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 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.

Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on the Semantics of Under-represented Languages in the Americas. Conference held at Cornell University in 2012.

The present book is a study in the field of linguistic pragmatics, by using conversation analysis and microsociolinguistics as an extension of speech act theory, as well as in the field of applied linguistics by offering an analysis of a genuine Romanian conversational corpus. The study is first of all important for its theme - that of conversational narratives, since it is the first comprehensive research of this issue in Romanian research. Chapter 1 deals with the theoretical framework of the research which is based on the integration of two theoretical perspectives, conversation analysis and narrative analysis. Narrative analysis offers the instruments necessary for the micro analysis of narratives as fragments per se, whereas conversation analysis offers the basis for the integration of narratives in the context of conversational interaction. Chapter 2 views conversational narratives as texts having certain linguistic features and content traits. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the narrative as process. Chapter 3 investigates the content of the story proper, analysing its communicative functions, in other words it analyzes the functions of narratives as message. Chapter 4 examines the interaction between narrative and conversation from the perspective of the interactional role of cooperation between the two discourse genres, the perspective adopted being again that of conversation analysis. Chapter 3, The functions of conversational narratives, is the most extended of all chapters and considers conversational narrative as a complex multifunctional message. It is the author's merit to have completed and systemized the discussion on the functions of conversational narrative starting from complete theories on the functions of language. In the present case, the author opts for Halliday, discriminating mainly between the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. These three functions are detailed by using the theory of the communicative code on the functions of language proposed by Jakobson. The two theories (Halliday's and Jakobson's) are convergent, both viewing language from the perspective of communication. The advantage of this combination is obvious in the discussion on the interpersonal function, which can be detailed in an emotive (expressive, according to Buehler) function (which constructs the speaker), a persuasive function, which focuses on the interlocutor, a phatic function, which maintains the channel of communication and expresses the concern for the mutual saving of the interlocutors' faces. The right assumption adopted by the author is that in each and every case there is a dominant function, which relates to the purpose of communication, that is to the very illocutionary or perlocutionary dimension of the story, whereas the other functions are present but subordinate (it is the case of the referential and textual functions) or simply absent (the poetic function). The chapter offers a coherent and integrative perspective on the complexity of the functions of conversation analysis, on the complexity of the literature in the field. The analysis is entirely original, the only stories discussed being the ones taken from the corpus collected by the author. From a methodological point of view, the chapter makes extensive use of the Speech Act Theory and the Politeness Theory, with many sociolinguistic elements. The linguistic sections provide the interested readers with lists of formulas, cliches, etc., the present study enriching the picture of Romanian oral discourse. This book is very nicely and correctly written; it is a pleasant read. Professor Dr. Alexandra Cornilescu University of Bucharest

In this book Mr. Putman presents for the first time his theory of semantics or, in the vernacular, "How language works." Other theories abound. Frege, Russell, Strawson, Donnellan are some of the famous philosophers of the past who's semantic theories are in print. Until now, few of us cared which theory of semantics is correct. We know language works and we use it. But the theory presented in this book is different. It has a practical bent. Once you understand Putman's "Distinctive Semantics" from Chapter 1 of this book, you can make use of it whenever you read or write. Just how to make use of it comprises the other four chapters of his book.

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.

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.

The volume offers a wealth of new information about the forms of several speech acts and their social distribution in Vietnamese as L1 and L2, complemented by a chapter on address forms and listener responses. As the first of its kind, the book makes a valuable contribution to the research literature on pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and language and social interaction in an under-researched and less commonly taught Asian language.

For over 200 years scholars have been talking about the possibility of changing the spelling of English so that it would be easier to learn and easier to remember. Using Ogden's Basic English 5000 words as a basis, this dictionary attempts to provide a phonetic alphabet based primarily on that of James Pitman's and a few simple rules to arrive at an idealized re-spelling of the most common English words. Definitions are not given since the focus is on the spelling and not the meanings of the words which can be found in any common English dictionary. Although this dictionary is limited to Ogden's Basic English vocabulary, the re-spelling of Kleer English, as I call it, can easily be extended to the entire English Language vocabulary.