This book addresses different forms of discourse by analysing the emergence of power dynamics in communication and their importance in shaping the production and reception of messages. The chapters focus on specific cognitive aspects, such as the verbal expression of reasoning or emotions, as well as on linguistic and discursive processes. The interaction between reasoning, feelings, and emotions is described in relation to several fields of discourse where power dynamics may emerge and includes, among others, political, media, and academic discourse. This volume aims to include representative instances of this heterogeneity and is deeply rooted, both theoretically and methodologically, in the acknowledgment that the investigation of the complex interaction between reason and emotion in discursive productions cannot be exempt from the adoption of a multi-disciplinary perspective. By providing a critical reflection of their methodological decisions, and describing the implications of their research projects, the contributors offer insights which are relevant for students, researchers, and practitioners operating in the broad field of discourse studies.

This book examines the most frequent form of Jew-hatred: Israel-related antisemitism. After defining this hate ideology in its various manifestations and the role the internet plays in it, the author explores the question of how Israel-related antisemitism is communicated and understood through the language used by readers in below-the-line comments. Drawing on a corpus of over 6,000 comments from traditionally left-wing news outlets The Guardian and Die Zeit, the author examines both implicit and explicit comparisons made between modern-day Israel and both colonial Britain and Nazi Germany. His analyses are placed within the context of resurgent neo-nationalism in both countries, and it is argued that these instances of antisemitism perform a multi-faceted role in absolving guilt, re-writing history, and reinforcing in-group status. This book will be of interest not only to linguistics scholars, but also to academics in fields such as internet studies, Jewish studies, hate speech and antisemitism.

Together with the first volume "Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments," this book collects contributions that represent the state of the art on the interconnection between pragmatics and philosophy. While the first volume presents the philosophical dimension of pragmatics, showing the path from theoretical advances to practical uses and approaches, this second volume offers a specular view on this discipline. Instead of adopting the top-down view of the first volume, this collection of eleven chapters starts from the analysis of linguistic data - which include texts and discourses in different languages, different types of dialogues, different types of interactions, and different modes for expressing meaning - looking for the regularities that govern our production and processing. The chapters are ordered according to their relationship with the themes and methods that define the field of pragmatics. The more explored and classical linguistic issues such as prototype-based generalizations, scalar implicatures, and temporal ordering, lead gradually to the more recent and debated topic of slurs and pejorative language, and finally to the interdisciplinary and more pioneering works addressing specific context of language use, such as marketplace interactions, courtroom speeches, schizophrenic discourse, literary texts for children, and multimedia communication. Chapter 12 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This edited book brings together studies on different aspects of marginalization in Japanese, creating a framework for studying marginalization which can also be applied in other linguistic and international contexts. The chapters in this book look at both marginalization of others and self-marginalization, examining the pragmatic strategies used to achieve marginalization, and investigating situations where it acts as an agentive tactic of speakers, in addition to a strategy of broader social structures. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and East Asian languages and cultures.

This volume serves as a reference on the field of cognitive semantics. It offers a systematic and original discussion of the issues at the core of the debate in semiotics and the cognitive sciences. It takes into account the problems of representation, the nature of mind, the structure of perception, beliefs associated with habits, social cognition, autism, intersubjectivity and subjectivity. The chapters in this volume present the foundation of semiotics as a theory of cognition, offer a semiotic model of cognitive integration that combines Enactivism and the Extended Mind Theory, and investigate the role of imagination as the origin of perception. The author develops an account of beliefs that are associated with habits and meaning, grounded in Pragmatism, testing his Narrative Practice Semiotic Hypothesis on persons with autism spectrum disorders. He also integrates his ideas about the formation of the theory of mind with a theory of subjectivity, understood as self-consciousness which derives from semiotic cognitive abilities. This text appeals to students, professors and researchers in the field.

This book offers a unique window to the study of im/politeness by looking at a translation perspective, which offers a different set of data and allows further understanding of the phenomenon. In the arena of real-life translation practice, the workings of im/politeness are renegotiated in a different cultural context and thus pragmatically oriented cross-cultural differences become more concrete and tangible. The book focuses on the language pair English and Greek, a strategic choice with Greek as a less widely spoken language and English as a global language. The two languages also differ in their politeness orientation in certain genres, which allows for a fruitful comparison. The volume focuses on press translation first, then translation of academic texts and translation for the stage, and finally audiovisual translation (mainly subtitles). These genres highlight a public, an interactional, and a multimodal dimension in the workings of im/politeness.

Metonymy and Language presents a new theory of language and communication in which the central focus is on the concept of metonymy, the recognition of partial matches and overlaps. Through the use of original data sets and rigorous primary research, Denroche characterizes metonymy as key to understanding why language is so 'fit for purpose' and how it achieves such great subtlety and flexibility. This study develops the notion of 'metonymic competence' and demonstrates that metonymic behavior is often pursued for its own sake in recreational activities, such as quizzes, puzzles and play, and shows the possible impact of the application of metonymic processing theory to professional fields, such as language teaching and translator training. Furthermore, it proposes a research approach with metonymy at its center, 'metonymics,' which Denroche suggests could provide a powerful framework for addressing issues in numerous fields of practice in the arts and sciences.

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 is all about the captivating ability that the human language has to express intricately logical (mathematical) meanings using tiny (microsemantic) morphemes as utilities. Languages mark meanings with identical inferences using identical particles and these particles thus creep up in a wide array of expressions. Because of their multi-tasking capacity to express seemingly disparate meanings, they are dubbed Superparticles. These particles are perfect windows into the interlock of several grammatical modules and the nature of the interaction of these modules through time. With a firm footing in the module where grammatical bones are built and assembled (narrow morpho-syntax), superparticles acquire varied interpretation (in the conceptual-intentional module - semantics) depending on the structure they fea- ture in. What is more, some of the interpretations these particles trigger are inferential and belong, under the standard account, to the realm of pragmatics. How can such tiny particles, rarely exceeding a syllable of sound, have such powerful and over-arching effects across the inter-modular grammatical space? This is the Platonic background against which this book is set.

Metonymy and Language presents a new theory of language and communication in which the central focus is on the concept of metonymy, the recognition of partial matches and overlaps. Through the use of original data sets and rigorous primary research, Denroche characterizes metonymy as key to understanding why language is so 'fit for purpose' and how it achieves such great subtlety and flexibility. This study develops the notion of 'metonymic competence' and demonstrates that metonymic behavior is often pursued for its own sake in recreational activities, such as quizzes, puzzles and play, and shows the possible impact of the application of metonymic processing theory to professional fields, such as language teaching and translator training. Furthermore, it proposes a research approach with metonymy at its center, 'metonymics,' which Denroche suggests could provide a powerful framework for addressing issues in numerous fields of practice in the arts and sciences.

An accessible and thorough introduction to implicatures, a key topic in all frameworks of pragmatics. Starting with a definition of the various types of implicatures in Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, the book covers many important questions for current pragmatic theories, namely: the distinction between explicit and implicit forms of pragmatic enrichment, the criteria for drawing a line between semantic and pragmatic meaning, the relations between the structure of language (syntax) and its use (pragmatics), the social and cognitive factors underlying the use of implicatures by native speakers, and the factors influencing their acquisition for children and second language learners. Written in non-technical language, Implicatures will appeal to students and teachers in linguistics, applied linguistics, psychology and sociology, who are interested in how language is used for communication, and how children and learners develop pragmatic skills.

The Routledge Handbook of Semantics provides a broad and state-of-the-art survey of this field, covering semantic research at both word and sentence level. It presents a synoptic view of the most important areas of semantic investigation, including contemporary methodologies and debates, and indicating possible future directions in the field. Written by experts from around the world, the 29 chapters cover key issues and approaches within the following areas: meaning and conceptualisation; meaning and context; lexical semantics; semantics of specific phenomena; development, change and variation. The Routledge Handbook of Semantics is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area.

This book presents reflections on the relationship between narratives and argumentative discourse. It focuses on their functional and structural similarities or dissimilarities, and offers diverse perspectives and conceptual tools for analyzing the narratives' potential power for justification, explanation and persuasion. Divided into two sections, the first Part, under the title "Narratives as Sources of Knowledge and Argument", includes five chapters addressing rather general, theoretical and characteristically philosophical issues related to the argumentative analysis and understanding of narratives. We may perceive here how scholars in Argumentation Theory have recently approached certain topics that have a close connection with mainstream discussions in epistemology and the cognitive sciences about the justificatory potential of narratives. The second Part, entitled "Argumentative Narratives in Context", brings us six more chapters that concentrate on either particular functions played by argumentatively-oriented narratives or particular practices that may benefit from the use of special kinds of narratives. Here the focus is either on the detailed analysis of contextualized examples of narratives with argumentative qualities or on the careful understanding of the particular demands of certain well-defined situated activities, as diverse as scientific theorizing or war policing, that may be satisfied by certain uses of narrative discourse.

This book focuses on the multifarious aspects of 'fuzzy boundaries' in the field of discourse studies, a field that is marked by complex boundary work and a great degree of fuzziness regarding theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and the use of linguistic categories. Discourse studies is characterised by a variety of theoretical frameworks and disciplinary fields, research methodologies, and lexico-grammatical categories. The contributions in this book explore some of the nuances and implications of the fuzzy boundaries in these areas, resulting in a wide-reaching volume which will be of interest to students and scholars of discourse studies in fields including sociology, linguistics, international relations, philosophy, literary criticism and anthropology.

How does a listener understand a sarcastic 'That was a wonderful speech' when the words point to a positive review? Why do students of introductory logic interpret 'Some cabs are yellow' as 'Not all cabs are yellow' when the meaning of 'some' is compatible with 'all'? Pragmatics aims to explain how listeners draw out a speaker's meaning from utterances, an astonishing feat when one considers that the words in a sentence hardly suffice for fully comprehending what the speaker intended. Given the nature of pragmatics, it is going to take the interdisciplinary firepower of many cognitive sciences - including philosophy, experimental psychology, linguistics and neuroscience - to fully appreciate this uniquely human ability. In this book, Ira Noveck, a leading pioneer in experimental pragmatics, engagingly walks the reader through the phenomena, the theoretical debates, the experiments as well as the historical development of this growing academic discipline.

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 constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 21st Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2020, held in Hong Kong, China in May 2020.Due to COVID-19, the conference was held virtually. The 76 full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 233 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Lexical semantics and general linguistics, AI, Big Data, and NLP, Cognitive Science and experimental studies.

This edited book presents contemporary empirical research investigating the use of language in professional settings, drawing on the contributions of a set of internationally-renowned authors. The book takes a critical approach to understanding professional communication in a range of fields and global contexts. Split into three parts, covering Business and Organisations, Healthcare, and Politics and Institutions, the contributors explore how and why academics engage in workplace research which takes the form of 'consultancy', 'advocacy' and 'activism'. In light of an ever-changing, ever-demanding global landscape, this volume offers new theoretical and methodological ways of conducting professional communication research with real-world impact. It will be of interest to linguistics and communication researchers and practitioners, particularly those working in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, business communication, health communication, political communication, language and the law and organisational studies.

Natural languages - idioms such as English and Cantonese, Zulu and Amharic, Basque and Nicaraguan Sign Language - allow their speakers to convey meaning and transmit meaning to one another. But what is meaning exactly? What is this thing that words convey and speakers communicate? Few questions are as elusive as this. Yet, few features are as essential to who we are and what we do as human beings as the capacity to convey meaning through language. In this book, Gaetano Fiorin and Denis Delfitto disclose a notion of linguistic meaning that is structured around three distinct, yet interconnected dimensions: a linguistic dimension, relating meaning to the linguistic forms that convey it; a material dimension, relating meaning to the material and social conditions of its environment; and a psychological dimension, relating meaning to the cognitive lives of its users. By paying special attention to the puzzle surrounding first-person reference - the way speakers exploit language to refer to themselves - and by capitalizing on a number of recent findings in the cognitive sciences, Fiorin and Delfitto develop the original hypothesis that meaningful language shares the same underlying logical and metaphysical structure of sense perception, effectively acting as a system of classification and discrimination at the interface between cognitive agents and their ecologies.

This book aims to address the challenges of defining measurement in social sciences, presenting a conceptualization of the practice of measurement from the perspective of the pragmatic tradition in philosophy. The book reviews key questions regarding the scope and limits of measurement, emphasizing that if the trust that the public places on mea sures in the social sciences relies on their connection to the notion of measurement in the physical sciences, then the clarification of the similarities and differences between measurement in the physical and the social realms is of central importance to adequately contextualize their relative advantages and limitations. It goes on to present some of the most influential theories of measurement such as the "classical view" of measurement, operationalism, and the representational theory of measurement, as well as more methodological perspectives arising from the practice of researchers in the social sciences, such as the latent variable perspective, and from the physical sciences and engineering, represented by metrology. This overview illustrates that the concept of measurement, and that of quantitative methods, is currently being used across the board in ways that do not necessarily conform to traditional, classical definitions of measurement, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes our technical understanding of it. Moreover, what constitutes a technical understanding of measurement, and the theoretical commitments that it entails, must vary in different areas. In this context, disagreement on what is constitutive of measurement is bound to appear. Pragmatism is presented as a theoretical perspective that offers the advantage of being flexible and fallibilist, encouraging us to abandon the pursuit of a timeless and perfect definition that attempts to establish decontextualized/definitive demarcation criteria for what is truly measurement. This book will be of particular interest for psychologists and other human and social scientists, and more concretely for scholars interested in measurement and assessment in psychological and social measurement. The pragmatic perspective of measurement presents a conceptual framework for researchers to ground their assessment practices acknowledging and dealing with the challenges of social measurement.

This book investigates the syntax and semantics of proportional most and other majority quantifiers across languages. Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin and Ion Giurgea draw on data from around 40 languages to demonstrate the existence of two distinct semantic types of most: a distributive type, which compares cardinalities of sets of atoms, and a cumulative type, which involves measuring plural and mass entities with respect to a whole. On the syntactic side, the most significant difference is between partitive and non-partitive configurations: certain majority quantifiers are specific to partitive constructions, while others are also allowed in non-partitives. The volume also explores complex expressions of the type the largest part and nominal quantifiers of the type the majority. The authors argue in favour of a quantificational analysis of most, in contrast to many recent studies, but adopt a bipartition-cum-superlative analysis for the largest part. The volume is a large-scale crosslinguistic investigation, offering typological insights as well as case studies from a range of languages, including German, Romanian, Hungarian, Hindi, and Syrian Arabic. The findings have implications for the study of number marking, partitivity, kind reference, (in)definiteness marking, and other crucial issues in linguistic theory.

This book presents the first full-length study of the stylistically experimental and influential novelist George Moore's (1852-1933) repeated acts of rewriting. Moore extensively and repeatedly revised and re-issued many of his major works, sometimes years or even decades after they were initially published. This monograph provides new insights into how this process shaped and determined his work, and by extension into the creative significance of literary rewriting more generally. It also offers the first sustained application of linguistic pragmatics, the study of meaning in interaction, to the work of a single author, opening up questions about how analytical paradigms developed in pragmatics can explain how rewriting can affect the interactive relationship between a literary text and its readers. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the areas of pragmatics, stylistics, literary history, English literature and Irish literature.

Acquiring Pragmatics offers a comprehensive synthesis of state-of-the-art research on the acquisition of pragmatics. It introduces the current topics of research in theoretical pragmatics and explores the issues they raise for language acquisition research and the new experimental designs which have been developed to address them. While each chapter covers each topic in depth, it also places a strong emphasis on the underlying methodological aspects of each issue, which will help the reader to develop their own experimental designs. Key topics covered include: The interfaces between pragmatics and language acquisition The social aspects of pragmatic competence The cognitive aspects of pragmatic competence The acquisition of pragmatics in autistic spectrum disorders and second language acquisition Acquiring Pragmatics is key reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying pragmatics and language acquisition.