Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 16, Issue 3, 2008

Ever since the seminal work of Paul Grice, tautologies such as Business is business have been discussed from a number of angles. While most approaches assume that tautological utterances have to do with the operation of conversational maxims, an integrated analysis is still lacking. This paper makes an attempt at analysing tautologies within the framework of Levinson (2000), who proposes a distinction between three pragmatic levels, namely Indexical Pragmatics, Gricean Pragmatics 1, and Gricean Pragmatics 2. It is shown that observations of Ward and Hirschberg (1991) on the exclusion of alternatives, the claim of Autenrieth (1997) that the second NP in nominal equatives is predicative, and the recent insights of Bulhof and Gimbel (2004) on ‘deep’ tautology, may be fruitfully integrated within Levinson’s framework. The gist of this paper is to show that tautologies are not as tautological as once thought, because implicatures influence their truth conditions. Data are drawn from the author’s corpus of authentic German examples.

This paper attempts to identify general, cross-cultural cognitive factors that trigger the default commissive interpretation of assertions about one’s future action. It is argued that the solution cannot be found at the level of the semantics of the English will, or any other future tense marker, but should be sought in the structure of rational intentions, as combined with the pragmatics of felicitous predictions and with parameters linked to the evolutionary advantage of cooperative behaviour. Some supporting evidence from language development studies is briefly presented.

This paper studies how the concept WATER is metonymically and metaphorically extended to six super-domains: NATURE, LIFE SUSTAINER, MOVEMENT, POWER, PURITY, and WOMAN. We demonstrate that these six target domains are related to each other in intricate ways and within each are a number of sub-domains. This complicated semantic network of WATER is formed via speakers’ embodied experience with their physical as well as cultural environment. We believe that our detailed discussion of the WATER network will contribute to the current research on the relationship between metaphor and metonymy.

This research examined the extent to which pragmatic comprehension, namely accurate and speedy comprehension of conversational implicatures, is related to cognitive processing skills and general listening abilities. Thirty-five Japanese students learning English as a second language completed five tasks: (1) a pragmatic listening test (PLT) that measured the ability to comprehend implied speakers’ intentions, (2) a phonemic discrimination test, (3) a listening section of the institutional TOEFL, (4) a working memory test, and (5) a lexical access test that measured the ability to make speedy semantic judgment. The students’ pragmatic comprehension was analyzed for accuracy (scores) and comprehension speed (time taken to answer items correctly). Results revealed a significant relationship between accuracy scores of the PLT and the TOEFL listening scores, but not with phonemic discrimination ability. Response time of pragmatic listening significantly correlated with the semantic access speed, but not with working memory.

This paper aims at clarifying the ontology of conflict as a preliminary for constructing a conflict mapping guide (Wehr 1979). After recalling the main definitions elaborated in different disciplines, the meaning of conflict is elicited through semantic analysis based on corpus evidence. Two fundamental meanings emerge: conflict as an interpersonal hostility between two or more human subjects, and conflict as a propositional incompatibility. These two states of affairs are significantly related, because the latter tends to generate the former whenever the incompatible positions are embodied by as many parties who feel personally questioned. The semantic analysis allows to sketch the ontology of the conflictual situation that can serve to generate a conflict mapping guide, and to face several crucial aspects that are relevant both to the study and to the management of conflicts. In the former perspective, it allows for a comparison of the situation of interpersonal conflict with the seemingly similar process of controversy.

In this paper we introduce a detailed and multi-faceted characterization of misunderstandings. The proposal attempts to capture the structure of misunderstandings in terms of several constructs: the message as intended by the speaker, the message as construed by the hearer, and the message as understood by an ‘objective’ judge. In addition, we suggest that the message the speaker intends the hearer to retrieve and the hearer’s perception of the speaker’s intentions should also be taken into account. Misunderstandings can also be classified according to the phase of the comprehension process at which they occur (the perception of the speaker’s message, its linguistic processing, discovering the implicatures, and so on).

The founder of Cognitive Poetics, Reuven Tsur, has seen his project broaden and evolve over the last quarter-century. Some of these developments run counter to Tsur’s continuing thinking, and he has been critical of some of the work that now goes under the name ‘cognitive poetics’. This paper is partly a response to criticisms made by Tsur specifically in relation to Stockwell’s work, and partly a more general defence of the broad discipline as it has emerged in recent years. The argument concerns the relationship between literary criticism and cognitive poetics, and the nature of the radical critique of traditional methods offered by the cognitive turn in arts and humanities research. A case for the broad definition of the term and its radical application is made.