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Topic, Antitopic and Verb Agreement in Non-Standard French
Jan 1981
Book
The author describes and explains the syntactic and pragmatic properties of the nominal and pronominal elements in sentences of the types Ces Romains ils sont fous and Ils sont fous ces Romains which in spite of their frequent occurrence have so far received little attention among linguists and grammarians. He argues that far from having the marginal status of a linguistic anomaly the cooccurrence in the same clause of coreferential nouns and pronouns is one formal manifestation of an important functional principle in modern French: the encoding of a topic-comment relationship in the surface structure of the sentence. The pronouns in sentences such as the ones mentioned are interpreted as agreement markers. The syntactic and semantic differences between topics and anti-topics are analyzed.
You Know : A discourse-functional approach
Jan 1981
Book
The basic function the expression you know serves in conversational discourse is said to be that of a pragmatic particle used when the speaker wants the addressee to accept as mutual knowledge (or at least be cooperative with respect to) the propositional content of his utterance. The fact that you know is even used when the addressee is assumed not to know what the speaker is talking about suggests that it functions at the deference level of politeness as a striving towards attaining a camaraderie relationship between speaker and hearer. You know is found to be more often used by women than by men in spontaneous conversation and the manner in which it is used is significantly different from male usage. Ontogenetically the age of four seems to be crucial for initial steps to use and master pragmatic particles including you know. Data for the study were derived from tape-recorded conversations and interviews.
The True and the False : The Domain of the Pragmatic
Jan 1981
Book
Pragmatics often begins by supposing that specifying and describing truth bearers is a proper task for semantics. The main thrust of the present work is to show why truth and truth bearers lie essentially beyond the descriptive reach of semantics and to outline a theory of truth bearers as a proper and fundamental task for pragmatics. It is also common for treatments or definitions of truth to be confused with substantive theories about truth bearers with a variety of unfortunate results. This monograph suggests a way of separating these tasks and shows how many problems are thus avoided. Some emphasis is placed on the generally universal — i.e. nonlanguage-specific — character of pragmatic topics and of truth. These issues occasion a discussion of semantic paradoxes and of several relativities in the notion of truth.
Essai sur les modalités tensives
Jan 1981
Book
The four studies grouped under the title Essai sur les modalités tensives touch upon several questions of semiotics presently debated in the theoretical framework proposed by A.J. Greimas. They are mainly concerned with the passages between meaning and form and with the convertibilités between the different levels.
Le Langage en Contexte : Etudes philosophiques et linguistiques de pragmatique
Jan 1980
Book
Les lois générales gouvernant la formation des théories sont valable dans la pragmatique comme partout ailleurs où se manifeste l’ambition théorique. La méthodologie adequate ici come ailleurs est plutôt celle de la reconstruction et de la découverte que celle de la description et de l’interpretation. Il faut que la noyau théorique évalué par les critères internes d’adéquation de cohérence et de simplicité ait une dynamique reconstructiviste d’expansion. La question à résoudre n’est pas: quel est l’object de ma science mais bien plutôt: comment est l’object de ma science si ma théorie a de telles propriétés une telle structure interne? Telle est d’ailleurs le perspective qui oriente le présent volume.
On Speech Act Verbs
Jan 1980
Book
This essay concerns the analysis of speech act verbs. It offers a range of ideas which form theoretical preliminaries to the analysis of this phenomenon.
Contexts of Understanding
Jan 1980
Book
This essay deals with the difficulty of understanding understanding taking the understanding of natural language fragments as a paradigm.
A Pragmatic Logic for Commands
Jan 1980
Book
The purpose of this essay is to both discuss commands as a species of speech act and to discuss commands within the broader framework of how they are used and reacted to.
Talk and Taxonomy : A methodological comparison of ethnosemantics and ethnomethodology with reference to terms for Canadian doctors
Jan 1980
Book
The thesis of this essay is that social or cultural competence consists more of an interpretive or methodological ability to use language in the service of interaction than of a substantive knowledge of collections of cultural categories and of the semantic relations between the terms naming those categories.
'The boat's gonna leave' : A study of children learning a second language from conversations with other children
Jan 1980
Book
This essay attempts to show how a second language is acquired by very young children in the process of socialization with other children. The study seeks to integrate the process of second language learning in the general framework of child development concentrating in particular on the development of language and conversational skills.
Explorations in Semantics and Pragmatics
Jan 1980
Book
The aim of this book is to show the way forward to a coherent view of language in which the achievement of the formalist paradigm is strengthened to the extent that its claims are weakened. A formal theory such as generative grammar is a special theory which is to be subsumed in a general theory of linguistic communication that also includes pragmatics. The tension between the psycho-formalist and the socio-functional views could be resolved in a synthesis whereby both the psychological and social natures of language are fully acknowledged. Semantics and pragmatics representing these two natures in the study of meaning have distinct goals which can be defined more clearly and pursued more effectively to the extent that both their distinctness and their interdependence are recognized.
Meaning Detachment
Jan 1980
Book
This essay concerns meaning detachment and (self-)interpreting utterances.
A Discourse Production Model for 'Twenty Questions'
Jan 1980
Book
This essay is an attempt to build up a plausible model of the cognitive processes behind the behavior exhibited by speaker-hearers in a specific discourse situation.
Pragmatics : An annotated bibliography
Jan 1978
Book
The selection of entries in this bibliography reflects the following definition of pragmatics: The study (i) of the use and extra-linguistic function(s) of language and (ii) of the relation between such uses or functions and the structure of language i.e. the contextual appropriateness conditions on the use of language. This bibliography does not only cover purely theoretical works but also includes applications of pragmatic theory in language teaching language acquisition discourse analysis literary studies etc. To augment the usefulness of the bibliography which is arranged alphabetically a subject and a language index have been added.