained in Chapters 2 and 14. My scheme discovered problems with which I have been much preoccupied. I have been less enjoyably delayed by missteps. Additions were put on and the renovations have been incessant. Even in the course of my ultimate revisions, I ran into slippery stretches and soft spots I could only gesture at repairing. But now time is running out and my energy is ebbing, and I must allow the work to come to its conclusion, with reservations certainly and not without a sense of despair. If the reception of this volume warrants, the two following parts will be wound up in what I hope may be fairly short order.

The theory of language acquisition is a young but increasingly active field. Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory presents one of the first detailed studies of comparative syntax acquisition. It is informed by the view that linguists and acquisitionists are essentially working on the same problem, that of explaining grammar learnability. The author takes cross-linguistic data from child language as evidence for recent proposals in syntactic theory. Developments in the structure of children's sentences during the first few years of life are traced to changes in the setting of specific grammatical parameters. Some surprising differences between the early child grammars of French and English are uncovered, differences that can only be explained on the basis of subtle distinctions in inflectional structure. This motivates the author's claim that functional or nonthematic categories are represented in the grammars of very young children. The book also explores the relationship between acquisition and diachronic change in French and English. It is argued that findings in acquisition, when viewed from a parameter setting perspective, provide answers to important questions arising in the study of language change. The book promises to be of interest to all those involved in the formal, psychological or historical study of linguistic knowledge.

Understanding Pragmatics takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide an accessible introduction to linguistic pragmatics. This book discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, social and interpersonal contexts, as well as to culture specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this book: debates the core issues of pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, deixis, gesture, interaction strategies, ritual communication, phatic communion, linguistic relativity, ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, languages and social classes, and linguistic ideologies incorporates examples from a broad variety of different languages and cultures takes an innovative and transdisciplinary view of the field showing linguistic pragmatics has its predecessor in other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, ethology, ethnology, sociology and the political sciences. Written by an experienced teacher and researcher, this introductory textbook is essential reading for all students studying pragmatics.

THE PLACE OF PHILOSOPHY IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE During the last few years, many books have been published and many meetings have been held on Cognitive Science. A cursory review of their contents shows such a diversity of topics and approaches that one might well infer that there are no genuine criteria for classifying a paper or a lecture as a contribution to Cognitive Science. It is as though the only criterion is to have appeared in a book or in the programme of a meeting or title we can find the expression " . . . Cognitive Science" in whose name or something like that. Perhaps this situation is due to the (relative) youth of the field, which is seeking its own identity, still involved in a process of formation and consolidation within the scientific community; but there are actually deep disagreements about how a science of the mind should be worked out, including how to understand its own subject, that is, "the mind. "While for some the term makes reference to a set of phenomena impossible to grasp by any scientific approach, for others "the mind" would be a sort of myth, and the mental terms await elimination by other more handy and empirically tractable terms.

This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects of event structure by combining foundational semantic research with a series of case studies from a variety of languages. The book begins with an overview of the theoretical issues central to the volume, along with a brief presentation of the remaining chapters and the points of contact between them. The chapters, developed within several different theoretical perspectives, promote cross-theory as well as cross-linguistic comparison. The work will interest scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition who are interested in the notions of telicity, change, and stativity.

This book integrates the research being carried out in the field of lexical semantics in linguistics with the work on knowledge representation and lexicon design in computational linguistics. It provides a stimulating and unique discussion between the computational perspective of lexical meaning and the concerns of the linguist for the semantic description of lexical items in the context of syntactic descriptions.

Interrogative Phrases and the Syntax-Semantics Interface starts by analyzing the interpretation of interrogative phrases in single and multiple constituent questions, including their interpretation under adverbs of quantification. The results are then put to work in a novel approach to some of the constraints on dependencies between fronted interrogative phrases and the associated gaps: superiority, weak crossover, as well as the so-called weak islands' (the WH-island, the negative island and the Factive Island). It is argued that the possibility of fronting an interrogative phrase out of these configurations is determined by a semantic/pragmatic condition on questions, which requires them to be answerable. The analysis is worked out principally on Romanian, a language which allows multiple wh-fronting. The results are then extended to English. Audience: Researchers and students in syntax, semantics and their interface, as well as linguists studying the relation between the acceptability of sentences and the larger discourse context.