This book aims to provide a solution to the semantic paradoxes. It argues for a unified solution to the paradoxes generated by our concepts of denotation, predicate extension, and truth. The solution makes two main claims. The first is that our semantic expressions 'denotes', 'extension' and 'true' are context-sensitive. The second, inspired by a brief, tantalizing remark of Goedel's, is that these expressions are significant everywhere except for certain singularities, in analogy with division by zero. A formal theory of singularities is presented and applied to a wide variety of versions of the definability paradoxes, Russell's paradox, and the Liar paradox. Keith Simmons argues that the singularity theory satisfies the following desiderata: it recognizes that the proper setting of the semantic paradoxes is natural language, not regimented formal languages; it minimizes any revision to our semantic concepts; it respects as far as possible Tarski's intuition that natural languages are universal; it responds adequately to the threat of revenge paradoxes; and it preserves classical logic and semantics. Simmons draws out the consequences of the singularity theory for deflationary views of our semantic concepts, and concludes that if we accept the singularity theory, we must reject deflationism.

Why are diagrams sometimes so useful, facilitating our understanding and thinking, while at other times they can be unhelpful and even misleading? Drawing on a comprehensive survey of modern research in philosophy, logic, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and graphic design, Semantic Properties of Diagrams and Their Cognitive Potentials reveals the systematic reasons for this dichotomy, showing that the cognitive functions of diagrams are rooted in the characteristic ways they carry information. In analyzing the logical mechanisms behind the relative efficacy of diagrammatic representation, Atsushi Shimojima provides deep insight into the crucial question: What makes a diagram a diagram?

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics is a comprehensive critical survey of the field of L2 pragmatics, collecting a number of chapters that highlight the key theories, methods, pedagogies, and research findings throughout its development over the last four decades. Demonstrating the ways in which pragmatics has long served as a lens through which to examine patterns of L2 development, the volume is divided into six parts which reflect the field's structure and evolution: * Constructs and units of analysis * Theoretical approaches * Methodological approaches * Pedagogical approaches * Contexts and individual considerations * L2 pragmatics in the global era The handbook has a particular focus on covering not only traditional topics in the field, such as constructs of pragmatic competence (e.g., speech acts, implicature), teaching and assessment, and pragmatics learning in a study abroad program, but also emerging areas of study, including interactional pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, usage-based approaches, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistic experimentation. Each chapter introduces the topic and follows with a description of its theoretical underpinnings, an overview of existing literature, appraisal of current practice, concluding with a discussion of future directions for research and key readings. The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics is an essential resource for those with an interest in second language acquisition, pragmatics, and language teaching.

Routledge Applied Linguistics is a series of comprehensive textbooks, providing students and researchers with the support they need for advanced study in the core areas of English language and applied linguistics.

Each book in the series guides readers through three main sections, enabling them to explore and develop major themes within the discipline.

Section A: Introduction, establishes the key terms and concepts and extends readers’ techniques of analysis through practical application.

Section B: Extension, brings together influential articles, sets them in context, and discusses their contribution to the field.

Section C: Exploration, builds on knowledge gained in the first two sections, setting thoughtful tasks around further illustrative material. This enables readers to engage more actively with the subject matter and encourages them to develop their own research responses.

Throughout the book, topics are revisited, extended, interwoven and deconstructed, with the reader’s understanding strengthened by tasks and follow-up questions.

Pragmatics:

provides a broad view of pragmatics from a range of perspectives, gathering readings from key names in the discipline, including Geoffrey Leech, Michael McCarthy, Thomas Kohnen, Joan Manes and Nessa Wolfson

covers a wide variety of topics, including speech acts, pragmatic markers, implicature, research methods in pragmatics, facework and politeness, and prosody

examines the social and cultural contexts in which pragmatics occurs, such as in cross-cultural pragmatics (silence, indirectness, forms of address, cultural scripts) and pragmatics and power (the courtroom, police interaction, political interviews and doctor-patient communication)

uses a wide range of corpora to provide both illustrative examples and exploratory tasks

is supported by a companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/archer featuring extra activities and additional data for analysis, guidance on undertaking corpus analysis and research, including how to create your own corpus with CMC, and suggestions for further reading.

Written by experienced teachers and researchers in the field, Pragmatics provides an essential resource for students and researchers of applied linguistics.

Table of Contents

Section A: Introduction A1. The Origins of Pragmatics A2. Research Methods in Pragmatics A3. The Semantic-Pragmatic Interface A4. Speech Acts: Doing Things With Words A5. Implicature A6. Pragmatics and discourse A7. Pragmatic Markers A8. Pragmatics, Facework and Im/Politeness A9. Pragmatics, Prosody and Gesture A10. Cross-cultural pragmatics A11. Historical Pragmatics A12. Pragmatics and Power Section B: Extension B1. The Origins of Pragmatics. Readings: B Nerlich ,History of Pragmatics (2010). G. Leech, Principles of pragmatics (1983). B2. Research Methods in Pragmatics. Readings: G Kasper, Data collection in pragmatics research (2000). J.- van der Henst and D Sperber, Testing the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance (2004) T. Kohnen, Historical corpus pragmatics (2009) B3. The Semantic-Pragmatic Interface. Readings: K.M Jasczolt, Semantics-pragmatics interface (2010). R. Stalnaker, Pragmatic presuppositions (1974). N. J. Enfield, The definition of what d’you-call-it: semantics and pragmatics of recognitional deixis (2003) B4. Speech Acts: Doing Things With Words Readings: J. Manes and N. Wolfson ,The compliment formula (1981). A Jucker, Speech act research between armchair, field and laboratory. The case of compliments. (2009). M. Eisenstein and J. Bodman, Expressing gratitude in American English (1993) B5. Implicature Readings H.P. Grice, Logic and conversation (1989). G. Leech, Semantics: the study of meaning (1981). D. Wilson, Relevance Theory (2010). B6. Pragmatics and the Structure of discourse Readings: A. Tsui, English conversation (1994). M. Stubbs, Discourse analysis (1983). M. McCarthy, Talking back: "small" interactional response tokens in everyday conversation (2003) B7. Pragmatic Markers Readings: G. Diani, The discourse functions of I don’t know in English conversation (2004). G. Gilquin, Hesitation markers among EFL learners: pragmatic deficiency or difference? (2008). C. Ruhlemann, Conversation in context. A corpus-drive approach (2007). B8. Pragmatics, Facework and (im)politeness Readings: J. O’Driscoll, Brown and Levinson’s face- how it can and can’t help us to understand interaction across cultures (2007). R. Watts, Politeness (2003). J Culpeper, D. Bousfield and A. Wichmann, Impoliteness revisited: with special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects (2003). B9. Prosody: Intonation Readings: I. Mennen, Phonological and phonetic influences in non-native intonation (2007). A Wichmann, The intonation of please-requests: a corpus based study (2004). C Gussenhoven, The phonology of tone and intonation (2004). B10. Cross-Cultural Communication Readings: A. Wierzbicka, Cross-cultural pragmatics (2003). J. Thomas, Cross-cultural pragmatic failure (1983). M Argyl, Bodily communication (1988) B11. Historical Pragmatics Readings: J. Culpeper, Historical pragmatics (2010). T. Kohnen, Historical corpus pragmatics (2009). I. Taavitsainen and A.H. Jucker, Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever (2008). B12. Analysing Power Readings: T. Van Dijk, Discourse, context and cognition (2006). S. Harris, Pragmatics and power (1995). K. Haworth, The dynamics of power and resistance in police interview discourse (2006). Section C: Exploration C1. Choosing, Transcribing and Annotating a Dataset C2. Exploring Routinised Speech Acts Using Corpora C3. Testing for Implicatures C4. The Organization of Discourse Structure C5. Pragmatic Markers: Further Explorations C6. Facework and Im/Politeness C7. Prosody and Non-Verbal communication C8. Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Pragmatics C9. Power. References

In a postfactual world in which claims are often held to be true only to the extent that they confirm pre-existing or partisan beliefs, this book asks crucial questions: how can we identify the many forms of untruthfulness in discourse? How can we know when their use is ethically wrong? How can we judge untruthfulness in the messiness of situated discourse? Drawing on pragmatics, philosophy, psychology, and law, All Bullshit and Lies? develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing untruthful discourse in situated context. TRUST, or Trust-related Untruthfulness in Situated Text, sees untruthfulness as encompassing not only deliberate manipulations of what is believed to be true (the insincerity of withholding, misleading, and lying) but also the distortions that arise from an irresponsible attitude towards the truth (dogma, distortion, and bullshit). Chris Heffer discusses times when truth is not "in play," as in jokes or fiction, as well as instances when concealing the truth can achieve a greater good. The TRUST framework demonstrates that untruthfulness becomes unethical in discourse, though, when it unjustifiably breaches the trust an interlocutor invests in the speaker. In addition to the theoretical framework, this book provides a clear, practical heuristic for analyzing discursive untruthfulness and applies it to such cases of public discourse as the Brexit "battle bus," Trump's tweet about voter fraud, Blair and Bush's claims about weapons of mass destruction, and the multiple forms of untruthfulness associated with the Skripal poisoning case. In All Bullshit and Lies? Chris Heffer turns a critical eye to fundamental questions of truthfulness and trust in our society. This timely and interdisciplinary investigation of discourse provides readers a deeper theoretical understanding of untruthfulness in a postfactual world.

In the study of modern languages at universities, philology understood in the narrower sense of textual criticism has become such a specialized activity that for a long time it generated only very few methodological impulses of broader relevance to the subjects and disciplines in which it was practised. This state of affairs changed dramatically with the advent of the so-called 'New Philology' in the early 90s, an approach relating textual criticism to text theory and text history. The volume assembles the findings of an international colloquium held at the University of Jena (19 Oct. to 21 Oct. 1995), at which linguists, literary scholars and specialists in Romance and German Studies subjected the theories of this 'New Philology' to a critical review, the overall objective being to revive the dialogue between the relevant disciplines and sub-disciplines.

This is a book about the multi-faceted notion of gender. Gender differences form the basis for family life, patterns of socialization, distribution of tasks, and spheres of responsibilities. The way gender is articulated shapes the world of individuals, and of the societies they live in. Gender has three faces: Linguistic Gender-the original sense of 'gender'-is a feature of many languages and reflects the division of nouns into grammatical classes or genders (feminine, masculine,This is a book about the multi-faceted notion of gender. Gender differences form the basis for family life, patterns of socialization, distribution of tasks, and spheres of responsibilities. The way gender is articulated shapes the world of individuals, and of the societies they live in. Gender has three faces: Linguistic Gender-the original sense of 'gender'-is a feature of many languages and reflects the division of nouns into grammatical classes or genders (feminine, masculine, neuter, and so on); Natural Gender, or sex, refers to the division of animates into males and females; and Social Gender reflects the social implications and norms of being a man or a woman (or perhaps something else). Women and men may talk and behave differently, depending on conventions within the societies they live in, and their role in language maintenance can also vary. The book focuses on how gender in its many guises is reflected in human languages, how it features in myths and metaphors, and the role it plays in human cognition. Examples are drawn from all over the world, with a special focus on Aikhenvald's extensive fieldwork in Amazonia and New Guinea.

This book is an investigation of Arabic derivational morphology that focuses on the relationship between verb meaning and linguistic form. Beginning with the ground form, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of the most common verb patterns of Arabic from a lexical semantic perspective. Peter Glanville explains why verbs with seemingly unrelated meanings share the same phonological shape, and analyses sets of words that contain the same consonantal root to arrive at a common abstraction. He uses both contemporary and historical data to explore the semantics of reflexivity, symmetry, causation, and repetition, and argues that the verb patterns of Arabic that express these phenomena have come about as the result of grammaticalization and analogical processes that are common cross-linguistically. The book adopts an approach to morphology in which rule-based derivation has created word patterns and consonantal roots, with the result that in some derivations roots may be extracted from a source word and plugged in to a pattern. It illustrates the semantic relationship between a source word and its derivative, while also offering evidence to support the view of the consonantal root as a morphological object. The volume will be a valuable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of Arabic language and linguistics who are interested in understanding the verb patterns of Arabic, the derivational relationships between words, and the construction of meaning in the mind. It will also appeal to researchers and students in morphology, semantics, historical linguistics, and cognitive linguistics.

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 examines the meaning of scalar modifiers - expressions such as more than, a bit, and much - from the standpoint of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. In natural language, scalar expressions such as comparatives, intensifiers, and minimizers are used for measuring an object or event at a semantic level. However, cross-linguistically scalar modifiers can often be used to express a range of subjective feelings or discourse pragmatic information at the level of conventional implicature (CI). For example, in English more than anything can signal the degree of importance of the given utterance, and in Japanese the minimizer chotto 'a bit' can weaken the degree of imposition of the speech act. In this book, Osamu Sawada draws on data from Japanese and a range of other languages to explore the dual-use phenomenon of scalar modifiers: he claims that although semantic scalar meanings and CI scalar meanings are logically different, the relationship between the two makes it crucial to examine them both together. The volume provides a new perspective on the semantic-pragmatics interface, and will be of interest to researchers and students of Japanese linguistics, semantics and pragmatics, and theoretical linguistics more generally.

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 book provides a comprehensive introduction to the ways in which meaning is conveyed in language, covering not only semantic matters but also topics normally considered to fall under pragmatics. Above all, the book displays and explains the richness and subtlety of meaning, with the aid of numerous examples and exercises throughout the text. Highly readable, written with style and wit, Meaning in Language is not bound to any particular theory, but provides explanations of theoretical approaches and perspectives as the context requires, with a stress throughout on the need for conceptual clarity.
The text and exercises in this third edition have been fully updated to take into account the most recent developments in the field and new chapters have been added, one on the semantics of prepositions and another on the semantics of derivational affixes.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book explores a key issue in linguistic theory, the systematic variation in form between semantic equivalents across languages. Two contrasting views of the role of lexical meaning in the analysis of such variation can be found in the literature: (i) uniformity, whereby lexical meaning is universal, and variation arises from idiosyncratic differences in the inventory and phonological shape of language-particular functional material, and (ii) transparency, whereby systematic variation in form arises from systematic variation in the meaning of basic lexical items. In this volume, Itamar Francez and Andrew Koontz-Garboden contrast these views as applied to the empirical domain of property concept sentences - sentences expressing adjectival predication and their translational equivalents across languages. They demonstrate that property concept sentences vary systematically between possessive and predicative form, and propose a transparentist analysis of this variation that links it to the lexical denotations of basic property concept lexemes. At the heart of the analysis are qualities: mass-like model theoretic objects that closely resemble scales. The authors contrast their transparentist analysis with uniformitarian alternatives, demonstrating its theoretical and empirical advantages. They then show that the proposed theory of qualities can account for interesting and novel observations in two central domains of grammatical theory: the theory of syntactic categories, and the theory of mass nouns. The overall results highlight the importance of the lexicon as a locus of generalizations about the limits of crosslinguistic variation. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

This book provides a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between what propositional content is at-issue and what content is not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, she argues that all sentences make three contributions: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground; not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the illocutionary relation uses the at-issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type, can trigger further updates. The analysis is supported by extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the author's own fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other languages.

This volume offers an empirical and diachronic investigation of the foundations and nature of metaphor in English. Metaphor is one of the hot topics in present-day linguistics, with a huge range of research focusing on the systematic connections between different concepts such as heat and anger (fuming, inflamed), sight and understanding (clear, see), or bodies and landscape (hill-foot, river-mouth). Until recently, the lack of a comprehensive data source made it difficult to obtain an overview of this phenomenon in any language, but this changed with the completion in 2009 of The Historical Thesaurus of English, the only historical thesaurus ever produced for any language. Chapters in this volume use this unique resource as a basis for case studies of semantic domains including Animals, Colour, Death, Fear, Food, Reading, and Theft, providing a significant step forward in the data-driven understanding of metaphor.

This book seeks to bring together the pragmatic theory of 'meaning as use' with the traditional semantic approach that considers meaning in terms of truth conditions. Daniel Gutzmann adopts core ideas by the philosopher David Kaplan in assuming that the meaning of expressions such as oops or damn can be captured by giving the conditions under which they can be felicitously used. He develops a multidimensional approach to meaning, called hybrid semantics, that incorporates use conditions alongside truth conditions in a unified framework. This new system overcomes the empirical gaps and conceptual problems associated with previous multidimensional systems; it also lessens the burden on the compositional system by shifting restrictions on the combination of use-conditional expressions to the lexicon-semantics interface instead of building them directly into the combinatoric rules. The approach outlined in this book can capture the entire meaning of complex expressions, and also has natural applications in the analysis of sentence mood and modal particles in German, as Gutzmann's two detailed case studies demonstrate. The book will be a valuable resource for linguists working in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, as well as to philosophers and cognitive scientists with an interest in meaning in language.

Yan Huang's highly successful textbook on pragmatics - the study of language in use - has been fully revised and updated in this second edition. It includes a brand new chapter on reference, a major topic in both linguistics and the philosophy of language. Chapters have also been updated to include new material on upward and downward entailment, current debates about conversational implicature, impoliteness, emotional deixis, contextualism versus semantic minimalism, and the elimination of binding conditions. The book draws on data from English and a wide range of the world's languages, and shows how pragmatics is related to the study of semantics, syntax, and sociolinguistics and to such fields as the philosophy of language, linguistic anthropology, and artificial intelligence. Professor Huang includes exercises and essay topics at the end of each chapter, and offers guidance and suggested solutions at the end of the volume. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, this new edition will continue to be an ideal textbook for students of linguistics, and a valuable resource for scholars and students of language in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and computer science.

This book provides an introduction to compositional semantics and to the syntax/semantics interface. It is rooted within the tradition of model theoretic semantics, and develops an explicit fragment of both the syntax and semantics of a rich portion of English. Professor Jacobson adopts a Direct Compositionality approach, whereby the syntax builds the expressions while the semantics simultaneously assigns each a model-theoretic interpretation. Alongside this approach, the author also presents a competing view that makes use of an intermediate level, Logical Form. She develops parallel treatments of a variety of phenomena from both points of view with detailed comparisons. The book begins with simple and fundamental concepts and gradually builds a more complex fragment, including analyses of more advanced topics such as focus, negative polarity, and a variety of topics centering on pronouns and binding more generally. Exercises are provided throughout, alongside open-ended questions for students to consider. The exercises are interspersed with the text to promote self-discovery of the fundamentals and their applications. The book provides a rigorous foundation in formal analysis and model theoretic semantics and is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, philosophy of language, and related fields.

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.