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Subject collection: Pragmatics (804 titles, 1978–2015)
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Subject collection: Pragmatics (804 titles, 1978–2015)
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On the Grammar of Optative Constructions
Author(s): Patrick G. GroszThis monograph is one of the first theoretical studies of optatives. Optative constructions express desire without an overt lexical item that means ‘desire’. The author specifically investigates optatives with the syntax of embedded clauses that contain prototypical particles such as ‘only’. He rejects the view that optativity arises compositionally from the standard semantics of embedded clauses and prototypical particles. The following system is proposed: Desirability is due to a generalized scalar exclamation operator EX. Furthermore, clausal properties such as factivity/counterfactuality are encoded in a Mood head, which co-determines morphological mood and complementizer choice. Finally, the prototypical particles that optatives contain are truth-conditionally vacuous presupposition triggers. As a result, these meaning components do not interact directly, but their meanings converge, with the consequence that they prototypically co-occur. This monograph is of interest for formal semanticists, syntacticians, pragmaticists and morphologists, and especially relevant for research on mood and particle semantics.
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On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures
Author(s): Eva OgiermannThis book investigates how speakers of English, Polish and Russian deal with offensive situations. It reveals culture-specific perceptions of what counts as an apology and what constitutes politeness. It offers a critical discussion of Brown and Levinson's theory and provides counterevidence to the correlation between indirectness and politeness underlying their theory. Their theory is applied to two languages that rely less heavily on indirectness in conveying politeness than does English, and to a speech act that does not become more polite through indirectness. An analysis of the face considerations involved in apologising shows that in contrast to disarming apologies, remedial apologies are mainly directed towards positive face needs, which are crucial for the restoration of social equilibrium and maintenance of relationships. The data show that while English apologies are characterised by a relatively strong focus on both interlocutors’ negative face, Polish apologies display a particular concern for positive face. For Russian speakers, in contrast, apologies seem to involve a lower degree of face threat than they do in the other two languages.
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Oral History
Editor(s): Marta Kurkowska-Budzan and Krzysztof ZamorskiMore LessOral History: The Challenges of Dialogue shows contemporary oral history at work in a variety of contexts, levels, and engagements. The issues developed in the book correspond to different stages of research: preparing and conducting the interview, evaluating and analyzing the collected material, publishing in the broad sense of speaking to different audiences, and finally, addressing the dilemmas and philosophical reflections with an emphasis on ethics. This book aims to address oral history from two perspectives. The first is the perspective of oral history as dialoguing, the second is the presentation of concrete situations, research, persons, and their own stories as built on the solid ground of discourse and within a concrete context. The chapters embody the experiences of the authors, their efforts and successes, as well as their failures in dialoguing with narrators. Unveiled in this book is the extensive breadth of contemporary oral history work, bridging epistemological and methodological horizons.
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On Information Structure, Meaning and Form
Editor(s): Kerstin Schwabe and Susanne WinklerMore LessThis collection of articles offers a new and compelling perspective on the interface connecting syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. At the core of this volume is the hypothesis that information structure represents the common interface of these grammatical components. Information structure is investigated here from different theoretical viewpoints yielding typologically relevant information and structural generalizations. In the volume's introductory chapter, the editors identify two central approaches to information structure: the formal and the interpretive view. The remainder of the book is organized accordingly. The first part examines information structure and grammar, concentrating on generalizations across languages. The second part investigates information structure and pragmatics, concentrating on clause structure and context. Through concrete analyses of topic, focus, and related phenomena across different languages, the contributors add new and convincing evidence to the research on information structure.
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Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past
Editor(s): Janne Skaffari, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen and Brita WårvikMore LessThis volume presents a variety of pragmatic and discourse analytical approaches to a wide range of linguistic data and historical texts, including data from English, French, Irish, Latin, and Spanish. This diversity of research questions and methods is a feature of the field of historical pragmatics, which by its very nature has to take into account the multiplicity of historical contexts and the infinite variety of human interaction. This is highlighted in the book’s introduction by means of the metaphor of "opening windows". Each chapter is a window affording a different view of the linguistic and textual landscape. Some of these windows were opened by historical linguists who have acquired discourse perspectives, some by pragmaticians with historical interests, and others by literary scholars drawing from linguistic pragmatics. Contributors include L. J. Brinton, A. H. Jucker, F. Salager-Meyer, I. Taavitsainen, B. Wehr, L. Wright, and sixteen others.
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Outside-In — Inside-Out
Editor(s): Costantino Maeder, Olga Fischer and William J. HerlofskyMore LessThis fourth volume of the Iconicity series is like its predecessors devoted to the study of iconicity in language and literature in all its forms. Many of the papers turn the notion of iconicity ‘inside-out’, some suggesting that ‘less-is-more’; others focus on the cognitive factors ‘inside’ the brain that are important for the iconic phenomena that are produced in the ‘outside’ world. In addition this volume includes a paper related to iconicity in music and its interaction with language. Other papers range from the theoretical issues involved in the evolution of language, to those that offer many ‘inside-out’ claims, such as claiming that nouns are derived from pronouns, and as such should more properly be called ‘pro-pronouns’. Also, this volume includes perhaps the first English-language analysis of the iconic aspects of sound symbolism in a prayer from the Koran. This is a truly interdisciplinary collection that should turn some of the notions of iconicity in language and literature ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’.
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On the Discourse of Satire
Author(s): Paul SimpsonThis book advances a model for the analysis of contemporary satirical humour. Combining a range of theoretical frameworks in stylistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, Simpson examines both the methods of textual composition and the strategies of interpretation for satire. Verbal irony is central to the model, in respect of which Simpson isolates three principal “ironic phases” that shape the uptake of satirical humour. Throughout the book, consistent emphasis is placed on satire’s status as a culturally situated discursive practice, while the categories of the model proposed are amply illustrated with textual examples. A notable feature of the book is a chapter on the legal implications of using satirical humour as a weapon of attack in the public domain.
A book where Jonathan Swift meets Private Eye magazine, this entertaining and thought-provoking study will interest those working in stylistics, humorology, pragmatics and discourse analysis. It also has relevance for forensic discourse analysis, and for media, literary and cultural studies.
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The Organizing Property of Communication
Author(s): François CoorenWhat is an organization? What are the building blocks that ultimately constitute this social form, so pervasive in our daily life? Like Augustine facing the problem of time, we all know what an organization is, but we seem unable to explain it. This book brings an original answer by mobilizing concepts traditionally reserved to linguistics, analytical philosophy, and semiotics. Based on Algirdas Julien Greimas’ semio-narrative model of action and Jacques Derrida’s concept of écriture, a reconceptualization of speech act theory is proposed in which communication is treated as an act of delegation where human and nonhuman agents are mobilized (texts, machines, employees, architectural elements, managers, etc.). Perfectly congruent with the last development of the sociology of translation developed by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, this perspective illustrates the organizing property of communication through a process called ‘interactoriality’. Jacques Lacan used to say that the unconscious is structured like a language. This book shows that a social organization is structured like a narrative.
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(On) Searle on Conversation
Author(s): John R. Searle, Herman Parret and Jef VerschuerenAt an international conference held in 1981 at the Universidada Estudual of Campinas (Brazil), a controversial lecture was given by John Searle which presented two conceptual theses: that conversation does not have an intrinsic structure about which a relevant theory can be formulated, and that conversations are not subject to (constitutive) rules. This lecture was first published in 1986 under the title “Notes on Conversation”, and was revised several times afterwards. The present volume offers the most recent version. Because of the importance of the article for conversation analysis, and for pragmatics in general, the editors have put together Searle's target article, along with eight original comments. The volume closes with a 'reply to replies' by Searle. In sociolinguistic studies, intralingual code-switching has been given less attention than most other areas, and linguists' attitudes towards the use of non-standard varieties still often suffer from fallacies of prescriptivism. Czech, a clear case of a language having a Standard and a strong central vernacular with intensive shifting between them, offers many points of general interest to sociolinguists.
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On Speech Act Verbs
Author(s): Jef VerschuerenThis essay concerns the analysis of speech act verbs. It offers a range of ideas which form theoretical preliminaries to the analysis of this phenomenon.
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