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 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.

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.

De l'approximation... se preoccupe de certains aspects de l'une des expressions les plus dynamiques du vague, l'approximation. Elle emprunte plusieurs identites discursives a partir de l'indetermination, passant par l'hesitation, l'attenuation, certaines formes de l'ellipse, tout ce qui se caracterise par une valeur imprecise de leur contenu semantique et discursif. Trois axes principaux representent le liant de cette demarche: identification, analyse, contrastivite. L'identification des sources et des moyens d'expression de l'approximation attire l'analyse des mecanismes de productions de ce phenomene, mis en action par divers operateurs logico-semantiques et pragmatico-discursifs divers effacer. On commence ainsi dans l'a peu pres francais pour finir dans cam a'sa ceva roumain. Contrastivement, l'approximation categorielle de meme que l'approximation predicative analysees sur un corpus roumain se miroitent premierement dans le francais, et ensuite dans l'espagnol et l'italien.

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 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.

Wortspiele entstehen unter anderem infolge kreativen Umgangs mit Wortbildungsregeln. In der Monographie schlagt die Autorin eine Definition und Klassifikation von Wortbildungsspielen vor dem Hintergrund von Wittgensteins Sprachspieltheorie vor. Sie untersucht, wie das Spiel mit den Wortbildungsregeln die semantische Struktur von Woertern verandert. Die Untersuchungsmethode stutzt sich auf die Erkenntnis, dass komplexe Lexeme als pradikative Strukturen aufgefasst werden koennen. Den Analysen liegt die Dependenzgrammatik zugrunde. Die Ergebnisse weisen nach, dass durch das Wortbildungsspiel in den Pradikationsstrukturen bewirkte Veranderungen bestimmte Regelhaftigkeiten erkennen lassen.

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.

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.

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.

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 steers a middle course between two opposing conceptions that currently dominate the field of semantics, the logical and cognitive approaches. Patrick Duffley brings to light the inadequacies of both of these frameworks, arguing that linguistic semantics must be based on the linguistic sign itself and on the meaning that it conveys across the full range of its uses. The book offers 12 case studies that demonstrate the explanatory power of a sign-based semantics, dealing with topics such as complementation with aspectual and causative verbs, control and raising, wh- words, full-verb inversion, and existential-there constructions. It calls for a radical revision of the semantics/pragmatics interface, proposing that the dividing line be drawn between content that is linguistically encoded and content that is not encoded but still communicated. While traditional linguistic analysis often places meaning at the level of the sentence or construction, this volume argues that meaning belongs at the lower level of linguistic items, where the linguistic sign is stored in a stable, permanent, and direct relation with its meaning outside of any particular context. Building linguistic analysis from the ground up in this way provides it with a more solid foundation and increases its explanatory power.

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 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.

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 systematically investigates what follows about meaning in language if current views on the limited, or even redundant, role of linguistic semantics are taken to their radical conclusion. Focusing on conditionals, the book defends a wholly pragmatic, wholly inferential account of meaning - one which foregrounds a reasoning subject's individual state of mind. The topics discussed in the book include conceptual content, internalism and externalism, the semantics-pragmatics distinction, meaning holism and explicit versus implicit communication. These topics and the author's analysis of conditionals will allow the reader to engage with some traditional and current research in linguistics, philosophy and psychology.

Formal semantics - the scientific study of meaning in natural language - is one of the most fundamental and long-established areas of linguistics. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, yet compact guide to the field, bringing together research from a wide range of world-leading experts. Chapters include coverage of the historical context and foundation of contemporary formal semantics, a survey of the variety of formal/logical approaches to linguistic meaning and an overview of the major areas of research within current semantic theory, broadly conceived. The Handbook also explores the interfaces between semantics and neighbouring disciplines, including research in cognition and computation. This work will be essential reading for students and researchers working in linguistics, philosophy, psychology and computer science.

Der Sammelband geht der Frage nach, inwiefern in massenmedialen Kontexten neue Emotionskulturen zum Tragen kommen. Die Beitrage untersuchen, wie Emotionen verbal und mit anderen Zeichen hervorgebracht oder neu verhandelt werden und welche soziopragmatischen oder diskursiven Effekte dies hat. Im Zentrum steht damit einerseits die Analyse der Medialitat des Emotionsdisplays, andererseits die Frage nach medial emergierenden Emotionskulturen: Sind neue sprachliche und andere soziale Praktiken der Emotionalisierung zu beobachten? Der Band vereinigt kulturanalytisch-medienlinguistische Analysen zu Emotionsdarstellungen in digitaler Kommunikation (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Selbsthilfeplattformen), aber auch im Fernsehen (Talkshows, Wissensdokus) und in der Medialitat der Handschriftlichkeit. Dabei werden Phanomene wie Hatespeech und Shitstorms auf Facebook und Twitter ebenso untersucht wie Fan-Trauer auf Twitter, Fussball-Livetweets und Emotionalisierungen in YouTube-Videos, Online-Selbsthilfegruppen, TV-Wissensdokus oder in der Fernsehrezeption in Social Media.

This innovative edited collection presents new insights into emerging debates around digital communication practices. It brings together research by leading international experts to examine methods and approaches, multimodality, face and identity, across five thematically organised sections. Its contributors revise current paradigms in view of past, present, and future research and analyse how users deploy the wealth of multimodal resources afforded by digital technologies to undertake tasks and to enact identity. In its concluding section it identifies the ideologies that underpin the construction of digital texts in the social world. This important contribution to digital discourse studies will have interdisciplinary appeal across the fields of linguistics, socio-linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, gender studies, multimodality, media and communication studies.

Este libro presenta un estudio contrastivo de las figuras retoricas de orden semantico mas prominentemente empleadas en tres corpus de notas periodisticas deportivas, uno en espanol, otro en frances y otro en ingles. El estudio determina las semejanzas y diferencias respecto de metaforas, metonimias e hiperboles explotadas por los periodistas deportivos en los tres corpus antes referidos. Por un lado, las metonimias evidencian la habilidad del periodista para redactar un texto coherente con multiples anaforas y cataforas. Por otro lado, las metaforas expresan conceptos deportivos mediante terminos que pertenecen a diversos campos semanticos. Por ultimo, las hiperboles describen imagenes inverosimiles que producen en el lector diversos sentimientos.