Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 32, Issue 2, 2025

In this paper, I consider contrastive discourse markers (CDMs) in English and Greek in terms of their etymological origins. In particular, I argue that English and Greek CDMs draw on sources inspired by the same basic cognitive categories: namely, PLACE, QUANTITY, and MANNER; and that these sources are designations of three apparently distinct concepts: namely, allness, sameness, and oppositeness. What makes this consensus even more interesting, not to say curious, is that Greek does not belong to the group of the Indo-European family that includes English. I will suggest that our world experience is the common denominator of the three designated concepts. It is hoped that this suggestion will be grounds not only for explaining the attested unanimity among English and Greek but also for illuminating the development of CDMs cross-linguistically.

Communicative intentions, conceived as internal mental states, are subject to an objection already raised by Wittgenstein: since they are not accessible to hearers, they cannot play an explanatory role in utterance understanding. Such an objection has led Sbisà (2001/2023a) and Hansen & Terkourafi (2023) to propose shifting the weight of explanation from speaker’s to hearer’s meaning. This article delineates the scope of that objection, arguing that communicative intentions are irrelevant if conceived as private mental states, but defending an alternative, public conception of communicatively relevant mental states, framed in terms of representations of public correlations between public facts. This allows for the formation of rules which are intersubjective but nonetheless mental. Importantly, such rules are presupposed by intentional communication as described in animal studies. Given this public conception of the mental, neither the speaker nor the hearer holds special authority over the intended content: they share a narrowly constrained authority.

When engaging imaginatively with a work of literary fiction, readers do more than reconstruct what is fictionally true — they also engage in richer forms of imagining. While the reconstruction of fictional truth must comply, at least to some extent, with the author’s intention, experiential imagining is often considered too subjective to be normatively constrained. This paper challenges this assumption by arguing that, although experiential imagining is largely subjective, it can be intentionally directed. In culturally, historically, or morally charged contexts, readers should aim to imaginatively experience what the author seeks to communicate.

This study analyzes the linguistic strategies in a guided meditation exercise. It describes the cognitive and phenomenal processes that the language encourages in meditators and how these relate to the philosophies that inform the Waking Up mindfulness app. It takes a discourse analytic approach grounded in Cognitive linguistics, applying concepts like conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), deliberate metaphor (Steen 2014, 2017), force-dynamics (Talmy 2000) and subjective/objective construal (Langacker 2008). The study finds that the cognitive semantics of the language encourages meditators to (a) adopt metaphorical frames and simulate physio-spatial scenarios in which introspective phenomena can be easily observed and manipulated; (b) strategically relinquish cognitive effort in ways that diminish their sense of agency; and (c) construe their sense of Self in paradoxical ways that may make it difficult to detect. The findings contribute to understanding how language can influence introspective phenomenal processes, providing insights for meditation guides and discourse analysts.

Despite the numerous studies on the perception of speech acts, very little is known about how children in middle childhood perceive implicit speech acts (ISA) across different ages. To this end, referring to the research paradigm described by Holtgraves (2005, 2008), this study aimed to examine the identification and classification of utterances with implicit performatives among 621 Chinese children between the age of 9–13. The results indicate that on the identification task, 11- and 12-year-olds significantly outperformed 9-year-olds, and girls identify more implicit speech acts than boys. Most importantly, similar to adults, 13-year-olds categorized implicit speech acts based on the emotional valence of listeners, while 11-year-olds tended to group them according to the psychological states and attitudes of the speakers. However, 9-year-olds were not able to classify implicit speech acts. The above findings offer valuable implications for pragmatic teaching and research.

In everyday communication, criticisms are important and commonly occurring face-threatening acts. In this paper, we investigate the way people deal with criticisms by conducting two experiments in French involving the production of, and response to, criticisms using a written Discourse Completion Test. In each experiment, we presented participants with scenarios in which we manipulated power relations (equal vs. hierarchical) and horizontal social distance (close or distant). We also assessed the roles of age and gender of the participants. Results indicate that power and distance significantly impact the formulation of criticisms but not that of responses to criticisms. Similarly, age and gender significantly interacted in the formulation of criticisms, with younger women being less direct, but older women being more direct compared to men. No effect was found on responses to criticisms. Taken together, these findings provide a more comprehensive perspective of the factors affecting the production of, and response to, criticisms from an experimental perspective, thus contributing to our understanding of this pivotal but understudied speech act.