2016 collection (147 titles)

How hearers arrive at intended meaning, which elements encode processing instructions in certain languages, how procedural meaning and prosody interact, how diverse types of utterances are interpreted, how epistemic vigilance mechanisms work, which linguistic elements assist those mechanisms, how a critical attitude to information and informers develops when a second language is learnt, or why some perlocutionary effects originate are some of the varied issues that have intrigued pragmatists, and relevance theorists in particular, and continue to fuel research. In this collection readers will discover new proposals based on the cognitive framework put forward by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson three decades ago. Their gripping, insightful and stimulating discussions, combined in some cases with meticulous and in-depth analyses, show the directions relevance theory has recently followed. Moreover, this collection also unveils fruitful and promising interactions with areas like morphology, prosody, language typology, interlanguage pragmatics, machine translation, or rhetoric and argumentation, and avenues for future research.

This volume encompasses a thorough examination of the use of request strategies on two contrastive dimensions. On the cross-cultural dimension, it compares the use of British and American English request strategies in naturally occurring informal conversations. The conversational data are retrieved from the International Corpus of English (ICE) and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. On the methodological dimension, it systematically compares request strategies and their frequency distributions in the conversational data to questionnaire-based requests. Highlighting various instrument-induced effects, the volume challenges the validity of one of the most widely used and accepted data collection tools in pragmatics research, the DCT.

The extensive data analysis contained in the volume includes a wide range of linguistic variables including mitigating and aggravating modification strategies and their interaction with head act directness levels. While it focuses on the first-pair part, the book also offers an analysis of request responses from a cross-cultural perspective.

The findings of the study contribute new insights to research on requests, politeness, variational pragmatics, and general research methodology.

The main aim of this book is to address a fundamental question in linguistics, namely why languages are similar and why they are different. The study proposes that languages are fundamentally similar when they encode the same meanings in their grammatical systems and that languages are different when they encode different meanings. Even if languages encode the same meaning, they may differ with respect to the formal means used to code those meanings. This approach allows for a typology based on functional domains, subdomains and functions coded in individual languages. The outcome of the study is a unified approach to language theory, linguistic typology, and descriptive linguistics. The argumentation for the hypotheses and the proposed approach is supported by analyses of data from more than a dozen languages, including English, Polish, French, Wandala, Mina, Hdi, and several other Chadic languages. The study is accessible to a wide variety of linguists.