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There is, at present, no book introducing the general issue of why
language is specific to human beings, how it works, why language is
not communication and communication is not language, why languages
vary and how they evolved. Based on the most recent works in
linguistics and pragmatics, Why Language? addresses many questions
that everyone has about language. Starting from false claims about
language and languages, showing that language is not communication
and communication is not language, the first part (Language and
Communication) ends by proposing a difference between linguistic
rules and communicative principles. The second part (Language,
Society, Discourse) includes domains of language and language uses
which are generally taken as extrinsic to language, such as
language variety, discourse and non-ordinary (literary) usages.
Special attention is given to figures of discourse (metaphor,
metonymy, irony) and literary usages such as narration and free
indirect style. The reader, either specialist or amateur in
language science, will find a first and unique synthesis about what
we know today about language and what we have yet to learn,
sketching what could be the future of linguistics in the next
decades.
It is a fact that tense, aspect and modality together form one of
the most recurring and active areas of research in contemporary
syntax and semantics, as well as in other disciplines of
linguistics. A large number of syntactic and semantic phenomena are
concerned by the temporal-aspectual-modal level of representation:
information about time, aspect and modality is part of virtually
all sentences; inflexion is quite widely considered as the core of
syntactic projections. Because of this very crucial situation and
role in the sentence structure, temporal-aspectual and modal
information concerns virtually any part of the sentence and this
information has scope over the whole characterization of the
eventuality denoted by the sentence. This book is an up-to-date
milestone for the studies of temporality and language, in
particular regarding syntax and semantics, but with incidental
hints to pragmatics and theories of human natural language
understanding. Through this very tight selection of 15 papers
(originally delivered during the 6th Chronos colloquium), tenses,
aspect and modality are investigated both at the descriptive and
theoretical levels, involving many different Indo-European and
non-Indo-European languages. The volume sheds light on a wide array
of phenomena that remained too little explored until now. These
include the following: modal subordination in Japanese, epistemic
modals in Dutch and English in Free Indirect Speech contexts,
aspectual readings of idioms, adverb-licensing with the German
perfect, French imperfective past compared with English progressive
past, infinitival perfect in English, Adult Root Infinitives,
economy constraints on temporal subordinations, future modality,
past interpretation of present tense in embedded clauses, and time
without tenses in Mandarin and Navajo. The book is of interest to
scholars and advanced students in the fields of linguistics
(general linguistics, semantics, syntax) as well as philosophy and
logic.
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Implicatures (Paperback)
Sandrine Zufferey, Jacques MOESCHLER, Anne Reboul
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R1,142
Discovery Miles 11 420
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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.
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