This monograph on indirect reports offers insights on the semantics/pragmatics interface and a refinement of the notion of explicature. The volume is written in an engaging style and guides the reader through the theoretical problems and their ramifications. The thorniest problem in the study of indirect reports is their polyphonic nature, and how the listener distinguishes between the reporter's voice and the original speaker's voice, either by contextual clues or, in the absence of such clues, by resorting to pragmatic principles. The introductory chapter discusses the main issues that will be addressed in the volume. The next chapters focus on the various aspects of indirect reports, covering both theory and practical applications.

The author integrates, expands, and deepens his previous publications about irregular (or "metalinguistic") negations. A total of ten distinct negatives-several previously unclassified-are analyzed. The logically irregular negations deny different implicatures of their root. All are partially non-compositional but completely conventional. The author argues that two of the irregular negative meanings are implicatures. The others are semantically rather than pragmatically ambiguous. Since their ambiguity is neither lexical nor structural, direct irregular negatives satisfy the standard definition of idioms as syntactically complex expressions whose meaning is non-compositional. Unlike stereotypical idioms, idiomatic negatives lack fixed syntactic forms and are highly compositional. The final chapter analyzes other "free form" idioms, including irregular interrogatives and comparatives, self-restricted verb phrases, numerical verb phrases, and transparent propositional attitude and speech act reports.

This volume outlines a model of language that can be characterized as functionalist, usage-based, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. The core idea is that linguistic structure is not stable and uniform, but continually refreshed by the interaction between three components: usage, the communicative activities of speakers; conventionalization, the social processes triggered by these activities and feeding back into them; and entrenchment, the individual cognitive processes that are also linked to these activities in a feedback loop. Hans-Joerg Schmid explains how this multiple feedback system works by extending his Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model, showing how the linguistic system is created, sustained, and continually adapted by the ongoing interaction between usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Fulfilling the promise of usage-based accounts, the model explains how exactly usage is transformed into collective and individual grammar and how these two grammars in turn feed back into usage. The book is exceptionally broad in scope, with insights from a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines. It provides a coherent account of the role of multiple factors that influence language structure, variation, and change, including frequency, economy, identity, multilingualism, and language contact.

This book is an introduction to the relationship between the morphosyntactic properties of sentences and their associated illocutionary forces or force potentials. The volume begins with several chapters dedicated to important theoretical and methodological issues, such as sentence and utterance meaning, illocutionary force, clause types, and cross-linguistic comparison. The bulk of the book is then composed of chapter-length case studies that systematically investigate typologically prominent clause types and their forces, such as declaratives and assertions, interrogatives and questions, and imperatives and commands. These case studies begin with an overview of the necessary theoretical foundations, followed by a discussion of the grammatical structures of English, and an assessment of the relevant cross-linguistic facts. Each chapter ends with a succinct summary of the most important findings, practice exercises, and recommendations for further reading and research. Overall, the book works towards developing a gradient model of clause types that goes substantially beyond the traditional distinction between major and minor clause types. It draws on insights from linguistics, philosophy, and sociology, and may be used as a textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses in semantics, pragmatics, and morphosyntax.

This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. Following an introduction to the main questions surrounding the analysis and categorization of copulas, the chapters address a range of key topics including the existence of more than one copular form in certain languages, the factors determining the presence or absence of a copula, and the morphology of copular forms. The team of expert contributors present new theoretical proposals regarding the formal mechanisms behind the behaviour and patterns observed in copulas in a wide range of typologically diverse languages, including Czech, French, Korean, and languages from the Dene and Bantu families. Their findings have implications beyond the study of copulas and shed more light on issues such as agreement relations, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.

This monograph poses a series of key problems of evidential reasoning and argumentation. It then offers solutions achieved by applying recently developed computational models of argumentation made available in artificial intelligence. Each problem is posed in such a way that the solution is easily understood. The book progresses from confronting these problems and offering solutions to them, building a useful general method for evaluating arguments along the way. It provides a hands-on survey explaining to the reader how to use current argumentation methods and concepts that are increasingly being implemented in more precise ways for the application of software tools in computational argumentation systems. It shows how the use of these tools and methods requires a new approach to the concepts of knowledge and explanation suitable for diverse settings, such as issues of public safety and health, debate, legal argumentation, forensic evidence, science education, and the use of expert opinion evidence in personal and public deliberations.

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 is the fully revised and expanded second edition of English - One Tongue, Many Voices, a book by three internationally distinguished English language scholars who tell the fascinating, improbable saga of English in time and space. Chapters trace the history of the language from its obscure beginnings over 1500 years ago as a collection of dialects spoken by marauding, illiterate tribes. They show how the geographical spread of the language in its increasing diversity has made English into an international language of unprecedented range and variety. The authors examine the present state of English as a global language and the problems, pressures and uncertainties of its future, online and offline. They argue that, in spite of the amazing variety and plurality of English, it remains a single language.

Die Studie beschaftigt sich mit einem Spezialgebiet der Substantivvalenzforschung. Nach der Diskussion einiger Grundfragen der Substantivvalenz ermittelt die Autorin die reziproken Strukturen auf empirischer Grundlage. Es folgt eine ausfuhrliche Beschreibung der morphosyntaktischen und semantischen Merkmale der Elemente von reziproken Strukturen. Der Formtyp Reziproke und der Funktionstyp Wechselseitigkeit werden als zwei Seiten eines funktionalen Modells gedeutet. Abschliessend wird uberpruft, ob die bestimmten Merkmale ausreichen, die reziproken Strukturen von den anderen Syntagmen valenter Substantive abzugrenzen. Die Ergebnisse der durchgefuhrten Untersuchungen sind im Anhang detailliert dargestellt, so u.a. zahlreiche valente Substantive im Hinblick auf Reziprozitat.

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.

Ausgehend von einer Sprecherbefragung mit deutschem Sprachmaterial untersucht die Autorin die Verwendung von indirekten pronominalen Anaphern im Deutschen. Die Ergebnisse der empirischen Arbeit bestatigen die zentrale Hypothese der Abhandlung: Den Muttersprachlern erscheint die Verwendung von indirekten pronominalen Anaphern im Deutschen als akzeptabel, wenn der implizite Referent nuklearer Bestandteil der gegebenen Diskursreprasentation ist. Die Autorin kann somit auf der Grundlage von Grammatikalitatsurteilen zeigen, dass indirekte pronominale Anaphern akzeptierte Koharenzmittel sind.

Die Autorin untersucht den seit Jakob Grimm in der Forschung diskutierten Gegenstand der Paarformel anhand der spatmittelalterlich-fruhneuzeitlichen Textsorte der Stadtrechtsbucher. Sie behandelt 20 Texte, die sich auf den gesamten deutschen Sprachraum verteilen und den Zeitraum vom 13.-15. Jahrhundert abdecken. Die Analyse ist nach sehr weit gefassten modernen Rechtsbegriffen wie "naturliche Person" oder "Koerperverletzung" strukturiert, die jenseits ihrer historischen Andersartigkeit als Grundtatsachen des menschlichen Lebens gelten koennen. Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass Paarformeln als Mittel zur Erfassung rechtsrelevanter Begrifflichkeiten dienen, berucksichtigt die Autorin neben Verwendung und Bedeutung auch die Funktion von Paarformeln im jeweiligen Kontext.

Das Buch bietet eine systematische Untersuchung von Mechanismen der Lizenzierung der Modalpartikeln ja, doch und denn im Deutschen und [ved'], [ze] und [vot] im Russischen in Nebensatzen. Folgende Fragen werden diskutiert: Wie hangt die Lizenzierung der Modalpartikeln im Nebensatz mit semantischen, grammatischen, kommunikativen und pragmatischen Besonderheiten des Matrixsatzes zusammen? Wie sollte die Definition des Phanomens "illokutiv selbststandiger Satz" formuliert werden? Was ist der Grund fur die Verwendung der Modalpartikeln in Nebensatzen? Koennen die Modalpartikeln auch in Nebensatzen in der Funktion von Konnektoren verwendet werden? Was beeinflusst die Lesarten der Modalpartikeln? Wodurch unterscheiden sich die Modalpartikeln in der Konnektorenlesart von Subjunktoren mit entsprechender Semantik?

Catorce investigadores de diferentes paises y nacionalidades, especialistas en diferentes campos de estudio sobre la lengua espanola - Didactica del ELE y del EFE, lengua de especialidad, lexicologia, linguistica aplicada, terminologia, traduccion -, resaltan, al enfocar el lexico dentro de un contexto profesional y cultural especificos, la permeabilidad y renovacion de la lengua espanola. Sus investigaciones ineditas que se enmarcan dentro de diversas perspectivas y areas de investigacion como la cibernetica, la cognitiva, la didactica, la estructuralista y la linguistica aplicada, abordan temas como los prestamos, las colocaciones sintacticas, la traduccion, el lexico profesional y de especialidad, el discurso retorico de la prensa, el lenguaje del turismo, los enfoques didacticos sobre el lexico. El resultado de sus analisis de corpus muestra diferentes interpretaciones del lexico espanol dentro de los ambitos arriba mencionados.

El trabajo explora - con base en los estudios de corte cognitivo de los eslavistas norteamericanos Laura Janda y Steven Clancy - la evolucion de las semanticas asociadas al caso dativo a lo largo de los 700 anos de historia de la lengua checa escrita. Del analisis sistematico de 8.355 dativos extraidos de cinco textos, que representan cuatro cortes sincronicos de la historia de esta lengua, obtenemos la distribucion diacronica de la red semantica del dativo checo en torno a tres subsemanticas principales: dativo receptor, dativo experimentador y dativo competidor. Un ultimo objetivo de este estudio es el diseno de una red conceptual que muestre de forma grafica toda la riqueza y complejidad de estas relaciones semanticas.

This book provides a pragmatic analysis of presidential language. Pragmatics is concerned with "meaning in context," or the relationship between what we say and what we mean. John Wilson explores the various ways in which U.S. Presidents have used language within specific social contexts to achieve specific objectives. This includes obfuscation, misdirection, the use of metaphor or ambiguity, or in some cases simply lying. He focuses on six presidents: John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald W. Reagan, William F. Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack H. Obama. These presidents cover most of the last half of the twentieth century, and the first decade of the twenty first century, and each has been associated with a specific linguistic quality. John F. Kennedy was famed for his quality of oratory, Nixon for his manipulative use of language, Reagan for his gift of telling stories, Clinton for his ability to engage the public and to linguistically turn arguments and descriptions in particular directions. Bush, on the other hand, was famed for his inability to use language appropriately, and Obama returns us to the rhetorical flourishes of early Kennedy. In the case of each president, a range of specific examples are explored in order to highlight the ways in which a pragmatic analysis may provide an insight into presidential language. In many cases, what the president says is not necessarily what the president means.

Few conversational topics can be as significant as our troubles in life, whether everyday and commonplace, or more exceptional and disturbing. In groundbreaking research conducted with John Lee at the University of Manchester UK, Gail Jefferson turned the microscope on how people talk about their troubles, not in any professional or therapeutic setting, but in their ordinary conversations with family and friends. Through recordings of interactions in which people talk about problems they're having with their children, concerns about their health, financial problems, marital and relationship difficulties (their own or other people's), examination failures, dramatic events such as burglaries or a house fire and other such troubles, Jefferson explores the interactional dynamics and complexities of introducing such topics, of how speakers sustain and elaborate their descriptions and accounts of their troubles, how participants align and affiliate with one another, and finally manage to move away from such topics. The studies Jefferson published out of that remarkable period of research have been collected together in this volume. They are as insightful and informative about how we talk about our troubles, as they are innovative in the development and application of Conversation Analysis. Gail Jefferson (1938-2008) was one of the co-founders of Conversation Analysis (CA); through her early collaboration with Harvey Sacks and in her subsequent research, she laid the foundations for what has become an immensely important interdisciplinary paradigm. She co-authored, with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, two of the most highly cited articles ever published in Language, on turn-taking and repair. These papers were foundational, as was the transcription system that she developed and that is used by conversation analysts world-wide. Her research papers were a distinctive and original voice in the emerging micro-analysis of interaction in everyday life.

This book contains an original analysis of the existential there-sentence from a philosophical-linguistic perspective. At its core is the claim that there-sentences' form is distinct from that of ordinary subject-predicate sentences, and that this fundamental difference explains the construction's unusual grammatical and discourse properties.

This book explores the various choices speakers or communicators make when expressing power relations in modern societies. The volume brings together several disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology, communication studies and social psychology, to give insight into how interactants co-construct different aspects of power in their everyday life.

This readable book presents a new general theoretical understanding of politeness. It offers an account of a wide range of politeness phenomena in English, illustrated by hundreds of examples of actual language use taken largely from authentic British and American sources. Building on his earlier pioneering work on politeness, Geoffrey Leech takes a pragmatic approach that is based on the controversial notion that politeness is communicative altruism. Leech's 1983 book, Principles of Pragmatics, introduced the now widely-accepted distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of politeness; this book returns to the pragmalinguistic side, somewhat neglected in recent work. Drawing on neo-Gricean thinking, Leech rejects the prevalent view that it is impossible to apply the terms 'polite' or 'impolite' to linguistic phenomena. Leech covers all major speech acts that are either positively or negatively associated with politeness, such as requests, apologies, compliments, offers, criticisms, good wishes, condolences, congratulations, agreement, and disagreement. Additional chapters deal with impoliteness and the related phenomena of irony ("mock politeness") and banter ("mock impoliteness"), and with the role of politeness in the learning of English as a second language. A final chapter takes a fascinating look at more than a thousand years of history of politeness in the English language.

Desde una perspectiva teorico-practica, las contribuciones del profesor Wotjak en el ambito de los estudios de traduccion han supuesto un serio y profundo avance en el conocimiento cientifico de la traductologia. El libro presenta una seleccion de articulos en espanol, escritos por el profesor de Leipzig a lo largo de mas de dos decadas y que han influenciado profundamente la traductologia espanola. Los temas tratados abarcan desde el proceso traductor, las herramientas y tecnicas de la traduccion, hasta reflexiones sobre sus aspectos cognitivos y comunicativos. Con estas aportaciones, Gerd Wotjak ofrece una reflexion profunda sobre la teoria y la epistemologia de la traduccion.

This book provides an introduction to the theory and methods of historical semantics. It gives a survey of the most important types of semantic innovation (metaphor, metonymy etc.), it describes typical paths and results of semantic change (polysemy, competition of lexical units, shifts of prototypical meaning), and it presents historical case studies on various fields of German vocabulary (from speech act verbs to forms of address). The book is designed for readers with no background knowledge of semantics and can be used for seminar discussion or self-study. It contains extensive exercises and suggestions for further reading.

This book is an advanced debate on the nature of scalar implicatures, one of the most popular topics in philosophical linguistics in the last 20 years. Leading theorists in the field offer an up-to-date presentation of the subject in a way that will help readers to orient themselves in the vast literature on the topic.