Volume 10, Issue 3

In this study, we propose a preliminary pragmatic definition for the speech act of lying and test it via a questionnaire survey among a group of American English speakers and a comparable group of Chinese speakers. This definition contains a necessary condition of untruth followed by three elements cast as continuums: the concealment continuum (the degree to which the untruth of the assertion is intended to be concealed), the self-benefit continuum (the degree to which the untrue assertion benefits self), and the other-benefit continuum (the degree to which the untruth benefits other). As a result, lying is understood as a scalar, rather than a bivalent, notion. While we do not claim that our definition will have universal applicability, we believe that it offers a point of departure for further research on a topic that seems to have fascinated philosophers and pragmaticists alike for decades.

This paper, representing theoretical pragmatics, aims to shed new light on the workings of irony, drawing on the research from the field of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and the philosophy of language. To meet this objective, the present article takes as its departure point the Gricean (1989a [1975], 1989b [1978]) philosophy, which is endorsed as a tenable basis for a new approach to irony, as long as a number of modifications and extensions are added to Grice’s original assumptions. Consequently, a number of salient subtypes of irony are elucidated: propositional negation irony, ideational reversal irony (both of which embrace litotic irony and hyperbolic irony), verisimilar irony and surrealistic irony. It is also argued that, irrespective of its subtype, irony rests on overt (or rarely implied) untruthfulness, based on the flouting of the first maxim of Quality, and generates conversational implicature invariably carrying negative evaluation.

Communication depends on cooperation in at least the following way: In order to be successful, communicative behavior needs to be adjusted to the general world knowledge, abilities, and interests of the hearer, and the hearer's success in figuring out the message and responding to it needs to be informed by assumptions about the communicator's informative intentions, personal goals, and communicative abilities. In other words, interlocutors cooperate by coordinating their actions in order to fulfill their communicative intentions. This minimal assumption about cooperativeness must in one way or another be built into the foundations of any plausible inferential model of human communication. However, the communication process is also influenced to a greater or lesser extent, whether intentionally and consciously or unintentionally and unconsciously, by the participants' orientation toward, or preoccupation with, their own concerns, so their behavior may easily fall short of being as cooperative as is required for achieving successful communication. In this paper, we consider in some detail a critical incident from a meeting that took place at the beginning of an intercultural project partnership, and we argue that such communication situations are “fragile” in that they can put pressure on the participants to be more self-oriented (i.e., self centered) and, therefore, less cooperative. We explore the reasons for this and propose that affective factors including face play a key role. We end by considering the theoretical implications of our study for future research.

In this paper I have used pronominal clitics in Italian in combination with verbs of propositional attitude to shed light on opacity effects due to intrusive pragmatics (at the level of free enrichments/explicatures). Certain problems discussed by Schiffer (2000) disappear completely, when the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of propositional clitics are discussed and such considerations are extended to propositional attitudes in general. In this paper, I add that a propositional clause must be in an appositional relationship (resulting from free enrichment and, thus, not actually present in the syntax) with the that-clause embedded in verbs of propositional attitude. I consider the consequences of this position. One of the most cogent results of this paper is that pronominal clitics generally refer back to full propositions (if they refer to propositions at all) and not to minimal propositions. I take my own considerations on clitics to give support to interesting and important considerations on emergent presuppositions by Kecskes and Zhang (2009).

According to a relevance theory view and bearing in mind that translation is another communicative act, a reader of a translation carries out a metarepresentation of the original author's intentions through the utterances constructed by the translator. The translator's position is thus one of power and responsibility: He or she is in a position to alter the conceptualization of reality as linguistically represented in the original. Historical texts are ideally suited to demonstrating ideological manipulation in translation, and in this article, we compare the first volume of William H. Prescott's work, History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain , published in 1855 with the Spanish version published in 1857, translated by Cayetano Rosell, focusing on fragments that are particularly sensitive to manipulation in the translated text because of their connection with the stereotype of the Spanish as inflexible Catholics, and the activities of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Our analysis shows that Rosell tries to adapt this view to the cultural models of the target receivers.