Volume 8, Issue 4

English written texts were produced by a group of monolingual speakers, as well as Chinese-English and Spanish-English bilinguals. These were randomly presented to another set of participants from the same three language groups for rating. The raters were unable to identify the language background of the authors of the transcripts, yet they were found to prefer the way the arguments were presented in the transcripts of their own language group. In contrast, there was no preference for the content of the arguments of the three language groups. A discourse analysis identified several aspects of the texts that might have led to the own-language preferences for rhetorical structure. The study provides empirical support for the notion of contrastive rhetoric.

Those who study language in interaction often reject what has been called cognitive-philosophical (mostly neo- and post-Gricean) pragmatics. Recent criticisms have centered on the role of speakers' intentions, but in the context of broader arguments that human linguistic interactions cannot be adequately characterized or understood in terms of how individual agents approach the production and interpretation of individual utterances. On this view, the existence of “emergent” aspects of meaning demands the adoption of an irreducible “interactional achievement” approach, according to which the linguistic interaction itself is the most basic object of analysis. This position is flawed in several ways. It fails to appreciate the inherent dynamism of a fully developed cognitive approach to utterance interpretation, such as Relevance Theory, and its consequent sensitivity to interactional factors. Conversely, to ignore individual-level and utterance-level processes is to obscure important elements of interactional phenomena. Meanwhile, criticism of theoretical uses of speakers' intentions often assumes an excessively narrow and deterministic definition. There remains work to be done within cognitive pragmatics to fully elucidate the appropriate notion of intention, but some such notion is ineliminable from the theory of communication, and is accordingly shown to be implicit in interactional achievement models themselves.

It will be argued that “knowing how” can be reduced to “knowing that” provided that a view based on pragmatic intrusion is accepted. In this paper, I explore various interconnected ideas: opacity, Gettier's problem, Igor Douven's pragmatics of belief, negativity arguments, and contextualism about knowledge. This paper mainly shows that philosophy and pragmalinguistic considerations are deeply entangled. When matters of inference are considered, it is also worthwhile considering pragmatic intrusion. There are reasons to believe that almost all questions that pertain to knowing how can be analyzed with reference to pragmatic intrusion—that being a pervasive feature of human communication. Given what Igor Douven says about the pragmatics of belief, we are not surprised that knowledge, as well as belief, is strictly connected with the notion of communication and that many of the arguments that pertain to the sphere of epistemology can be illuminated by the tool of pragmatic intrusion.

This study develops an overarching theoretical framework of the strategic elasticity of vague language (e.g., “I probably have some books on the topic”), which has been lacking in the literature. The metaphor of a slingshot used in this study describes the stretching of vague language (VL) to target the needs of communication. Drawing attention to the positive and effective role of VL, this qualitative study investigates how the VL theory is manifested, explained through the real-life data of tension-prone encounters between Australian Customs officers and passengers. The empirical evidence validates the working of the main maxim (stretch language elastically in discursive negotiations) and the four specific VL maxims (go just-right, go general, go hypothetical and go subjective). There are three major findings: (1) interconnection between pragmatic functions, their linguistic realizations and pragmatic maxims conformed; (2) the dominant factor is the communicative goal; and (3) stretching on a continuum of polarities, between soft or tough, firm or flexible, cooperative or uncooperative, shows the versatility and elasticity of VL. An important implication of this study is that while vagueness is context-governed and culturedependent, it is universal in terms of its all-round elasticity.

Metaphor is typically seen in relevance theory as a pragmatic phenomenon that emerges from people's striving to optimally communicate with others. Cognitive linguistics, on the other hand, has traditionally viewed metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon with verbal metaphor mostly being a surface realization of underlying conceptual metaphors. Deirdre Wilson (Intercultural Pragmatics 8: 177–196, 2011) advances earlier discussions on the similarities and differences between these two major approaches to metaphor. She suggests that conceptual metaphors may arise from verbal metaphors, and that relevance theory is especially well-suited for explaining people's context-sensitive interpretations of linguistic metaphors because of specialized inferential processes that are linked to people's communicative efforts. We describe some of the issues related to the connections between metaphoric cognition and communication, and claim that these are far more tightly coupled than is now perhaps accepted by either relevance theory or cognitive linguistics.