Volume 22, Issue 5

In this article, I sum up Kecskes’ views on intercultural pragmatics, English as a lingua franca, and the socio-cognitive approach to language and communication. I try to present a coherent picture of his views by adding my own comments and considerations. I focus on the main concept of intercultural communication, the speaker’s egocentrism and salience. I also address the issue of a priori and emergent intentions. I distinguish between communal prior experience and privatized prior experience. I propose that inferential pragmatics is involved in selecting either one or the other aspect of communication. I offer some reflections on salience and the relationship between salient meanings and idealized pragmatics. I finally expatiate on situation-bound utterances and claim that they also require a notion of salience.

“Indexical shift” is said to occur when allegedly “pure” indexicals have referents other than those Kaplan codified. I argue first that indexical shift is even more widespread than has so far been recognized, occurring even in English propositional attitude and speech act reports, and that I , here , and how like he and that can be used anaphorically and demonstratively as well as deictically. I then argue that the leading theories developed to account for indexical shift are unsuccessful, focusing on bicontextualism, Schlenker’s context-quantifier theory, Deal’s context-shifting operator theory, and Eckardt’s event-based theory. They claim that the simplicity of Kaplan’s rules can be preserved by applying them to contexts other than the context of use. I show that only the context of use determines the referents of shifted indexicals, and point out the contextual features they depend on. I show finally that none of these theories can account for the de se character of shifted indexicals. To account for that, propositional attitudes must be construed as relations to structured thoughts with distinctive components expressed by indexicals.

This paper revisits Pietroski’s challenge to truth-conditional semantics, focusing on his critique of Davidsonian event semantics in the case of mutual chases , which provide an intriguing exemplification of the complex interaction between logical forms and ambiguous contexts of utterance. Pietroski argues that truth-conditional analyses either collapse into contradiction or demand dubious metaphysical commitments, pushing us instead toward a purely procedural, concept-assembly view of meaning. Building on Quine’s “double-vision” puzzle, we defend truth-conditional semantics by introducing the notion of event guises : role-indexed properties of a single complex event. We argue that guises are supported not by subevents or perspectival constructs, but by minimal subsituations in Kratzer’s sense, i.e. informational parts of the situation that supports the event. This analysis dissolves apparent contradictions, preserves a lean ontology of events, and accommodates adverbial modification without metaphysical extravagance. The upshot is a hybrid event–situation semantics that shows why logical forms remain robustly truth-conditional, contra Pietroski’s skepticism.

It is argued that or is inherently symmetric, based on the intuitive equivalence of If x is P or Q, then y is and If x is Q or P, then y is – referred to as Rooth-Partee conditionals. As observed in Rooth and Partee [1982. Conjunction, type ambiguity and wide scope or. In Daniel P. Flickinger, Marlys Macken & Nancy Wiegand (eds.), Proceedings of WCCFL , vol. 1], the elided phrase in the consequent clause of these conditionals brings about a reading paraphrased as If x is P, y is P, and if x is Q, y is Q . Accounting for that reading proves to be problematic for asymmetric approaches to or , even those that rely on presupposition accommodation.

The expression “faith of a mustard seed” is a variant of “ faith as a grain of mustard seed”, which entered the English language via the King James Bible (1611), as part of the translation of Jesus’ saying: “Verily verily I say to you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, ‘Remove hence to yonder place’, and it shall remove, and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17:20, KJV). The article argues that the common interpretation of this saying – according to which Jesus was telling people that even a very small amount of faith has great power and can “move mountains” – is mistaken. On the contrary, Jesus points to a small seed as an example of great faith (“I can be a tree, I want to be a tree”) and as a teacher for us people: we too can be transformed if we steadfastly believe in Jesus as the one “sent by God” and never doubt. Further, the article explores the question of how Jesus’ sayings about “faith” can be translated into languages which don’t have a word like “faith”(that is, the majority of the world’s languages). Using examples from the translations of the Gospels into Australian languages Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara, and from the Hawaii Pidgin Bible, the article seeks to show that these sayings, which were intended, indirectly, for the whole humanity and which have been translated into thousands of languages, provide a unique opportunity for studying translatability and the limits of human understanding across languages, centuries and cultures.

This article argues in favor of a formal model that views language as an integrated multimodal system where syntax, prosody, and gestures are linked. It demonstrates that specific syntactic structures trigger sensorimotor realizations, which include intonation, phonology, and gestures. We argue that gestures, in particular non-lexical co-speech gestures, are not merely an additional channel but a fundamental part of grammar, integrated into the same system that governs word order and phonological realization. We suggest a syntactic representation of warning expressions that combines syntactic and pragmatic aspects, based on Italian data and experimental evidence. Specifically, we argue that warnings always include a warning call, which can be either lexical in content or expressed solely through special prosody and gestures.

It is commonly assumed that the openings of first encounters are highly scripted, allowing for little variation. Building on the work of Kecskes on the sociocognitive approach to intercultural pragmatics, it is argued in this paper that in intercultural settings the openings of first encounters are inevitably negotiated by participants in situ in the course of those openings. This is because in intercultural settings participants do not necessarily know whose interactional routines they can or should be implementing: should they be following the interactional routines of L1, L2 or something between? Drawing from an analysis of the openings of first encounters between Australian L1 speakers of English with Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese L2 speakers of English, the ways in which co-participants negotiate the occurrence of different possible components of those openings, as well as how participants go about negotiating specific components within these openings, specifically greetings and introductions, is highlighted. It is concluded that in intercultural first encounters there is less reliance on prior experience and core common ground and greater reliance on the actual situated context and emergent common ground.

This paper aims to explore the semantics and pragmatics of quasi-proper names (QP-names) from cross-linguistic and language-specific perspectives, based on Japanese data. First, a stronger basis is provided for the core part of QP-names from a cross-linguistic perspective. Specifically, supporting evidence is provided for direct reference and rigidity, by examining the reference of a QP-name in a modal context compared with the corresponding definite description. Then, indexicality as a unique property of QP-names is discussed in greater detail, with a clarification of the notion in relation to Kaplan’s theory of indexicals. On this basis, QP-names are characterized as rigid designators that apply to each individual in a relational scheme (such as a family tree) in such a way that they are assigned in a systematic way, with customization, to the individual’s superiors within a certain degree of relationship and are used from the individual’s perspective. Ambiguity and disambiguation are also discussed, using illustrations of phrasal and compound QP-names, which serve as full names and nicknames. Second, deviant cases of QP-names are investigated. Specifically, QP-names with a higher degree of quasi -ness, or quasi-quasi -proper names, are discussed, using illustrations of examples unique to Japanese. These include anata , which is derived from a second person pronoun (‘you’) to be used by a wife when talking to her husband even when he is not there. Furthermore, pseudo -quasi-proper names are discussed. They look like QP-names but have an essential difference. They are regarded as metonymically-created temporary names to be used in the context at issue. Based on the core features and deviant cases of QP-names, together with an observation of atypical proper names, it was proposed that we evaluate the quality of (quasi-)proper names on multiple criteria and consider a complex model of (quasi-)proper names, according to this evaluation.

This study investigates illocutionary conditionals – conditional constructions that modulate speech acts such as requests, offers, and warnings – in speakers with aphasia. Previous clinical research has mainly focused on the morphosyntactic properties of conditional constructions, largely overlooking illocutionary conditionals and their pragmatic functions. To highlight the importance of this structure in everyday communication and address this research gap, the study is organized into two parts. The first part provides a comprehensive overview of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features of illocutionary conditionals. The second part presents a corpus-based analysis of how speakers with aphasia use these constructions. Preliminary findings indicate that individuals with aphasia are capable of producing illocutionary conditionals using strategies broadly similar to those of neurotypical speakers, though some differences emerge. These results underscore the need to consider the pragmatic dimensions of conditional constructions in clinical research and suggest that more fine-grained theoretical distinctions from linguistics should be integrated into experimental studies.