This study undertakes a systematic analysis of French prepositional connectors. It explains the tendency of prepositions to form connectors and provides a model of complementary semantic and pragmatic categories covering the types, functions, and usage of connectors across a variety of genres.

Rooted in Gricean tradition, this book concentrates on game- and decision-theoretic (GDT) approaches to the foundations of pragmatics. An Introduction to GDT, with an overview of GDT pragmatics research to date and its relation to semantics and to Gricean pragmatics is followed by contributions offering a high-level survey of current GDT pragmatics and the field of its applications, demonstrating that this approach provides a sound basis for synchronic and diachronic explanations of language use.

L2 Spanish Pragmatics is a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of current research into pragmatics and Spanish language teaching. It presents the research on the teaching of pragmatics and Spanish language as a multifaceted discipline. Written by an international cohort of scholars, the breadth of topics includes innovative topics in the teaching of Spanish, such as genre analysis, discourse markers, politeness and impoliteness, nonverbal communication, irony, and humor, as well as web-based pragmatics resources. Key features: An overview of new trends in Spanish pragmatics research and the growing need for instruction in intercultural communication; Insights derived from important theoretical and empirical works that may contribute to integrate pragmatics in the teaching of the language; Explanations with great clarity, plenty of examples and references, as well as connections to language teaching and learning; Tasks and activities that can help teachers move from a traditional curricular approach to a more innovative and engaging one; Descriptions of numerous activities or guidelines for the classroom, supplemented with additional materials; A bilingual glossary of terms in pragmatics that will help teachers in their implementation of activities to teach L2 Spanish pragmatics. L2 Spanish Pragmatics constitutes a reference book on current research on learning and teaching Spanish pragmatics. It will be of interest to university lecturers, researchers, and graduate students. It will also be an excellent resource for language educators and K-16 teachers willing to expand their knowledge and apply the teaching of pragmatics as an integral component in the teaching of the Spanish language.

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. Pragmatics for Latin provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.

Ten leading scholars provide exacting research results and a reliable and accessible introduction to the new field of optimality theoretic pragmatics. The book includes a general introduction that overviews the foundations of this new research paradigm. The book is intended to satisfy the needs of students and professional researchers interested in pragmatics and optimality theory, and will be of particular interest to those exploring the interfaces of formal pragmatics with grammar, semantics, philosophy of language, information theory and cognitive psychology.

This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.

This volume provides a detailed account of the syntax of expressive language, that is, utterances that express, rather than describe, the emotions and attitudes of the speaker. While the expressive function of natural language has been widely studied in recent years, the role that grammar plays in the interpretation of expressive items has been largely neglected in the semantic and pragmatic literature. Daniel Gutzmann demonstrates that expressivity has strong syntactic reflexes that interact with the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of these utterances, and argues that expressivity is in fact a syntactic feature on a par with other established features such as tense and gender. Evidence for this claim is drawn from three detailed case studies of expressive adjectives, intensifiers, and vocatives; their puzzling properties are accounted for through a minimalist approach to syntactic features and agreement, which shows that expressivity can partake in agreement operations, trigger movement, and be selected for syntactically. The analysis not only supports the hypothesis of expressive syntax, but also highlights the hidden role that grammar may play in phenomena that are traditionally considered to be solely semantic in nature.

The Extent of the Literal develops a strikingly new approach to metaphor and polysemy in their relation to the conceptual structure. In a straightforward narrative style, the author argues for a reconsideration of standard assumptions concerning the notion of literal meaning and its relation to conceptual structure. She draws on neurophysiological and psychological experimental data in support of a view in which polysemy belongs to the level of words but not to the level of concepts, and thus challenges some seminal work on metaphor and polysemy within cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics and analytical philosophy.

This book uses a unique and extensive data survey of manufacturing firms in Zimbabwe to analyse firm-level responses to economic liberalization. The focus on labour and financial markets, investment behaviour, the determinants of entrepreneurship, productivity growth and efficiency, export performance, firm growth, and resource shifts between different manufacturing activities. Understanding these determinants is crucial evaluating the success or failure of structural adjustment.

In der Arbeit werden Grundzuge einer semantischen Frame-Theorie erarbeitet und im ubergeordneten Zusammenhang einer holistischen Sprachtheorie diskutiert. Ausgangspunkt bildet die Annahme, dass sich Strukturen semantischen Wissens mittels Frames linguistisch genau beschreiben lassen. Frames sind konzeptuelle Wissenseinheiten, die zur Bedeutungserfassung aus dem Gedachtnis abgerufen werden. Zu wissen, was ein Ausdruck bedeutet und wie er zu verwenden ist, heisst, uber einen Frame zu "verfugen", der mit dem Ausdruck konventionell assoziiert ist. In sprachtheoretischer Hinsicht ist die Arbeit als ein Pladoyer fur eine konzeptualistische Semantiktheorie zu verstehen, die sich konzeptionell an der Kognitiven Grammatik und Konstruktionsgrammatik orientiert. Ausgehend von Fillmores Vorschlag, Frames als kognitive Organisationsstrukturen sowie als analytische Werkzeuge zu begreifen, wird der integrative Charakter der entwickelten Theorie an vielen sprachlichen Phanomenen (wie Metaphern, Prasuppositionen, diskurssemantischen Grundfiguren, indirekten Anaphern, Referenz, Pradikation) demonstriert. Der diskursanalytische Nutzen zeigt sich zudem in einer Korpusanalyse zur Metapher "Finanzinvestoren als Heuschrecken".

The study focuses on the correlations existing between the conceptual properties of the modalities of visual and auditory perception and the semantic-syntactic behavior of the verbs of perception ver/voir, oA-r/entendre, mirar/regarder, and escuchar/A(c)couter. In part one of the book, the author argues that visual perception and auditory perception differ in terms of extra-linguistic criteria. Part two draws upon empirical material to advance syntactic evidence for a connection between the cognitive features of visual and auditory perception and the syntactic behavior of verbs expressing such perception.

Does interpretation have anything to do with truth? This new theory of interpretation denies this, yet it argues that some interpretations are false and some are just. These theses are justified through a pragmatic model of interpretation as a language-game involving five participants: an author, a text, a reader, a language, and an encyclopedia. The model claims to provide an account of both literary interpretation and face-to-face dialogue. The central intuition is that authorial intention is radically separated from textual meaning and that consequently, the reader's role is one of necessary imposture.

The claim according to which there is a categorial gap between meaning and saying - between what sentences mean and what we say by using them on particular occasions - has come to be widely regarded as being exclusively a claim in the philosophy of language. The present essay collection takes a different approach to these issues. It seeks to explore the ways in which that claim - as defended first by ordinary language philosophy and, more recently, by various contextualist projects - is grounded in considerations that transcend the philosophy of language. More specifically, the volume seeks to explore how that claim is inextricably linked to considerations about the nature of truth and representation. It is thus part of the objective of this volume to rethink the current way of framing the debates on these issues. By framing the debate in terms of an opposition between "ideal language theorists" and their semanticist heirs on the one hand and "communication theorists" and their contextualist heirs on the other, one brackets important controversies and risks obscuring the undoubtedly very real oppositions that exist between different currents of thought.

Der Band versammelt Beitrage unterschiedlicher Fachrichtungen, die sich der Entwicklung eines erweiterten Textbegriffs widmen. Die Frage nach der Bedeutung und Funktion von Textualitat fuhrt dabei zur Aufgabe der traditionellen Arbeitsteilung von Philosophie und Philologie, sensibilisiert fur unterschiedliche sprachlich-asthetische Darstellungsformen, erprobt neue Lekturepraktiken und reflektiert deren epistemologische Konsequenzen."

Public discourse constitutes the language environment of a town or a city, which forms part of the social environment of a country or a region. Based on extensive first-hand data collected from public places, mass media and the Internet, this monograph attempts critical pragmatic studies of public discourse in the contemporary Chinese context. By applying pragmatic theories and analytical instruments to the analysis of the data, including business names, advertisements, public signs and notices, and news, the book showcases such discursive practices as personalization and subjectivization and reveals such social problems as unhealthy social mentalities, "pragmatic traps", suspect discrimination, and vulgarity. It exemplifies a way of combining the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach and the pragmatic approach with a clear focus on the pragmatic issues. This book will not only be a necessary addition to the academic discipline of pragmatics in general, and critical pragmatics in particular, but also lay bare the problems existing in the use of public discourse and suggest several ways to improve such use. While it addresses the Chinese data only, the proposed analyses may contribute to international readers' understanding of public discourse in contemporary China and serve as a reference for similar researches worldwide.

Guia practica de pragmatica del espanol es un texto introductorio en espanol. Ofrece introducciones accesibles a una importante variedad de teorias y conceptos imprescindibles en el campo de la pragmatica del espanol. El libro contiene 22 capitulos divididos en seis secciones que cubren: actos de habla, formas de tratamiento, cortesia y descortesia, comunicacion y persuasion, discurso digital, metodologia en pragmatica. Los diferentes capitulos incluyen ejemplos tomados de la comunicacion cara a cara y en linea, lecturas (recomendadas y complementarias), y preguntas y actividades que toman como punto de partida diferentes variedades del espanol y diferentes contextos sociales, culturales y/o politicos en el mundo hispanohablante. Constituye un recurso valioso para estudiantes de pragmatica y linguistica hispanica, tanto hablantes nativos como estudiantes de espanol avanzado.

Academic Discourse and Global Publishing offers a coherent argument for changes in published academic writing over the past 50 years. Demonstrating how published writing represents academics' decisions about how best to present their work, their readers and themselves in the global context of a rapidly shifting university system, this book provides: An up-to-date reference on contemporary topics in specialist discourse analysis, current research methodologies and innovative approaches to the study of writing; New insights into conceptual and theoretical issues related to the analysis of academic writing; An accessible introduction to diachronic research in EAP and a case for the value of the diachronic study of texts using corpus techniques; A clear overview of how texts work in interaction and how they relate to evolving institutional and political contexts; Links between the practices of different disciplines and the environments in which they operate, as well as observations on the ways in which they differ. This volume is essential reading for students and researchers of EAP/ESP and Applied Linguistics and will also be of significant interest to academics and students looking to have their work published.

An exploration of English pragmatics with a thorough integration of theoretical and experimental research A central goal of pragmatics is to identify the capabilities that underpin our ability to communicate 'non-literal' meanings. Guiding students through the many facets of English pragmatics, this textbook discusses the ways in which people successfully convey and recover meanings that are not simply associated with the combinations of words that they use. The book draws on a broad range of data, including psycholinguistic experimentation, studies of acquisition and corpus research, and uses real examples from English to illuminate contemporary debates in pragmatics and related fields. With exercises and discussion topics at the end of each chapter, it invites students to explore how pragmatic meaning can be explained in theoretical terms and contemplate whether these explanations command empirical support.

Guia practica de pragmatica del espanol es un texto introductorio en espanol. Ofrece introducciones accesibles a una importante variedad de teorias y conceptos imprescindibles en el campo de la pragmatica del espanol. El libro contiene 22 capitulos divididos en seis secciones que cubren: actos de habla, formas de tratamiento, cortesia y descortesia, comunicacion y persuasion, discurso digital, metodologia en pragmatica. Los diferentes capitulos incluyen ejemplos tomados de la comunicacion cara a cara y en linea, lecturas (recomendadas y complementarias), y preguntas y actividades que toman como punto de partida diferentes variedades del espanol y diferentes contextos sociales, culturales y/o politicos en el mundo hispanohablante. Constituye un recurso valioso para estudiantes de pragmatica y linguistica hispanica, tanto hablantes nativos como estudiantes de espanol avanzado.

This volume offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. In some languages, the speaker always has to specify this source - for example whether they saw the event, heard it, inferred it based on visual evidence or common sense, or was told about it by someone else. While not all languages have obligatory marking of this type, every language has ways of referring to information source and associated epistemological meanings. The continuum of epistemological expressions covers a range of devices from the lexical means in familiar European languages and in many languages of Aboriginal Australia to the highly grammaticalized systems in Amazonia or North America. In this handbook, experts from a variety of fields explore topics such as the relationship between evidentials and epistemic modality, contact-induced changes in evidential systems, the acquisition of evidentials, and formal semantic theories of evidentiality. The book also contains detailed case studies of evidentiality in language families across the world, including Algonquian, Korean, Nakh-Dagestanian, Nambikwara, Turkic, Uralic, and Uto-Aztecan.