This book is the first in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. In addition, it explores ethnopragmatics and conversational humour, with a further focus on semantic analysis more broadly. Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

This volume sets out to provide a semantics for the "future-directed opining verbs", a novel class whose members are used to describe subjects' externally attested opinions toward future possibilities. Including verbs like recommend, promise, and permit, the class can be situated within a broader range of opinion verbs, including the well-known propositional attitudes, and key to the investigation here are differences among these groups along the lines of available event types, interaction with the common ground, and restrictions on subjects and objects. Other important semantic topics implicated in the discussion are dispositions, free choice disjunction, and Neg-raising/embedded NPI licensing, and the host of new data associated with the future-directed opining verbs prompts surveys of the expanded scope of these phenomena, and corresponding re-evaluation of existing theories. Collectively, the contributions of this work deepen our understanding of predicates that describe opinion and disposition, and how these interact with fundamental logical operations like negation and disjunction, highlighting the crucial role of contextual factors like relevance for these processes.

This volume explores the progress of cross-linguistic research into the structure of complex nominals since the publication of Chomsky's 'Remarks on Nominalization' in 1970. In the last 50 years of research into the division of labour between the mental lexicon and syntax, the specific properties of nominalized structures have remained a particularly central question. The chapters in this volume take stock of developments in this area and offer new perspectives on a range of issues, including the representation of morphological complexity in the syntax, the correlation of nominal affixes with different types of nominalizations, and the modelling of non-compositional meaning within syntactic approaches to word formation. Crucially, the contributors base their analyses on data from typologically diverse languages, such as Archi, Greek, Hiaki, Icelandic, Mebengokre, Turkish, and Udmurt, and explore the question of whether, cross-linguistically, nominalizations have a uniform core to their structure that can be syntactically described.

This innovative book examines the discourse of reality television, and the elasticity of language in the popular talent show The Voice from a cross-cultural perspective. Analysing how and why elastic language is used in persuasion and comforting, a comparison between Chinese and English is made, and the authors highlight the special role that elastic language plays in effective interactions and strategic communication. Through the lens of the language variance of two of the world's most commonly spoken languages, the insights and resources provided by this book are expected to advance knowledge in the fields of contrastive pragmatics and cross-cultural communication, and inform strategies in bridging different cultures. This study highlights the need to give the elastic use of language the attention it deserves, and reveals how language is non-discrete and strategically stretchable. This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students engaged in elastic/vague language studies, cross-cultural pragmatics, media linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and communication studies.

This book offers new perspectives on the study of Chinese lexical semantics, as well as discourse analysis and cognitive pragmatics based on lexical semantics. The first part focuses on fundamental issues in lexical semantic research, while the second features articles highlighting various aspects of the lexical category systems in Chinese. The third part discusses application-oriented research on lexical semantics. Presenting the latest research in the field, the book is a valuable resource for specialists in Chinese lexical semantics, as well as for researchers and students interested in grammar, theory of lexical semantics, and word/meaning processing.

This edited volume focuses on the hypothesis that performativity is not a property confined to certain specific human skills, or to certain specific acts of language, nor an accidental enrichment due to creative intelligence. Instead, the executive and motor component of cognitive behavior should be considered an intrinsic part of the physiological functioning of the mind, and as endowed with self-generative power. Performativity, in this theoretical context, can be defined as a constituent component of cognitive processes. The material action allowing us to interact with reality is both the means by which the subject knows the surrounding world and one through which he experiments with the possibilities of his body. This proposal is rooted in models now widely accepted in the philosophy of mind and language; in fact, it focuses on a space of awareness that is not in the individual, or outside it, but is determined by the species-specific ways in which the body acts on the world. This theoretical hypothesis will be pursued through the latest interdisciplinary methodology typical of cognitive science, that coincide with the five sections in which the book is organized: Embodied, enactivist, philosophical approaches; Aesthetics approaches; Naturalistic and evolutionary approaches; Neuroscientific approaches; Linguistics approaches. This book is intended for: linguists, philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, scholars of art and aesthetics, performing artists, researchers in embodied cognition, especially enactivists and students of the extended mind.

This book explores the use of discourse markers - lexical items where drawing a distinction between propositional and non-propositional, syntactically-semantically integrated and discourse-pragmatic uses is especially relevant. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, descriptive and critical (CDA) perspectives, and manual annotation and automatized analyses, the author argues that Discourse Markers (DMs) cannot be effectively studied in isolation, but must instead be contextualised with reference to other discourse-pragmatic devices and their language and genre backgrounds. This book will be of interest to students and academics working in the fields of DM research and critical discourse studies, and will also appeal to scholars working in areas such as genre studies, second language acquisition (SLA), literary analysis, contemporary cinematography, Tolkien scholarship, and Bible studies.

This book offers a concise but comprehensive entry-level guide to the study of meaning in context. There can be a big difference between what a speaker says and what they mean - i.e. between literal meaning and intended meaning. A speaker who says I need coffee can mean anything from 'Please buy more coffee' to 'I'm really sleepy'. How is a hearer to know? In this book, Betty Birner explores how we get from what is said to what is meant, from the perspective of both the speaker and the hearer, dealing with a range of context-dependent issues in language along the way: literal and non-literal meaning, implicature, speech acts, reference, definiteness, presupposition, and information structure. She reveals how language users can infer each other's meanings using not just what is being said but also the context and an assumption of rationality and cooperation. This slim guide summarizes the most important and foundational theories in the field of linguistic pragmatics, illustrated with plenty of real-life examples, and including a helpful glossary of key terms. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book will appeal to a wide range of readers, from undergraduate and graduate students of pragmatics to general readers interested in how we successfully communicate with one another.

This book is a comparative corpus-based study of discourse markers based on verbs of saying in English and French. Based on a wide comparable web corpus, the book investigates how discourse markers work in discourse, and compares their differences of position, scope and collocations both cross-linguistically and within single languages. The author positions this study within the wider epistemological background of the French-speaking 'enunciative' tradition and the English-speaking 'pragmatic' tradition, and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars of semantics, pragmatics and contrastive linguistics.

, , . , - . - ( ) . , . - . , , , . A l'epoque du developpement de la linguistique de corpus, de l'elaboration de corpus de textes annotes qui contiennent un volume important de donnees, l'application des methodes quantitatives d'analyse devient une partie inherente de toute etude linguistique. Le livre contient les resultats de l'etude contrastive (russe-francais) des connecteurs avec l'utilisation des methodes quantitatives qui a ete menee dans le cadre du projet de recherche conjoint (Suisse-Russie) soutenu par le FNS et par la Fondation pour la recherche fondamentale de la Federation de Russie (RFBR). Les donnees statistiques pour l'etude contrastive des connecteurs ont ete obtenus grace a une nouvelle ressource informatique: une base de donnees des connecteurs qui contient des textes paralleles en russe et en francais. Le premier chapitre decrit la base de donnees, ses fonctionnalites et les possibilites qu'elle offre aux linguistes pour l'analyse contrastive, qualitative et quantitative, des connecteurs. Le deuxieme et le troisieme chapitres presentent les resultats de l'application de ce type d'analyse des connecteurs russes et francais en tant que marqueurs des relations discursives de concomitance et de reformulation. Dans le quatrieme chapitre ces methodes sont appliquees a l'analyse des resultats de traduction automatique, un domaine de recherche qui se trouve actuellement au centre des interets de la linguistique de corpus et de la linguistique computationnelle.

This book focuses on information literacy for the younger generation of learners and library readers. It is divided into four sections: 1. Information Literacy for Life; 2. Searching Strategies, Disciplines and Special Topics; 3. Information Literacy Tools for Evaluating and Utilizing Resources; 4. Assessment of Learning Outcomes. Written by librarians with wide experience in research and services, and a strong academic background in disciplines such as the humanities, social sciences, information technology, and library science, this valuable reference resource combines both theory and practice. In today's ever-changing era of information, it offers students of library and information studies insights into information literacy as well as learning tips they can use for life.

This book proposes a semantic theory of conditionals that can account for (i) the variability in usages that conditional sentences can be put; and (ii) both conditional sentences of the form 'if p, q' and those conditional thoughts that are expressed without using 'if'. It presents theoretical arguments as well as empirical evidence from English and other languages in support of the thesis that an adequate study of conditionals has to go beyond an analysis of specific sentence forms or lexical items. The resulting perspective on conditionals is one in which conditionality is located at a higher level than that of the sentence; namely, at the level of thought. The author argues that it is only through adopting such a perspective, and with it, a commitment to context-dependent semantics, that we can successfully represent conditional utterances as they are used and understood by ordinary language users. It will be of interest to students and scholars working on the semantics of conditionals in the fields of linguistics (especially semantics and pragmatics) and philosophy of language.

This book discusses the concept of indirect reporting in relation to sociopragmatic, philosophical, and cognitive factors. In addition, it deals with several state-of-the-art topics with regard to indirect reports, such as trust, politeness, refinery and photosynthetic processes and cognitive features. The book presents socio-cognitive accounts of indirect reports that take into consideration Grice's Cooperation Principle and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. It discusses direct and indirect reports and their similarities and differences, with a focus on the neglected role of the hearer in indirect reports. It presents an extensive comparison of translation and indirect reports (with a detailed discussion on reporting/translating slurring), and examines politeness issues and the role of trust. It deals with the main principles governing the use and interpretation of indirect reports (among them, the Principle of Commitment and the Principle of Immunity). Finally, the book discusses the idea of 'common core' and cross-cultural studies in reported speech and illustrates by means of an analysis of Persian reported speech, how subjectivity and uncertainty are presented among Persian speakers.

This book shows how pragmatics and philosophy are interconnected, and explores the consequences and ramifications of this innovative idea, especially in addressing and solving the problem of breaking Grice's circle. The author applies philosophy in order to get to a better understanding of pragmatics, and pragmatics in order to get a better understanding of philosophy. The book starts with a chapter on the non-cancellability of explicatures and the role that this idea plays in the resolution of Grice's circle, and proceeds with the discussion of other topics in which explicatures or cancellability play an important and decisive role. While the reader proceeds in the reading of this book, they accumulate notions and pieces of knowledge which will be of invaluable use when arriving at the chapter on conversational presuppositions (and related chapters), where the author expresses his most radical views: namely that (potential) presuppositions are indeed cancellable, contrary to what many believe.

This book develops a theory of enriched meanings for natural language interpretation that uses the concept of monads and related ideas from category theory, a branch of mathematics that has been influential in theoretical computer science and elsewhere. Certain expressions that exhibit complex effects at the semantics/pragmatics boundary live in an enriched meaning space, while others live in a more basic meaning space. These basic meanings are mapped to enriched meanings only when required compositionally, which avoids generalizing meanings to the worst case. Ash Asudeh and Gianluca Giorgolo show that the monadic theory of enriched meanings offers a formally and computationally well-defined way to tackle important challenges at the semantics/pragmatics boundary. In particular, they develop innovative monadic analyses of three phenomena - conventional implicature, substitution puzzles, and conjunction fallacies - and demonstrate that the compositional properties of monads model linguistic intuitions about these cases particularly well. The analyses are accompanied by exercises to aid understanding, and the computational tools used are available on the book's companion website. The book also contains background chapters on enriched meanings and category theory. The volume is interdisciplinary in nature, with insights from semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, and computer science, and will appeal to graduate students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines with an interest in natural language understanding and representation.

Wer empfindet keine Freude daran, seinem/seiner Gesprachspartner/in etwas Nettes zu sagen? Wer bleibt schon unberuhrt davon, von seinem/seiner Gesprachspartner/in etwas Nettes zu hoeren? Dabei sind wir uns selten dessen bewusst, welch grosses kommunikations- und beziehungsfoerderndes Potenzial im Komplimente-Machen liegt. In diesem Buch geht der Autor dem Phanomen der "schmeichelnden Worte" - wie Komplimente oft zu Unrecht genannt werden - sowohl aus linguistischer als auch aus psychologischer und soziologischer Sicht nach. Diese interdisziplinare Herangehensweise ist eine notwendige Voraussetzung dafur, den Gebrauch von Komplimenten im Deutschen und im Polnischen aus mehreren Perspektiven zu beleuchten. Ihr Vergleich beruht dabei auf solchen Parametern wie Ziel, Form und Wirkung des Komplimentierens.

Based on a rich set of historical data, this book traces the development of pragmatic markers in English, from hwaet in Old English and whilom in Middle English to whatever and I'm just saying in present-day English. Laurel J. Brinton carefully maps the syntactic origins and development of these forms, and critically examines postulated unilineal pathways, such as from adverb to conjunction to discourse marker, or from main clause to parenthetical. The book sets case studies within a larger examination of the development of pragmatic markers as instances of grammaticalization or pragmaticalization. The characteristics of pragmatic markers - as primarily oral, syntactically optional, sentence-external, grammatically indeterminate elements - are revised in the context of scholarship on pragmatic markers over the last thirty or more years.

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.

Die Funktion, die im Leben des Menschen der angeblich prosaischen, aber fur seine Existenz notwendigen Tatigkeit - dem Essen - beigemessen wird, bleibt nicht ohne Einfluss auf die Sprache. Ein bemerkbares Forschungsfeld aus der Schnittstelle des Kulinarischen und der Linguistik bilden kulinarische Namen, die einerseits als Verkoerperung diverser Aspekte des menschlichen Lebens und andererseits als Manifestation menschlicher Denkweise und Aktivitat gelten. UEberdies sind sie ein Zeugnis der kulturellen und gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung. In dieser Monografie wird ein UEberblick uber diverse linguistische Zugange zu kulinarischen Namen prasentiert. Das Ziel ist es dabei, kulinarische Namen aus der sprachwissenschaftlichen Perspektive moeglichst holistisch und komplex zu beschreiben.

Ausgangspunkt fur diesen Band ist der Terrorismus als weltweit prominentes Thema in Printmedien. Die Autorin arbeitet Veranderungen der diskursiven Konstruktion dieses Themas wahrend vier ausgewahlter Untersuchungszeitpunkte heraus. Sie zeigt, dass die unterschiedlichen politischen, wirtschaftlichen und kulturell-philosophischen Rahmenbedingungen in Deutschland und China die diskursive Konstruktion von Terrorismus beeinflussen. Die Analysen illustrieren, wie solche Zusammenhange, Entwicklungen und Divergenzen durch eine korpusbasierte Diskursanalyse sichtbar gemacht werden koennen. Mit ihren statistikbasierten Methoden und anhand der grossen Datenmengen gewinnt die Autorin eine neue Perspektive auf das Thema Terrorismus und erweitert das Methodenrepertoire der Diskursanalyse.

Fur die individuelle und gesamtgesellschaftliche Wissenskommunikation, d.h. den kommunikativ vermittelten Transfer sprachlich gefassten Wissens, haben sich durch die allumfassende Digitalisierung die Bedingungsgefuge in vielfacher Hinsicht verandert. Neue technisch-mediale Rahmenbedingungen, diversifizierte und flexibilisierte Textsorten und Interaktionstypen sowie undurchsichtige Akteurs-Konstellationen lassen eine ganze Reihe neuer wissenskommunikativer Erscheinungsformen entstehen, die trotz ihrer grossen alltaglichen Bedeutung erst in Ansatzen beschrieben sind. Der Sammelband dokumentiert sprach- und transferwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf diesen multidisziplinar im Fokus stehenden Gegenstandsbereich.

La habilidad para comprender y producir textos adecuados en las distintas situaciones comunicativas es una competencia cultural clave en la sociedad actual del conocimiento. El presente volumen colectivo auna didactica y linguistica para explorar la complejidad textual y la competencia textual en la ensenanza del espanol como lengua extranjera. Los estudios interdiciplinares revelan que el encuentro con textos de lengua extranjera, en un entorno intercultural, fomenta la competencia textual para que leer sea tambien comprender.

Das Buch prasentiert Ergebnisse der Forschungsarbeit aus vielen Bereichen der germanistischen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft. Ein gemeinsamer Nenner ist die Verwendung der deutschen Sprache in Kommunikation, im DaF-Unterricht, in Erinnerungskultur mit ihren semantischen Phanomenen, sowie unter pragmatischem Aspekt. Eroertert werden Fragestellungen zu parlamentarischen Zwischenrufen, Funktionsverbgefugen in den Online-Zeitungen, der DDR-Geschichte und ihrer Rezeption, zur Hoeflichkeit unter den Studenten von heute, zu Phrasemen im modernen Fremdsprachenunterricht, semantischen Relationen in Komposita anhand von deutscher Kuche bis hin zu bevor- und ehe-Subjunktoren sowie Zeitverlaufsstrukturen.

In diesem Buch wird die germanistische Aktionsartforschung nachhaltig bereichert und entscheidend vorangetrieben. Zum ersten Mal erfahren Aktionsarten eine allumfassende Behandlung, indem sie sowohl im klassifikatorischen Sinne als Gliederung der Verben nach dem zeitlichen Geschehensablauf und damit nach der Ereignisstruktur als auch im morphologischen Sinne als motivierte Derivate, die von unprafigierten Basisverben abgeleitet sind, aufgefasst werden. Das Buch zeigt nicht nur die Unzulanglichkeiten der traditionellen Vendlerschen Verbklassifikation auf und beseitigt diese, sondern gewahrt daruber hinaus auch einen tiefen Einblick in das bislang wohl ungeahnte semantische Leistungsvermoegen verbaler Prafixe.