Linguistic pragmatism claims that what we literally say goes characteristically beyond what the linguistic properties themselves mandate. In this book, John Collins provides a novel defence of this doctrine, arguing that linguistic meaning alone fails to fix truth conditions. While this position is supported by a range of theorists, Collins shows that it naturally follows from a syntactic thesis concerning the relative sparseness of what language alone can provide to semantic interpretation. Language-and by extension meaning-provides constraints upon what a speaker can literally say, but does not characteristically encode any definite thing to say. Collins then defends this doctrine against a range of alternatives and objections, focusing in particular on an analysis of weather reports: 'it is raining/snowing/sunny'. Such reporting is mostly location-sensitive in the sense that the utterance is true or not depending upon whether it is raining/snowing/sunny at the location of the utterance, rather than some other location. Collins offers a full analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of weather reports, including many novel data. He shows that the constructions lack the linguistic resources to support the common literal locative readings. Other related phenomena are discussed such as the Saxon genitive, colour predication, quantifier domain restriction, and object deletion.

This stimulating volume provides fresh perspectives on choice, a key notion in systemic functional linguistics. Bringing together a global team of well-established and up-and-coming systemic functional linguists, it shows how the different senses of choice as process and as product are interdependent, and how they operate at all levels of language. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it covers a range of linguistic viewpoints, informed by evolutionary theory, psychology, sociology and neuroscience, to produce a complex but unifying account of the issues. This book offers a critical examination of choice and is ideal for students and researchers working in all areas of functional linguistics as well as cognitive linguistics, second language acquisition, neurolinguistics and sociolinguistics.

This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Speakers can modulate the meaning and effects of their utterances by changing the location of stress or of pauses, and by choosing the melody of their sentences. Although these factors often do not change the literal meaning of what is said, linguists have in recent years found tools and models to describe these more elusive aspects of linguistic meaning. This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Daniel Buring presents the main phenomena involved, and introduces the details of current formal analyses of prosodic structure, relevant aspects of discourse structure, intonational meaning, and, most importantly, the relations between them. He explains and compares the most influential theories in these areas, and outlines the questions that remain open for future research. This wide-ranging book involves aspects of phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and will be of interest to researchers and students in all of these fields, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

This book contributes to the scholarly debate on the forms and patterns of interaction and discourse in modern digital communication by probing some of the social functions that online communication has for its users. An array of experts and scholars in the field address a range of forms of social interaction and discourses expressed by users on social networks and in public media. Social functions are reflected through linguistic and discursive practices that are either those of 'convergence' or 'controversy' in terms of how the discourse participants handle interpersonal relations or how they construct meanings in discourses. In this sense, the book elaborates on some very central concerns in the area of digital discourse analysis that have been reported within the last decade from various methodological perspectives ranging from sociolinguistics and pragmatics to corpus linguistics. This edited collection will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the fields of digital discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, social media and communication, and media and cultural studies.

This book explores what new light philosophical approaches shed on a deeper understanding of (im)politeness. There have been numerous studies on linguistic (im)politeness, however, little attention has been paid to its philosophical underpinnings. This book opens new avenues for both (im)politeness and philosophy. It contributes to a fruitful dialogue among philosophy, pragmatics, and sociology. This volume appeals to students and researchers in these fields.

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.

This book explores debaters' professional identity construction through implicit negation in televised debates from an interpersonal pragmatic perspective. It reveals the linguistic strategies used to indirectly negate the identity of others, and highlights three pairs of professional identity constructed through implicit negation: (1) expert vs. non-expert identity, (2) outsider vs. insider identity, (3) authentic vs. false identity. Furthermore, it proposes the Inter-relationality Principle, self-through-other identity and other-through-self identity, which contribute to Bucholtz and Hall's theory of identity construction. Lastly, the book discusses the relations between professional identity construction through implicit negation and im/politeness, and builds a model of professional identity construction through implicit negation based on interpersonal pragmatics. By focusing on the interpersonal pragmatics of professional identity construction, the book advances the interpersonal pragmatic study of identity construction, im/politeness and implicit negation. As such, it is a valuable resource for a broad readership, including graduate students, and scholars who are interested in professional identity construction, implicit negation and im/politeness research.

This book considers metaphor as a communicative phenomenon in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney, in light of the relevance theory account of communication first developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in the 1980s. The first half of the book introduces relevance theory, situating it in relation to literary criticism, and then surveys the history of metaphor in literary studies and assesses relevance theory's account of metaphor, including recent developments within the theory such as Robyn Carston's notion of 'the lingering of the literal'. The second half of the book considers the role of metaphor in the work of three nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets through the lens of three terms central to relevance theory: inference, implicature and mutual manifestness. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars working in literary studies, pragmatics and stylistics, as well as to relevance theorists.

Many languages include constructions which are sensitive to the expression of polarity: that is, negative polarity items, which cannot occur in affirmative clauses, and positive polarity items, which cannot occur in negatives. The phenomenon of polarity sensitivity has been an important source of evidence for theories about the mental architecture of grammar over the last fifty years, and to many the oddly dysfunctional sensitivities of polarity items have seemed to support a view of grammar as an encapsulated mental module fundamentally unrelated to other aspects of human cognition or communicative behavior. This book draws on insights from cognitive/functional linguistics and formal semantics to argue that, on the contrary, the grammar of sensitivity is grounded in a very general human cognitive ability to form categories and draw inferences based on scalar alternatives, and in the ways this ability is deployed for rhetorical effects in ordinary interpersonal communication.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics provides an overview of key concepts and theory in pragmatics, charts developments in the disciplinary relationship between translation studies and pragmatics, and showcases applications of pragmatics-inspired research in a wide range of translation, spoken and signed language interpreting activities. Bringing together 22 authoritative chapters by leading scholars, this reference work is divided into three sections: Influences and Intersections, Methodological Issues, and Applications. Contributions focus on features of linguistic pragmatics and their analysis in authentic and experimental data relating to a wide range of translation and interpreting activities, including: news, scientific, literary and audiovisual translation, translation in online social media, healthcare interpreting and audio description for the theatre. It also encompasses contributions on issues beyond the level of the text that include the study of interpersonal relationships in practitioner networks and the development of pragmatic competence in interpreter training. Each chapter includes many practical illustrative examples and a list of recommended reading. Fundamental reading for students and academics in translation and interpreting studies, this is also an essential resource for those working in the related fields of linguistics, communication and intercultural studies.

This book criticizes the methodology of the recent semantics-pragmatics debate in the theory of language and proposes an alternative. It applies this methodology to argue for a traditional view against a group of "contextualists" and "pragmatists", including Sperber and Wilson, Bach, Carston, Recanati, Neale, and many others. The author disagrees with these theorists who hold that the meaning of the sentence in an utterance never, or hardly ever, yields its literal truth-conditional content, even after disambiguation and reference fixing; it needs to be pragmatically supplemented in context. The standard methodology of this debate is to consult intuitions. The book argues that theories should be tested against linguistic usage. Theoretical distinctions, however intuitive, need to be scientifically motivated. Also we should not be guided by Grice's "Modified Occam's Razor", Ruhl's "Monosemantic Bias", or other such strategies for "meaning denialism". From this novel perspective, the striking examples of context relativity that motivate contextualists and pragmatists typically exemplify semantic rather than pragmatic properties. In particular, polysemous phenomena should typically be treated as semantic ambiguity. The author argues that conventions have been overlooked, that there's no extensive "semantic underdetermination" and that the new theoretical framework of "truth-conditional pragmatics" is a mistake.

This edited book focuses on speech etiquette, examining the rules that govern communication in various online communities: professional, female, and ethnospecific. The contributors analyze online communication in the Slavic languages Russian, Slovak, Polish, and Belarusian, showing how the concept of speech etiquette differs from the concept of politeness, although both reflect the relationship between people in interaction. Online communities are united on the basis of common informative or phatic illocutions among their participants, and their speech etiquette is manifested in stable forms of conducting discussions - stimulating and responding. Each group has its own ideas of unacceptable speech behavior and approaches to sanitation, and the rules of speech etiquette in each group determine the degree of rapport and distancing between the participants in discourse. The chapters in this book explore how rapport and distance are established through acts such as showing attention to the addressee and increasing his or her communicative status; reducing or increasing the illocutionary power of evaluations and motivations; and evaluating one's own or someone else's speech. The volume will be of interest to researchers studying online communication in such diverse fields as linguistics, sociology, anthropology, programming, and media studies.

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?

The book provides insights into the systems and strategies of expressing the Phasal Polarity (PhP) concepts ALREADY, STILL, NOT YET and NO LONGER in African languages. Special emphasis is laid on careful examination of the functional spectrum and paradigmatic affiliation of PhP expressions. The book challenges hypotheses and established assumptions in the typological literature.

New Directions in Second Language Pragmatics brings together varying perspectives in second language (L2) pragmatics to show both historical developments in the field, while also looking towards the future, including theoretical, empirical, and implementation perspectives. This volume is divided in four sections: teaching and learning speech acts, assessing pragmatic competence, analyzing discourses in digital contexts, and current issues in L2 pragmatics. The chapters focus on various aspects related to the learning, teaching, and assessing of L2 pragmatics and cover a range of learning environments. The authors address current topics in L2 pragmatics such as: speech acts from a discursive perspective; pragmatics instruction in the foreign language classroom and during study abroad; assessment of pragmatic competence; research methods used to collect pragmatics data; pragmatics in computer-mediated contexts; the role of implicit and explicit knowledge; discourse markers as a resource for interaction; and the framework of translingual practice. Taken together, the chapters in this volume foreground innovations and new directions in the field of L2 pragmatics while, at the same time, ground their work in the existing literature. Consequently, this volume both highlights where the field of L2 pragmatics has been and offers cutting-edge insights into where it is going in the future.

Semantics is the study of meaning in language. This clear and comprehensive textbook is the most up-to-date introduction to the subject available for undergraduate students. It not only equips students with the concepts they need in order to understand the main aspects of semantics, it also introduces the styles of reasoning and argument which characterise the field. It contains more than 200 exercises and discussion questions designed to test and deepen readers' understanding. More inclusive than other textbooks, it clearly explains and contrasts different theoretical approaches, summarises current debates, and provides helpful suggestions for further reading. Examples are drawn both from major world languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish and English, and from minority ones. The book also highlights the connections between semantics and the wider study of human language in psychology, anthropology, and linguistics itself.

Semantics is the study of meaning in language. This clear and comprehensive textbook is the most up-to-date introduction to the subject available for undergraduate students. It not only equips students with the concepts they need in order to understand the main aspects of semantics, it also introduces the styles of reasoning and argument which characterise the field. It contains more than 200 exercises and discussion questions designed to test and deepen readers' understanding. More inclusive than other textbooks, it clearly explains and contrasts different theoretical approaches, summarises current debates, and provides helpful suggestions for further reading. Examples are drawn both from major world languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish and English, and from minority ones. The book also highlights the connections between semantics and the wider study of human language in psychology, anthropology, and linguistics itself.

This book adopts a cross-sectional approach and mainly focuses on one of the core pragmatic constructs, formulaic/pragmatic routines, in addition to components put forward by Roever (2011) and Taguchi (2013). It actively integrates multidimensional pragmatic modalities-including both production (initiating and responding) and reception (recognition, comprehension, and perception), together with learners' cognitive processes-rather than one or two types of task modalities. Focusing more on the Chinese EFL context instead of Japanese or European L1 learners, it also takes advantage of an emerging instrument, the computer-animated elicitation task, for data collection based on authentic oral responses and to avoid "coached" responses. The socio-cognitive approach, proposed by the famous linguistic expert Prof. Istvan Kecskes, is subsequently applied to conduct an in-depth analysis of the data. Hence, the book introduces a new and fruitful theoretical perspective to the traditional L2 pragmatic research field.

In everyday talk about language, we distinguish between what someone said and what they implied, or otherwise conveyed. This distinction has been carried over into theorising about language and communication, resulting in much debate about how the notion of what is said should be defined. Against the underlying assumption of these disputes, Nothing is Said argues that it is a mistake to import the notion of saying into our models of basic linguistic communication. Rather than belonging to our basic linguistic competence, the notion of saying is a reflective one resulting from a higher-order metacommunicative competence that is relatively late-developing. This competence allows us to reflect simultaneously on the form and content of an utterance, and hence characterise it as an act of saying. The study shows how this notion of saying can be accounted for without assuming that identifying what is said is a necessary step in basic utterance interpretation. The idea that linguistic interpretation relies on identifying what is said is deeply ingrained. Mark Jary considers the consequences for semantic and pragmatic theory of dropping this assumption, focusing on lexical pragmatics, scalar implicature, assertion, lying, and other topics that have received significant attention in the recent literature. The claims made are supported by reference to empirical data from experimental psychology.

Lexicology is about words, their meanings and the relationships between them, their origins and their structure. It combines the study of derivational morphology with lexical semantics. This textbook explores the history, meanings and structure of words, the way they are collected in dictionaries and the way they are stored in our minds. It goes beyond examining the morphological structure of words to examine the way words are spelt and the way they sound. At every stage, the book focuses not only on description, but also on the puzzles that words present. Supported by numerous examples, exercises, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading and a glossary, this is an accessible and lively guide to the linguistic study of English through the consideration of words.