Volume 12, Issue 2 -

The study of dialogue does not belong to one discipline alone. This paper brings together a range of cross-disciplinary data – from sociolinguistics, child development, social neuroscience and virtual reality engineering – to investigate an aspect of dialogue that is somewhat under-researched: the disruptive power of an addressee who does not respond as expected. Much evidence exists to show that addressees who demonstrate rapport with speakers play an active role in encouraging speakers to perform effectively. But less work has been done on the impact made on speaker competence by addressees who respond uncooperatively, and there has been no attempt to approach it from a cross-disciplinary perspective. In this paper, I suggest that verbal or non-verbal addressee responses that do not meet the expectations projected by a speaker can have a systematic and damaging effect on speaker performance at the conceptualization (or message) level, and that this disorganization takes place automatically and below the level of consciousness.

Metonymy is a pervasive aspect of spontaneous as well as reflective linguistic performance and its cognitive and communicative role needs to be adequately attended to. The paper aims to offer a new model of metonymy grounded in the relevance-theoretic approach to communication, adopting the view that all comprehension is underlain by inferential processes. First, we present a critical overview of selected existing accounts of metonymy put forward by cognitive linguists, arguing that although they offer valuable observations about the role of metonymy in online meaning construction and bring to light a varied spectrum of different types of metonymic conceptualizations, cognitive linguistic analyses fall some way short of offering a convincing rationale for metonymic uses in verbal communication and do not articulate a psychologically plausible and testable principle that would explain why metonymy arises and how the intended meaning is inferred in context by the recipient. We also critically address the existing relevance-theoretic models, which, while offering a cognitively motivated account of metonymy, likewise suffer from certain inadequacies. In an attempt to remedy these shortcomings, we develop a fully inferential relevance-theoretic account, which assumes that metonymy is a case of tagging the intended referent by a concept literally denoted by the metonymic expression. The real-world contiguity which underlies metonymic usage is postulated to be encapsulated in mental schemas that are indexed by the concept that the metonymic word or phrase provides access to.

This study seeks to show that Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) analytical techniques allow an integrated semantic-pragmatic approach to the use of “swear words” and “curse (cuss) words”. The paper begins with a semantic exegesis of the lexical items swear word and curse word . This is helpful to delimit and conceptualize the phenomena being studied, and it also hints at some interesting differences between the speech cultures of Australian English and American English. Subsequent sections propose semantic explications for a string of swear/curse words and expressions as used in Australian English, including: exclamations ( Shit! Fuck! Damn! Christ! Jesus! ), abuse formulas ( Fuck you! , Damn you!) , interrogative and imperative formulas (e.g. Who the fuck do you think you are? ; Get the hell out of here! ), and the free use of expressive adjectives, such as fucking and goddamn , in angry swearing. A novel aspect, with interesting implications for the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, is that the explications incorporate a metalexical awareness section, modelling speaker awareness of the ethnometapragmatic status of the word in the community of discourse. The study goes on to address so-called “social/conversational” swearing. I propose cultural scripts to capture some Anglo ethnopragmatic assumptions about how the use of swear/curse words can be affected by perceptions of familiarity, solidarity, and mutuality. Differences between Australian English and American English are discussed at various points.

The fact that a speaker can say “I broke a finger” in reference to her own finger was first noted by Grice. Building on implicature-based accounts of how and why this works, this large-scale corpus study focuses on the choice, in such utterances, between the indefinite article a and the possessive determiner my , and what motivates that choice. The phrases investigated involve inalienable possessions (body parts and kin) and adversative events. It is claimed that, in such phrases, a is associated with low salience and my with high salience, salience itself being determined by multiple factors which fall under either Salience of O (the object) or Salience of E (the event). Specifically, I show that my is associated with objects low in number and present, with events that are real and recent, and with both objects and events to which we have a high degree of sensory access, while a is associated with the opposite.

On the basis of examples drawn from seven classic Hungarian film comedies, I argue in this article that the place of humor within the Gricean–Leechian model needs to be revisited and extended towards social psychological pragmatics to account for a wider range of humorous material. Scrutinizing the relevant controversial details of Grice’s conceptual framework, my concern is to find a practical way of fitting the various forms of humor into an adequate (and not an idealistic) pragmatic theory. I propose to differentiate between two levels and five types of breaking the maxims, introducing the Self-interest Principle (SiP) supposed to be in constant tension with, and as rational as, Grice’s Cooperative Principle. Politeness and self-presentational phenomena are subsumed under the operation of the SiP which embraces and coordinates the speaker’s own personal and interpersonal purposes.