Volume 5, Issue 2 -

Editorial

Shared Content as Speaker Meaning Cappelen and Lepore (2005; 2006; 2007) have recently emphasised the significance of a minimal notion of perfectly shared content for pragmatic theories. This paper argues for a similar notion, but assumes that a satisfactory defence cannot be achieved along the lines of the existing debate between Minimalism and Contextualism (e.g. Carston 2002, Recanati 2004). Rather, it is necessary to consistently distinguish two functional domains: the subjective processing domain and the interpersonal domain of communication, each with its own kind of utterance meaning. I will argue that it is the mutually recognised content of the speaker's overt commitment that should be identified as ‘speaker meaning’. Diverging from the (post-) Gricean tradition, it is conventionally restricted (minimal), but genuinely pragmatic (speaker-dependent). Functional considerations show that it is, moreover, unnecessary to include further elements in ‘speaker meaning’. The distinction between two notions of utterance meaning with very different characteristics allows us to integrate the assumption of perfect sharing, which explains people's trust in communication, and the subjectivity of the hearer's inferences into a coherent and powerful model.

Pragmatic Ambiguity: The Thetic Function of Modality The aim of this paper is to present an overview of the pragmatic aspects of ambiguity present in deontic sentences, which may have three pragmatic functions: a prescriptive or a descriptive or a constitutive function. This type of ambiguity is investigated on the lexical, phrasal, and sentential level. The discussion focuses on the deontic constructions of the German verb sollen and the English shall as they are used in legal texts. It also includes comments on the thetic function of the Latin imperative mood and the subjunctive mood.

A Note on the Linguistic (In)Determinacy in the Legal Context This paper discusses linguistic vagueness in the context of a semantically restricted domain of legal language. It comments on selected aspects of vagueness found in contemporary English normative legal texts and on terminological problems related to vagueness and indeterminacy both in the legal domain and language in general. The discussion is illustrated with selected corpus examples of vagueness in English legal language and attempts to show problems of the relation between vagueness and ambiguity in the context of legal institutionalised systems. The discussion also evokes theoretical issues which pertain to the relation between legal texts and their contexts, the problem of how linguistic forms acquire their contextual meaning and how linguistic expressions are disambiguated. These issues are further related to the post-Gricean theory of relevance, its inferential model of communication, and the interplay between the linguistic code and inferential processes in (specialised) communication.

Why Can a Japanese Unagi-Sentence Be Used in a Request? The objective of this paper is to reveal why the so-called Unagi-sentence in Japanese can be widely used in the context of request within the framework of cognitive linguistics and cognitive pragmatics. The Unagi-sentence, which is known as a representative sentence of the Japanese language, has been analyzed for years in various manners from various viewpoints. For instance, the sentence "Boku-wa Unagi-da" when literally translated into English reads I am an eel. One of the most influential reasons for this sentence being regarded as characteristic to Japanese seems to be the clear difference in the sense in that the literally translated version in English means the identification between I and an eel , whereas the Unagi-sentence in Japanese indicates who orders the eel dish or sometimes requests the waiter to put a proper dish in a proper place. This thesis discusses the schematic meaning of the "X-wa Y-da" pattern in Japanese; further, it discusses the tendency for the Japanese language, unlike English, to depend more heavily on contextual information when the construed mental images are encoded. Through the discussion, I will reveal that the study of the Unagi-sentence from the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics sheds a new light on the contrastive studies in the field of pragmatics.

Might Interjections Encode Concepts? More Questions than Answers This paper reflects on the conceptual nature of interjections. Although there are convincing reasons to claim that interjections do not encode concepts, arguments can be adduced to question such claim. In fact, some pragmatists have contended that they may be conceptual elements. After reviewing both the non-conceptualist and conceptualist approaches to interjections, this paper discusses some reasons that can be given to reconsider the conceptuality of interjections. Nevertheless, it adopts an intermediate standpoint by arguing that the heterogeneity of interjections, with items incorporated from other lexical categories, and the openness of the word class they constitute, which results in the coinage of certain interjections or the innovative usage of some elements, could indicate the existence of a continuum of more and less conceptual items. In any case, this paper suggests that those items with conceptual content would not encode full concepts, but some schematic material requiring subsequent pragmatic adjustments.

‘I Bet They Are Going to Read It’: Reported Direct Speech in Titles of Research Papers in Linguistic Pragmatics Titles of research articles in the humanities, including linguistics, tend to be more creative and less informative than corresponding titles in exact sciences or medicine. In linguistics, pragmatic studies are an area where reported discourse, i.e. direct speech in the form of a full speech act, occurs relatively frequently in titles of research papers. This paper analyses the metonymic and cataphoric relations between such titles and article texts on the background of the functions of text titles. It also presents the results of a survey conducted among graduate students and aimed at finding out whether titles containing reported discourse in the form of speech acts are easier to memorize and attract more attention among the articles' potential readers.

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