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This volume provides an innovative approach to the referential process thanks to its focus on the relationship between conventions and discourse pragmatics. It brings together a cross-section of current research on referential conventions and pragmatic strategies in a number of different fields (formal and theoretical linguistics semantics discourse analysis psycholinguistics interactional linguistics natural language processing) in a variety of verbal and non-verbal languages (English German different varieties of French Indonesian Belgian sign language) and in a diversity of contexts (the coining of names language acquisition second language learning and various genres such as news articles narratives satire or game playing). The volume is meant as a series of thought-provoking studies which place speakers and addressees at the core of the referential act thus providing evidence on how they negotiate and adjust depending on the context.

In recent years the study of the conceptualization of time has seen a considerable growth providing a basis for exploring the cognitive foundation of metaphor. But if metaphorical representations of time are established in the cognitive system how are they manipulated when humans are engaged in creative expression? This is the question that the present volume addresses on the assumption that by interrogating creativity new insights into our understanding of time may be gained. Our view of creativity which informs the ten chapters that compose this volume endorses not only the extraordinary instances found in poetry and the arts (cinema music graphic novels etc.) but also its more ‘mundane’ everyday manifestations that appear in ordinary language use political discourse or TV news. Spanning across modalities (verbal pictorial auditory and gestural) the exemplary expressions herein are intended to reflect the richness and diversity vis-à-vis the creativity of time representations while also pointing to the common underpinnings that motivate and constrain creativity.

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics broadly conceived as the cognitive social and cultural study of language and communication i.e. the science of language use.

The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995.

Also available as Online Resource: https://benjamins.com/online/hop

This volume proposes a novel structural analysis for causative constructions offering a solution for the long-standing mono/bi-clausal dualism. Causatives are claimed to instantiate a ‘complex object’ construction insofar as the causee is not only the subject of the lexical verb but also a participant that is related to the whole event. Furthermore the analysis reveals that the realization of causatives implies a crucial interplay with the pseudo-relative construction a much-debated structure as well. Data from Scandinavian languages are highlighted through the results of an experimental test on the scope of negation and adverbs supporting the present analysis. The book offers a cross-linguistic perspective as it discusses the relevant constructions in languages including Italian English French Portuguese and Spanish.

World Englishes and English in postcolonial contexts have been curiously neglected in an otherwise abundant research literature on text types and genres in English. This volume looks at the adaptation transformation and emergence of genres in the particular cultural context of the Anglophone Caribbean. A comprehensive framework for the investigation of text production in postcolonial and global English communities is followed by empirically based case studies on specific text formats such as recipes death notices and obituaries letters to the editor newspaper advice columns radio phone-in programmes online forums and the music genre calypso. Influences from oral versus literate culture as well as status and function of English versus Creole are considered by highlighting written spoken and digital genres. All chapters present surveys from a historical and cross-cultural perspective before exploring specific linguistic and cultural features in the Caribbean texts. This volume will be highly relevant for researchers in World Englishes and Caribbean studies postcolonial pragmatics genre and media studies as well as linguistic anthropology.

This volume addresses demands on external and internal science communication in times of crisis. The contributions discuss present crises such as COVID-19 (e.g. vaccination campaigns or political reactions towards the pandemic in the context of science scepticism) and climate change (e.g. plausibility judgements or the role of scientists). They also relate their approaches to past crises e.g. 9/11 or the Galileo affair. This volume is unique in that it is interdisciplinary from a theoretical and methodological perspective. In that respect the authors apply concepts from corpus linguistics discourse analysis rhetoric news values analysis pragmatics and terminology research to various types of data such as newspaper headlines Tweets open letters corpora or glossaries. The case studies are situated within different cultural contexts with various languages being examined i.e. Polish Arabic English French German and Spanish. Elevating our understanding of the interface of science communication and crisis communication this collection of articles proves valuable to scholars and students from linguistics communication science political science sociology and philosophy of science.

Argumentative Style discusses the various ways in which the defence of a standpoint is given shape in argumentative discourse. In this innovative study the new notion – ‘argumentative style’ – introduced for this purpose is situated in the theoretical framework of the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation. This means that the choices involved in utilising a particular argumentative style do not only concern the presentational dimension but also the topical selection and the audience adaptation of the strategic manoeuvring taking place in the discourse. In identifying the functional variety of the argumentative styles utilised in the political the diplomatic the legal the facilitatory the academic and the medical domain the point of departure is that these argumentative styles manifest themselves in the discourse in the argumentative moves that are made the dialectical routes that are chosen and the strategic considerations that are brought to bear.

Discourse particles have often been treated as a phenomenon restricted to Germanic languages (Abraham 2020) and they still raise questions about their nature as an independent category. This book reveals that this phenomenon exists in other languages as well and provides evidence for their nature as a separate category. The volume brings together a collection of nine papers that focus on three research topics: a) the diachronic development of discourse particles; b) their syntactic analysis; and c) the study of their semantic-pragmatics. Furthermore it also discusses other issues less often dealt with in the literature but of great interest for linguistic theory such as the acquisition of discourse particles by children or the analysis of elements not usually considered discourse particles but whose historical path or microvariation indicates otherwise. Additionally the book offers a cross-linguistic perspective as it discusses various languages including Basque Catalan German Italian Laz Mandarin Chinese Old English Portuguese and Spanish.

This book combines explanatory breadth with analytical delicacy. It offers a comprehensive study of a broad array of traditional figures of speech by systematizing linguistic evidence of the cognitive processes underlying them. Such processes are explicitly linked to different communicative consequences thus bringing together pragmatics and cognition. This type of study has allowed the authors to provide new definitions for all the figures while making their dependency relations fully explicit. For example hypallage antonomasia anthimeria and merism are studied as variants of metonymy and analogy paragon and allegory as variants of metaphor. An important feature of the book is its special emphasis on the combinations of figures of speech into conceptually more complex configurations. Finally the book accounts for the principles that regulate the felicity of figurative expressions. The result is a broad integrative framework for the analysis of figurative language grounded in the relationship between pragmatics and cognition.

This volume is the first monograph exploring the functions of visual cues in humor advocating for the development of a non-linguocentric theory of humor performance. It analyzes a corpus of dyadic face-to-face interactions in Spanish and English to study the relationship between humor smiling and gaze and shows how by focusing on these elements it is possible to shed light on the “unsaid” of conversations.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>In the book the humorous framing of an utterance is shown to be negotiated and co-constructed dialogically and multimodally through changes and patterns of smiling synchronicity smiling intensity and eye movements. The study also analyzes the multimodal features of failed humor and proposes a new categorization from a dialogic perspective.<br/>Because of its interdisciplinary approach which includes facial expression analysis and eye tracking this book is relevant to humor researchers as well as scholars in social and behavioral sciences interested in multimodality and embodied cognition.