Mouton Series in Pragmatics [MSP]

Intentions in Comedy Discourse presents a systematic pragmatic analysis of stand-up comedy. Drawing on previous literature on humour, socio-cognitive pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, storytelling, and media discourse analysis, the author proposes a theoretical perspective on comedy discourse that interrogates the way stand-up performers entextualise culture and society to instantiate situated actions with interactional, textual or social functions. The book addresses how we can objectively move from stand-up jokes to how humorous discourse does things in the real world, either in interacting with audiences or in creating heightened socio-political consciousness in them.

Current debates on intercultural communication often align with critical approaches. However, in the fields of cultural linguistics and intercultural pragmatics, significant strides have been made towards a dynamic and sociocognitive framework for understanding intercultures. Drawing from these concepts, this book proposes a fine-grained analysis to elucidate the active co-construction of intercultural space in situ, encompassing verbal, corporal-gestural, and prosodic dimensions. This empirical contribution fills a notable gap in the burgeoning interface between cognition, interaction, and embodiment, shedding light on a critical intercultural facet that has hitherto remained underexplored.

With the “discursive turn” has come a distrust – a complete rejection by some – of theories that seek deeper reasons for surface phenomena. Rong Chen argues that this distrust, with its accompanying overemphasis on specificity and fluidity of linguistic meaning and social values, is unwarranted and unhelpful. Drawing on insights from social theories and various strands of pragmatics, he proposes a motivation model of pragmatics (MMP), contending that language use can be adequately, coherently, and elegantly studied via the motivation behind it in its varied and dynamic contexts. The model, with its well-laid out components, is then applied to (im)politeness research, cross-cultural pragmatics, diachronic pragmatics, discourse and genre analysis, conversation analysis, identity construction, and the study of metaphor, sarcasm, parody, and lying. MMP is thus a framework aimed at accounting for fluidity with stable notions, specificity with general principles, and differences with similar underlying factors. As such, the book should appeal to students of pragmatics, (im)politeness, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, communication, sociology, and psychology.

In recent years the traditional approach to common ground as a body of information shared between participants of a communicative process has been challenged. Taking into account not only L1 but also intercultural interactions and attempting to bring together the traditional view with the egocentrism-based view of cognitive psychologists, it has been argued that construction of common ground is a dynamic, emergent process. It is the convergence of the mental representation of shared knowledge that we activate, assumed mutual knowledge that we seek, and rapport as well as knowledge that we co-construct in the communicative process.

This dynamic understanding of common ground has been applied in many research projects addressing both L1 and intercultural interactions in recent years. As a result several new elements, aspects and interpretations of common ground have been identified. Some researchers came to view common ground as one component in a complex contextual information structure. Others, analyzing intercultural interactions, pointed out the dynamism of the interplay of core common ground and emergent common ground.

The book brings together researchers from different angles of pragmatics and communication to examine (i) what adjustments to the notion of common ground based on L1 communication should be made in the light of research in intercultural communication; (ii) what the relationship is between context, situation and common ground, and (iii) how relevant knowledge and content get selected for inclusion into core and emergent common ground.

There is, at present, no book introducing the general issue of why language is specific to human beings, how it works, why language is not communication and communication is not language, why languages vary and how they evolved.
Based on the most recent works in linguistics and pragmatics, Why Language? addresses many questions that everyone has about language.

Starting from false claims about language and languages, showing that language is not communication and communication is not language, the first part (Language and Communication) ends by proposing a difference between linguistic rules and communicative principles. The second part (Language, Society, Discourse) includes domains of language and language uses which are generally taken as extrinsic to language, such as language variety, discourse and non-ordinary (literary) usages. Special attention is given to figures of discourse (metaphor, metonymy, irony) and literary usages such as narration and free indirect style.

The reader, either specialist or amateur in language science, will find a first and unique synthesis about what we know today about language and what we have yet to learn, sketching what could be the future of linguistics in the next decades.

Relying on a wealth of new data, this book argues that long-standing puzzles of Negative Inversion (NI) syntax are not puzzles at all when viewed through the lenses of Gricean pragmatics and Labovian sociolinguistics. Focusing on sentences such as "Can't nobody lift that rock" in African American, Anglo, and Chicano Englishes in Texas, the book provides tidy solutions to problems such as: the NI’s relationship to its non-inverted counterpart, its relationship to existential “there” sentences, to modal existential sentences, to the definiteness effects surrounding its NP subject, the emphatic meaning with which it seems to be associated, and more. The book argues that such issues, which have been explored in the syntax and semantics literature since the late 1960s, are handled more fruitfully via Gricean reasoning, demographics of use, and a simple semantics. As such, the book argues that NI can be freed from the “syntactico-semantic straitjacket” into which it has often been forced. It also demonstrates ways in which pragmatic and sociolinguistic thought can be brought together to inform larger linguistic analyses.

This book presents both general issues in pragmatic theories and specific arguments for an inferential approach to pragmatics. At the present time, pragmatics is generally approached from the neo- and post-Gricean perspectives. These perspectives, which stem from philosophical theories of meaning, can be viewed as paradigms, that is, sets of concepts, procedures and results which structure scientific investigations.

The main purpose of the book is to defend a new post-Gricean approach to the substantial lexicon and to the functional lexicon (tenses, connectives), and more specifically to explore lexical and non-lexical pragmatics. A precise approach to lexical and non-lexical pragmatic contents will be developed, with special emphasis on non-lexical temporal and causal information. A model for inferring temporal relations in discourse (the directional inferences model based on French data) is developed. This approach to temporal representations and inferences will be completed by a discussion on how causal inferences are triggered in discourse interpretation. The role of conceptual causal relations, as well as causal procedural information encoded in discourse connectives (mainly parce que ‘because’, donc ‘therefore’, et ‘and’), is empirically and theoretically supported. Pragmatic theory can be described as a very powerful interface system which gives access to lexical and functional information, and which contains rich pragmatic enrichment processes, for non-lexical information (quantifier, tenses, connectives) as well as for lexical information (event predicates).

The book’s originality stems from its demonstration that pragmatic enrichment is structurally constrained, and occurs at the level of explicature.

This book examines emblems (or emblematic gestures) from a pragmatic view, that is to say, as autonomous gestures that fulfill communicative functions, embody illocutionary values, and act as signals of cognitive relevance.

Emblems are conceived as multimodal tools on the frontier between verbal and nonverbal modes, and are part of the communicative repertoire of individuals and sociocultural groups. Emblems constitute clear cases of embodiment and are susceptible to many processes of metaphorization (contrasting or not with verbal metaphors), metonymy, and interference between modalities. The applications of emblematic analysis are numerous, from lexicography to second language learning, or to natural language processing.

This book offers fresh perspectives on untruthfulness entailed in various forms of irony, deception and humour, which have so far constituted independent foci of linguistic and philosophical investigation. These three distinct (albeit sometimes co-occurring) notions are brought together within a neo-Gricean framework and consistently discussed as representing overt or covert untruthfulness. The postulates that represent the interface between language philosophy and pragmatics are illustrated with scripted interactions culled from the series House, which help appreciate the complexities of the three concepts at hand. Apart from affording new insights into the nature of irony, deception and humour, this book critically examines previous literature on these notions, as well as relevant aspects of Grice's philosophy of language. Giving a state-of-the-art picture of untruthfulness, this publication will be of interest to both experienced and inexperienced researchers studying Grice’s philosophy, irony, deception and/or humour.

Cognitive pragmatics is a mature field of research, characterized by robust theories and a growing amount of experimental work. In particular, Relevance Theory has provided a rich framework for research in the field. However, this theory makes a number of assumptions that are rooted in a modular view of cognition. This book provides a detailed analysis of such assumptions, arguing for an alternative model which has, however, some support in ideas explored by relevance theorists. First of all, inferences are explained in terms of associative pattern completion within associative networks, based on the schematic organization of memory. This explanation is shown to apply to a number of cognitive domains besides pragmatics, including mindreading. Moreover, such a view is compatible with a general understanding of the neurocomputational machinery of our cortex, suggesting a general argument to the effect that modularity in its standard version cannot be right. Second, the book argues for a crucial role of conscious attention in pragmatics as well as in most cognitive processes. In the end, what is proposed is not only a revision of Relevance Theory but also a fresh analysis of reasoning, which vindicates some Gricean intuitions.

What methodological impact does Contextualism have on the philosophy of language? This collection sets out to provide some answers. The authors in this volume question three ultimately connected assumptions of the philosophy of language. The first assumption relates to the predominant status of referential semantics and its power to explain truth-conditional meaning. This assumption has come under attack by the context thesis and a number of papers pursue the question of whether this is justified. The second assumption gives priority to assertive sentences when considering language use. The context thesis changes our understanding of language use altogether; possible implications from this methodological shift are addressed in this volume. According to the third assumption, philosophical analysis amounts to nothing more than conceptual analysis. The context thesis risks undermining this project. Whether conceptual analysis can still be defended as a methodological tool is discussed in this volume.

In legal interpretation, where does meaning come from? Law is made from language, yet law, unlike other language-related disciplines, has not so far experienced its "pragmatic turn" towards inference and the construction of meaning. This book investigates to what extent a pragmatically based view of l linguistic and legal interpretation can lead to new theoretical views for law and, in addition, to practical consequences in legal decision-making.
With its traditional emphasis on the letter of the law and the immutable stability of a text as legal foundation, law has been slow to take the pragmatic perspective: namely, the language-user's experience and activity in making meaning. More accustomed to literal than to pragmatic notions of meaning, that is, in the text rather than constructed by speakers and hearers … the disciplines of law may be culturally resistant to the pragmatic turn. By bringing together the different but complementary perspectives of pragmaticians and lawyers, this book addresses the issue of to what extent legal meaning can be productively analysed as deriving from resources beyond the text, … beyond the letter of the law.
This collection re-visits the feasibility of the notion of literal meaning for legal interpretation and, at the same time, the feasibility of pragmatic meaning for law. Can explications of pragmatic meaning support court actions in the same way concepts of literal meaning have traditionally supported statutory interpretations and court judgements? What are the consequences of a user-based view of language for the law, in both its practices of interpretation and its definition of itself as a field? Readers will find in this collection means of approaching such questions, and promising routes for inquiry into the genre- and field-specific characteristics of inference in law.
In many respects, the problem of literal vs. pragmatic… meaning confined to the text vs. reaching beyond it … will appear to parallel the dichotomy in law between textualism and intentionalism. There are indeed illuminating connections between the pair of linguistic terms and the more publicly controversial legal ones. But the parallel is not exact, and the linguistic dichotomy is in any case anterior to the legal one. Even as linguistic-pragmatic investigation may serve legal domains, the legal questions themselves point back to central conditions of all linguistic meaning.

All of the papers included in this volume offer some novel and/or updated perspective on issues of central importance in pragmatics, suggesting original ways in which research in the particular areas they adhere to could advance. Apart from the obvious aim of motivating further discussion on the topics it touches on, a central objective of this volume is to underline that research in pragmatics can and does substantially inform research in numerous other fields of enquiry, namely philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics and conversation analysis, revealing in this way the truly interdisciplinary nature of pragmatics theorizing. In this respect, and given that most of the contributions in this volume are from leading scholars in their respective fields, it is clearly expected that the ideas put forth in this volume will have a profound and long-lasting impact for future research in the area.

This volume looks at current issues in Intercultural Pragmatics from an applied perspective. The content is organized in three sections that encompass the primary applications of intercultural exchanges: the linguistic and cognitive domain, the social and cultural domain, and the discourse and stylistics domain. The chapters analyze real language situations in English, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, Filipino or Polish.

In pragmatics, it is widely accepted that the overall meaning of an utterance performed as part of a verbal interchange is basically underdetermined by the meaning of the sentence uttered. What counts as having been said for most contemporary authors goes far beyond sentence meaning. Rather, it has to be considered as a complex utterance level combining semantic knowledge and context-driven, pragmatic information as an integrated whole.
The focus of the present book lies on central questions about the nature, the function and the acquisition of pragmatic inferencing strategies. The question of the relation between the explicit and the implicit side of verbal communication and its mutual delimitation is addressed. What is the character of pragmatic inferences, wherever they may be situated in a descriptive model? Are they nonce inferences arising anew in each act of communication, or do we have to conceive of them as based on regularities and conventions? What is an adequate model of the acquisition of the skills which are relevant for mastering the inferential processes leading to an adequate interpretation of utterances? And what is the relation between a theory of pragmatic enrichment and optimality theory with an OT pragmatics as a possible result?

While lying has been a topic in the philosophy of language, there has been a lack of genuine linguistic analysis of lying. Exploring lying at the semantics-pragmatics interface, this book takes a contextualist stand by arguing that untruthful implicatures and presuppositions are part of the total signification of the act of lying.

Jonathan Berg argues for the Theory of Direct Belief, which treats having a belief about an individual as an unmediated relation between the believer and the individual the belief is about. After a critical review of alternative positions, Berg uses Grice's theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution failure in belief ascriptions and goes on to defend this view against objections, including those based on an unwarranted "Inner Speech" Picture of Thought. The work serves as a case study in pragmatic explanation, dealing also with methodological issues about context-sensitivity in language and the relation between semantics and pragmatics.

The book addresses controversies around the conscious vs automatic processing of contextual information and the distinction between literal and nonliteral meaning. It sheds new light on the relation of the literal/nonliteral distinction to the distinction between the automatic and conscious retrieval of information. The question of literal meaning is inherently interwoven with the question of lexical salience on one hand and default interpretations on the other. This volume addresses these interconnected issues, stressing their mutual interdependence. It contributes new, ground-breaking insights into the questions of literalness, semantics-pragmatics interface, automatic (default) retrieval and contextual pragmatic enrichment, modelling of discourse processing, lexical pragmatics, and other related issues.

This volume brings together two highly researched but also highly controversial concepts, those of politeness and implicature. A theory of implicature as social action and im/politeness as social practice is developed that opens up new ways of examining the relationship between them. It constitutes a fresh look at the issues involved that redresses the current imbalance between social and pragmatic accounts of im/politeness.

This book aims to disseminate at an international level a set of innovative studies whose descriptive and applied point of reference is the Catalan language. The volume constitutes a significant contribution to the field of intercultural pragmatics and also to a broad range of grammatical and cognitive issues which have been approached from the pragmatic perspective.

To join the recent debate on data problem in linguistics, this collection of papers provides complex dual purpose analyses at the interface of semantics and pragmatics (including historical, lexical, formal and experimental pragmatics). Based on several current theories and various types of data taken from a number of languages, it discusses object theoretical issues of referentiality, scalar implicatures, implicit arguments, grammaticalization, co-construction and syntactic alternation in their mutual connections to metatheoretical questions concerning the relationship between data and theory.

This collection of essays by the Linguistic Politeness Research Group represents the results of over a decade of the group's research, discussions, seminars and conferences on the subject of linguistic politeness. The volume brings together cutting edge essays reflecting the range of discursive approaches to the analysis of politeness and impoliteness.

Studies on the nature of quotation have become a topic of growing interest among linguists and philosophers of language. What is the function and logical status of quotations? How can an analysis of quotation help to develop a general theory of the semantics-pragmatics interface? This volume is a collection of original papers by leading researchers in the field on such issues and related linguistic and philosophical aspects of quotations.

This volume brings together original papers by linguists and philosophers on the role of context and perspective in language and thought. Several contributions are concerned with the contextualism/relativism debate, which has loomed large in recent philosophical discussions. In a substantial introduction, the editors survey the field and map out the relevant issues and positions.

In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? How can we examine pragmatic competence to make inference of its development among L2 learners? In what ways do research findings inform teaching and assessment of pragmatic competence?

This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second/foreign language. The book has three sections. The first section offers a general overview and historical sketch of the study of Japanese pragmatics and its influence on Japanese pedagogy and curriculum. The overview chapter is followed by eight empirical findings, each dealing with phenomena that are significant in Japanese pragmatics. They target selected features of Japanese pragmatics and investigate the learners' use of them as an indicator of their pragmatic competence.

The target pragmatic features are wide-ranging, among them honorifics, speech style, sentence final particles, speech acts of various types, and indirect expressions. Each study explicitly prompts the connection between pragmalinguistics (linguistic forms available to perform language functions) and sociopragmatics (norms that determine appropriate use of the forms) in Japanese. By documenting the understanding and use of them among learners of Japanese spanning multiple levels and time durations, this book offers insight about the nature and development of pragmatic competence, as well as implications for the learning and teaching of Japanese pragmatics. The last section presents a critical reflection on the eight empirical papers and prompts a discussion of the practice of Japanese pragmatics research.

This book presents current research that discusses some of the major issues in pragmatics from new perspectives, and directs attention to aspects of fundamental tenets that have been investigated only to a limited extent.

Current pragmatic theories emphasize the importance of intention, cooperation, common ground, mutual knowledge, relevance, and commitment in executing communicative acts. However, recent research in cognitive psychology, linguistic pragmatics, and intercultural communication has raised questions that warrant some revision of these major tenets. Debates about the place of intention in pragmatics have indicated that Gricean intentions may play a less central role in communication than traditionally assumed. Cognitive psychologists pointed out that individual, egocentric endeavors of interlocutors play a much more decisive role in the initial stages of production and comprehension than current pragmatic theories envision. Some researchers criticized the Clark and Brennan's common ground model and Clark's contribution theory arguing that these approaches retain a communication-as-transfer-between-minds view of language, and treat intentions and goals as pre-existing psychological entities that are later somehow formulated in language. All these developments are addressed in the papers of the volume written by prominent scholars representing several disciplines.

This theoretically motivated approach to pragmatics (vs. semantics) produces a radically new view of culture and its role vis-a-vis society. Understanding what words mean in use requires an open-ended recourse to pragmatic cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge makes up a productive conceptual system. Members of a cultural community share the system but not all of the system's content, making culture a system of parallel distributed cognition. This book presents such a system, and then elaborates a version of "cultural models" that relates actions to goals, values, emotional content, and context, and that allows both systematic generative capacity and systematic variation across cultural and subcultural groups. Such models are offered as the basic units of cultural action. Culture thus conceived is shown as a tool that people use rather than as something deeply internalized in their psyches.

The recent history of linguistics has witnessed the development of some disciplines that were conceived apart but benefited from common intuitions. One example of this phenomenon is the relationship established throughout time between pragmatics and corpus linguistics. Although their arrival heralded the application of two paradigms based on distant theoretical principles, they always showed an interest in their mutual advances and their practical reconciliation gave birth to an intellectual synergy that proved very fruitful. The present volume is an homage to the symbiosis of pragmatics and corpus linguistics and gathers the works of some of the scholars that have striven to create the liaison between them for a better understanding of language.

The papers in this volume reflect current trends in international research in pragmatics over recent years. The unique feature of the book is that the authors coming from ten different countries represent all aspects of pragmatics and address issues that have emerged as the result of recent research in pragmatics proper and neighboring fields such as cognitive psychology, philosophy, and communication.

Recent theoretical work on the semantics/pragmatics interface, empirical work within cognitive and developmental psychology, intercultural communication and bilingual pragmatics have directed attention to issues that warrant reexamination and revision of some of the central tenets and claims of the field of pragmatics. In addition, cultural changes originating from globalization have affected the relation of language to the wider world. In particular, the spread of English as a global language has led to the emergence of issues of usage, power, and control that must be dealt with in a comprehensive pragmatics of language.

Pragmatic theories have traditionally emphasized the importance of intention, rationality, cooperation, common ground, mutual knowledge, relevance, and commitment in the formation and execution of communicative acts. The new approaches to pragmatic research reflected in this volume, while not questioning the central role of these factors, extend the purview of the discipline to allow for a more comprehensive picture of their functioning and interrelationship within the dynamics of communication.

The papers address these issues from a variety of directions. In Part I, Searle and Horn examine language use and pragmatics from a philosophical perspective. In Part II, the cognitive aspect of pragmatics is represented in the papers of Moeschler, Ruiz de Mendoza & Baicchi, and Giora. They focus on well-known domains such as illocutionary constructions, the pragmatics of negation, and the relevance-theoretic concept of explicature. However, each paper sheds new light on the familiar concepts. The papers in Part III by Mey, Kecskes and Grundy discuss the intercultural aspects of pragmatics while Terkourafi explores the explanatory potential of an interpretation of Grice's Cooperative Principle. Margerie's and Geeraert & Kristiansen's articles focus on the application of usage-based methodology in different ways within pragmatics.