Combining a fresh, previously unexplored view of the subject with a detailed overview of the past and ongoing philosophical discussion on the matter, this book investigates the phenomenon of semantic under-determinacy by seeking an answer to the questions of how it can be explained, and how communication is possible despite it.

In considering the ways in which current theories of language in use and communicative processes are applied to the analysis, interpretation and definition of literary texts, this book sets an agenda for the future of pragmatic literary stylistics and provides a foundation for future research and debate.

The continental Germanic languages are well known to possess a wealth of modal particles (such as eigentlich, auch, and denn in German), whereas this is not the case in the Romance languages. The argument advanced here is that in Romance languages their functions are expressed by other means. To supply a tertium comparationis the study elaborates a communicative definition of modality, enabling us to identify forms of modal shading independently of translation comparisons. The investigation also demonstrates that in diachronic terms forms of modal shading (whether particles or not) are recruited from a specific type of language change.

Tod und Sterben gelten in unserer Gesellschaft immer noch als Tabu. Zum Sterben wird gerne auf Institutionen wie Krankenhaus oder Pflegeheim zuruckgegriffen. Durch die Palliativmedizin und den immer starkeren Einfluss der Hospizbewegung andert sich mittlerweile das Bewusstsein fur die letzte Phase des Lebens. Diese Studie betrachtet den Umgang mit den Begriffen Tod und Sterben in der Medizin. Auch werden die damit in Zusammenhang stehenden Begriffe Lebensqualitat, Sterbehilfe und Sterbebegleitung in ihrer historischen Entwicklung thematisiert. Den Abschluss der Arbeit bildet eine ausfuhrliche Betrachtung der historischen und aktuellen Bedingungen einer Kommunikation mit Sterbenden.

Wenn man uber das menschliche Leben spricht oder schreibt, benutzt man oft metaphorische Ausdrucke wie am Kreuzweg stehen oder sein Leben aufs Spiel setzen. Im ersten Teil der Arbeit geht der Autor der Frage nach, wie metaphorische Idiome im Rahmen der kognitiven Linguistik, unter kritischer Betrachtung der kognitiven Metapherntheorie von Lakoff und Johnson, untersucht werden koennen. Im empirischen Teil wird eine Sammlung von deutschen metaphorischen Lebens-Idiomen aus Woerterbuchern und aus dem Deutschen Referenzkorpus (IDS-Korpus) zusammengestellt und ihre Motiviertheit in Korpusbelegen untersucht. Die Idiome werden demnach nicht nur durch konzeptuelle Metaphern, sondern auch durch Symbole sowie etymologisches, kulturelles und enzyklopadisches Wissen motiviert.

This book shows that over forty years of psychological laboratory-based research support the claims of the Lexical Priming Theory. It examines how Lexical Priming applies to the use of spoken English as the book provides evidence that Lexical Priming is found in everyday spoken conversations.

This book synthesizes previous work on thanking, politeness and Japanese pragmatics and crystallises the theoretical underpinnings of thanking, how it is realized linguistically and the social meaning and significance of this aspect of Japanese communication.

In clear and lively prose that avoids jargon, the author carefully and systematically examines the many kinds of subtly nuanced words or word-pairs of everyday discourse such as 'and'-'but', 'before'-'ere', 'Chinese'-'Chink', and 'sweat'-'perspiration', that have proven resistant to truth-conditional explanations of meaning.

This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects of event structure by combining foundational semantic research with a series of case studies from a variety of languages. The book begins with an overview of the theoretical issues central to the volume, along with a brief presentation of the remaining chapters and the points of contact between them. The chapters, developed within several different theoretical perspectives, promote cross-theory as well as cross-linguistic comparison. The work will interest scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition who are interested in the notions of telicity, change, and stativity.

Die ostseefinnischen Sprachen enthalten viele alte, d.h. vor etwa 500 A.D. ubernommene Woerter germanischer Herkunft. Die germanische Lehnwortschicht reicht teilweise bis in die Jahrhunderte vor unserer Zeitrechnung zuruck. Im dreibandigen Werk werden fast 1400 Stichwoerter behandelt. Die Autoren stellen nicht nur sichere Lehnwoerter vor, sondern auch solche Woerter, die in der Forschungsliteratur zu Unrecht fur germanische Lehnwoerter gehalten worden sind oder deren germanische Herkunft zweifelhaft ist.

The subject of this extensive corpus-based study is the distribution and the functional role played by a total of 22 indefinite nouns in 9 key texts for Italian linguistic and literary history dating from the late 13th to the early 16th century (including ANovellinoA, ADecameronA, and Bembo's AProseA). The central issue is the semantic and functional differentiation of these indefinite forms as encountered in the texts. This is pinpointed by way of comparison with their Latin etyma and modern Italian equivalents. A further essential aspect is the problem of the grammaticalization of indefinite noun determinants in Italian and the Romance languages in general.

This book examines the importance of politeness in pragmatic expression and communication, making a significant contribution to the debate over whether the universal politeness theory is applicable globally regardless of cultural differences.

This volume brings together twelve papers by linguists and philosophers contributing novel empirical and formal considerations to theorizing about vagueness. Three main issues are addressed: gradable expressions and comparison, the semantics of degree adverbs and intensifiers (such as 'clearly'), and ways of evading the sorites paradox.

This book brings together chapters on the semantics and pragmatics of measurement, scales, and numerical expressions. The chapters highlight recent developments in measurement theory, the meaning of numerical expressions and the relation between measurement scales and entailment scales. The authors provide explorations in formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics, as well as at the interfaces of this field with others including philosophy of language and sociolinguistics. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in these areas, as well as psychology, psycholinguistics and artificial intelligence.

Making pragmatics accessible to a wide range of students and instructors without dumbing down the content of the field, this text for language professionals:

• raises awareness and increases knowledge and understanding of how human beings use language in real situations to engage in social action
• fosters the ability to think critically about language data and use
• helps readers develop the ability to "do pragmatics"

The book features careful explanations of topics and concepts that are often difficult for uninitiated readers, a wealth of examples, mostly of natural speech from collected data sources, and attention to the needs of readers who are non-native speakers of English, with non-Western perspectives offered when possible. Suggested Readings, Tasks, Discussion Questions, and Data Analysis sections involve readers in extending and applying what they are reading. The exercises push readers to recall and synthesize the content, elicit relevant personal experiences and other sources of information, and engage in changing their own interactional strategies. The activities go beyond a predictable framework to invite readers to carry out real life observations and experiment to make doing pragmatics a nonjudgmental everyday practice.

This book contributes to the scholarly debate on the forms and patterns of interaction and discourse in modern digital communication by probing some of the social functions that online communication has for its users. An array of experts and scholars in the field address a range of forms of social interaction and discourses expressed by users on social networks and in public media. Social functions are reflected through linguistic and discursive practices that are either those of 'convergence' or 'controversy' in terms of how the discourse participants handle interpersonal relations or how they construct meanings in discourses. In this sense, the book elaborates on some very central concerns in the area of digital discourse analysis that have been reported within the last decade from various methodological perspectives ranging from sociolinguistics and pragmatics to corpus linguistics. This edited collection will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the fields of digital discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, social media and communication, and media and cultural studies.

The 'profile' of a word is understood here as the totality of the semantic, combinatory, and grammatical features determining its specific communicative potential. The book provides profiles of well over 100 French nouns and verbs, thus supplying new foundations for the distinction of synonyms, the differentiation of subordinate meanings, and the etymology of the words in question. The study draws upon large-scale electronic corpora (modern novels, newspapers). The purpose of this approach is to demonstrate that the typical collocations encountered in everyday usage can be explained with reference to deeper semantic and cognitive structures.

This book explores what new light philosophical approaches shed on a deeper understanding of (im)politeness. There have been numerous studies on linguistic (im)politeness, however, little attention has been paid to its philosophical underpinnings. This book opens new avenues for both (im)politeness and philosophy. It contributes to a fruitful dialogue among philosophy, pragmatics, and sociology. This volume appeals to students and researchers in these fields.

This collection brings about a current interdisciplinary debate on explicit communication. With Robyn Carston's pragmatics at the core of the discussion, special attention is drawn to linguistic under-determinacy, the explicit/implicit divide and also to the construction or recruitment of concepts in on-line utterance comprehension.

What are words? Where do words come from? How are they used? Answering these questions and more, this book guides you through the key concepts in the lexicology of modern English. Providing an overview which encompasses all aspects of English vocabulary, this book explains the sources of modern English words and shows how the vocabulary has developed over time. Thoroughly updated throughout to keep pace with recent developments in the field, this third edition features: - Enhanced chapters on vocabulary, dictionaries and investigative lexicology - New sections on contemporary topics such as internet language, social media and youth culture - Guides to new electronic resources and tools of analysis - Exercises throughout each chapter, with an updated answer key - A revised list of suggestions for further reading Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, and featuring exercises and a fully updated glossary of lexicological terms to support your learning, An Introduction to English Lexicology is the only book you need to understand the basics of English lexicology.

Develops a highly original theory of accentuation in which accentuation serves the mere pragmatic function of making utterances well comprehensible. Semantic effects of accentuation are explained as epiphenomena of pragmatic accentuation. The theory is formally elaborated in a model-theoretic framework and experimentally justified.

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.

Rooted in Gricean tradition, this book concentrates on game- and decision-theoretic (GDT) approaches to the foundations of pragmatics. An Introduction to GDT, with an overview of GDT pragmatics research to date and its relation to semantics and to Gricean pragmatics is followed by contributions offering a high-level survey of current GDT pragmatics and the field of its applications, demonstrating that this approach provides a sound basis for synchronic and diachronic explanations of language use.