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.

Taguchi and Roever present the latest developments in second language pragmatics research, combining acquisitional and sociolinguistic perspectives. They cover theories of pragmatics learning and research methods in investigating pragmatics, linking these with findings on the acquisition of second language pragmatics and with practice in teaching and assessing pragmatics. Discussing pragmatics in the context of multilingual societies and diverse contexts of use, they offer a broad perspective on this growing area.

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.

An accessible and thorough introduction to implicatures, a key topic in all frameworks of pragmatics. Starting with a definition of the various types of implicatures in Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, the book covers many important questions for current pragmatic theories, namely: the distinction between explicit and implicit forms of pragmatic enrichment, the criteria for drawing a line between semantic and pragmatic meaning, the relations between the structure of language (syntax) and its use (pragmatics), the social and cognitive factors underlying the use of implicatures by native speakers, and the factors influencing their acquisition for children and second language learners. Written in non-technical language, Implicatures will appeal to students and teachers in linguistics, applied linguistics, psychology and sociology, who are interested in how language is used for communication, and how children and learners develop pragmatic skills.

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 is the first textbook on Functional Discourse Grammar, a recently developed theory of language structure which analyses utterances at four independent levels of grammatical representation: pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological. The book offers a very systematic and highly accessible introduction to the theory: following the top-down organization of the model, it takes the reader step-by-step though the various levels of analysis (from pragmatics down to phonology), while at the same time providing a detailed account of the interaction between these different levels. The many exercises, categorized according to degree of difficulty, ensure that students are challenged to use the theory in a creative manner, and invite them to test and evaluate the theory by applying it to the new data in various linguistic contexts. Evelien Keizer uses examples from a variety of sources to demonstrate how the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar can be used to analyse and explain the most important functional and formal features of present-day English. The book also contains examples from a wide variety of other typologically diverse languages, making it attractive not only to students of English linguistics but to anyone interested in linguistic theory more generally.

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.

How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for? Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, which things are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words? In Roads to Reference, Mario Gomez-Torrente provides novel answers to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names, demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure. He then provides arguments for a new anti-descriptivist picture of those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing conventions for them do not describe their reference. This book also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible qualities. According to these accounts these words refer, respectively, to 'ordinary kinds', cardinality properties, and properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated reference-fixing conventions.

This book investigates the syntactic and semantic development of a selection of indefinite pronouns and determiners (such as aliquis 'some', nullus 'no', and nemo 'no one') between Latin and the Romance languages. Although these elements have undergone significant diachronic change since the Classical Latin period, the modern Romance languages show a remarkable degree of similarity in the way their systems of indefinites have evolved and are structured today. In this volume, Chiara Gianollo draws on data from Classical and Late Latin texts, and from electronic corpora of the early stages of various Romance languages, to propose a new account of these similarities. The focus is primarily on Late Latin: at this stage, the grammar of indefinites already shows a number of changes, which are homogeneously transmitted to the daughter languages, leading to parallelism in the various emerging Romance systems. The volume demonstrates the value of using methods and models from synchronic theoretical linguistics for investigating diachronic phenomena, as well as the importance of diachronic research in understanding the nature of crosslinguistic variation and language change.

This volume explores the many ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders or classes. A noun may belong to a given class because of its logical or symbolic similarities with other nouns, because it shares a similar morphological form with other nouns, or simply through an arbitrary convention. The aim of this book is to establish which functional or lexical categories are responsible for this type of classification, especially along the nominal syntactic spine. The book's contributors draw on data from a wide range of languages, including Amharic, French, Gitksan, Haro, Lithuanian, Japanese, Mi'kmaw, Persian, and Shona. Chapters examine where in the nominal structure gender is able to function as a classifying device, and how in the absence of gender, other functional elements in the nominal spine come to fill that gap. Other chapters focus on how gender participates in grammatical concord and agreement phenomena. The volume also discusses semantic agreement: hybrid agreement sometimes arises due to a distinction that grammars encode between natural gender on the one hand and grammatical gender on the other. The findings in the volume have significant implications for syntactic theory and theories of interpretation, and contribute to a greater understanding of the interplay between inflection and derivation. The volume will be of interest to theoretical linguists and typologists from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

The study of meaning in language embraces a diverse range of problems and methods. Philosophers think through the relationship between language and the world; linguists document speakers' knowledge of meaning; psychologists investigate the mechanisms of understanding and production. Up through the early 2000s, these investigations were generally compartmentalized: indeed, researchers often regarded both the subject-matter and the methods of other disciplines with skepticism. Since then, however, there has been a sea change in the field, enabling researchers increasingly to synthesize the perspectives of philosophy, linguistics and psychology and to energize all the fields with rich new intellectual perspectives that facilitate meaningful interchange. The time is right for a broader exploration and reflection on the status and problems of semantics as an interdisciplinary enterprise, in light of a decade of challenging and successful research in this area. Taking as its starting-point Lepore and Stone's 2014 book Imagination and Convention, this volume aims to reconcile different methodological perspectives while refocusing semanticists on new problems where integrative work will find the broadest and most receptive audience.

This book addresses different linguistic and philosophical aspects of referring to the self in a wide range of languages from different language families, including Amharic, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Newari (Sino-Tibetan), Polish, Tariana (Arawak), and Thai. In the domain of speaking about oneself, languages use a myriad of expressions that cut across grammatical and semantic categories, as well as a wide variety of constructions. Languages of Southeast and East Asia famously employ a great number of terms for first person reference to signal honorification. The number and mixed properties of these terms make them debatable candidates for pronounhood, with many grammar-driven classifications opting to classify them with nouns. Some languages make use of egophors or logophors, and many exhibit an interaction between expressing the self and expressing evidentiality qua the epistemic status of information held from the ego perspective. The volume's focus on expressing the self, however, is not directly motivated by an interest in the grammar or lexicon, but instead stems from philosophical discussions on the special status of thoughts about oneself, known as de se thoughts. It is this interdisciplinary understanding of expressing the self that underlies this volume, comprising philosophy of mind at one end of the spectrum and cross-cultural pragmatics of self-expression at the other. This unprecedented juxtaposition results in a novel method of approaching de se and de se expressions, in which research methods from linguistics and philosophy inform each other. The importance of this interdisciplinary perspective on expressing the self cannot be overemphasized. Crucially, the volume also demonstrates that linguistic research on first-person reference makes a valuable contribution to research on the self tout court, by exploring the ways in which the self is expressed, and thereby adding to the insights gained through philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

Wylie Breckenridge offers a fresh understanding of the character of visual experience by deploying the methods of semantics. He develops a theory of what we mean by the 'look' sentences that we use to describe the character of our visual experiences, and on that basis develops a theory of what it is to have a visual experience with a certain character. The result is a new and stronger defence of a neglected view, the adverbial theory of perception.

Im alltaglichen Sprachgebrauch werden Somatismen, d.h. Phraseologismen, die ein Koerperteil als Komponente beinhalten, besonders in der gesprochenen Sprache verwendet. Die UEbersetzbarkeit dieser formelhaften Konstituenten ist aufgrund ihrer komplexen lexikalischen und semantischen Zusammensetzung sowie der soziokulturellen Unterschiede bisweilen problematisch. UEbersetzer und Sprachlehrer sehen sich immer wieder vor die Herausforderung gestellt, in der Zielsprache nach einer moeglichen AEquivalenz suchen zu mussen. Das vorliegende Woerterbuch, in dem die deutschen somatischen Redewendungen mit ihren synonymen turkischen Entsprechungen in Gruppen gegliedert sind, kann als Hilfsmittel bei der ubersetzerischen Tatigkeit verwendet werden und eignet sich fur den Fremdsprachenunterricht.

Das Buch vereinigt 15 Beitrage zur historischen Valenzforschung. Die Autoren dokumentieren den gegenwartigen Stand der Forschung und unterstutzen zugleich Bestrebungen fur ein Woerterbuch, das die Entwicklung der Valenz deutscher Verben im UEberblick beschreibt. Dazu wird die grundlegende Korpusfrage diskutiert. Ferner eroertern die Autoren an ausgewahlten Beispielen, wie die Verbumgebung im Satz auf den historischen deutschen Sprachstufen festzustellen ist. Neu sind Beitrage, die sich mit dem Verhaltnis von historischer Valenz und Konstruktionsgrammatik auseinandersetzen.

Das Buch untersucht die Semantik der Substantivkomposita des Mittelhochdeutschen. Grundlage ist das Korpus des Projekts "Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik" von Th. Klein, K.-P. Wegera und H.-J. Solms. Der Autor bestimmt die aktuellen Bedeutungen der Belege in ihrem jeweiligen UEberlieferungskontext, der moeglichst vollstandig mitgeteilt wird. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden die Wortbildungsbedeutungen der einzelnen Woerter angesetzt, die wiederum Grundlage der anschliessenden semantischen Klassifizierung der Komposita sind. Das Bindungsverhaltnis zwischen Grundwort und Bestimmungswort wird nach einem bereits fur die Gegenwartssprache erprobten Raster ermittelt.

Die Studien greifen den Widerspruch zwischen der bestandigen Prasenz von Schrifttexten im Alltag und deren mangelnder empirischer textlinguistisch-stilistischer Bearbeitung auf. Der Kommunikationsbereich Alltag ist uber seine soziokulturelle und historische Wesenheit charakterisiert, deshalb fokussieren die Beitrage innerhalb eines kommunikationsorientierten Ansatzes synchronische, diachronische, interkulturelle und produktiv-rezeptive Aspekte ausgewahlter Schrifttexte. Aufgrund der Unabgeschlossenheit dieses Kommunikationsbereichs, seiner UEberschneidungen und Vernetzungen mit anderen Kommunikationsbereichen sind keine prototypischen Schrifttextsorten des Alltags inferierbar. Es wird gezeigt, dass es bezuglich einzelner Textsorten Zuordnungen von Formulierungsweisen gibt, dass jedoch das Ausloten von Polaritaten, wie Privatheit - Offizialitat, Usualitat - Kreativitat, Normbefolgung - Saloppheit, eine gangige kommunikative Praxis darstellt. Die Besonderheit des Bandes besteht darin, dass ein Ausschnitt schriftlicher Alltagskommunikation sowie deren sozio-kulturell-historische Determination starker in den Fokus empirisch-linguistischen Interesses geruckt werden.

Das Buch eroertert die Verbalisierungsschwierigkeiten von olfaktorischen Wahrnehmungen. Hierfur betrachtet der Autor zunachst die Olfaktorik aus kulturell-philosophischer, neurophysiologischer und anthropolinguistischer Perspektive. Des Weiteren legt er dar, wie man uber Geruche im Deutschen und Polnischen spricht. Er geht auf zweierlei Art und Weise vor. Zunachst erfolgen anhand von Woerterbuchern Analyse und Vergleich des deutschen und polnischen Geruchswortschatzes auf der synchronen und diachronen Ebene. Anschliessend zeigt der Autor mithilfe von sprachlichen Korpora und unter Anwendung der kognitiv-linguistischen Methodologie (Frame-Semantik, konzeptuelle Metapher) auf, wie heute Geruche im Deutschen und Polnischen verbalisiert und konzeptualisiert werden.