Pragmatics & Beyond

This study is an inquiry into the pragmatics of speaker and hearer reference. It falls into a theory-based and a description-based part. The former covers three topics: (a) the categories of speaker and hearer as opposed to the category of nonparticipants in the speech act; (b) the interactional roles of speaker and hearer as defined by the illocutionary point of the speech act and the preconditions underlying its successful performance; (c) the decomposition of the speech act as a model for describing strategies in verbal interaction. The object of the descriptive part of this study is to survey the different realizations of the categories of speaker and hearer reference and the strategic effects speakers intend to bring about by employing them. For this purpose, a language-specific analysis is applied to the system of speaker and hearer reference in Peninsular Spanish. For the sake of homogeneity, Peninsular Spanish is also chosen as the object language for the discussion of the general language phenomena which are treated in the theoretical discussion.

The research reported in this volume attempts to refine our understanding of persuasive messages of television advertising by studying the role of language in persuasion in two ways. First, it comprises an attempt to refine our understanding of how language might function in persuasion by examining relevant work from a variety of related disciplines, potentially germane either in terms of their theoretical approaches to the process or in terms of the actual linguistic techniques which they have suggested as enhancing the persuasive impact of a message. Second, a comparative study was undertaken in order to test the generalizability of the linguistic features found to characterize persuasive language in television advertising.

Passivization is explained by using the formalism of combinatory logic. The agented passive is derived from the agentless as follows: a term denoting an agent is transposed into a predicate modifier and applied to the passive predicate of the agentless construction. The passive predicate consists of two parts: 1) the two-place converse of the active predicate and 2) a zero unspecified term to which the converse predicate is applied. The passive is not derived from but is related to the active. The modifier of the passive predicate is the functional counterpart of the subject in the active. The proposed hypothesis gives an adequate solution to problems arising from various types of passive constructions. Passivization and antipassivization are defined as instances of a general cross-linguistic process involving conversion.

It is a longstanding if not altogether coherent tradition of logic and rhetorical studies that an argument can be incorrect or fallacious in virtue of some proposition in it being “irrelevant”. This monograph clarifies that tradition. Non-classical propositional calculi, including relevance logics and relatedness logics, are juxtaposed against conversational criticisms of irrelevance in natural argumentation, e.g. in parliamentary debates. The object is to see if there is a reasonable way of evaluating criticisms like “That’s beside the point!” or “That’s irrelevant!”.

Any informal discussion of a piece of nonsense literature produces highly varying interpretations which retain, however, a common core. It seemed, then, that nonsense would be a fertile base in the study of nonautomatic comprehension, i.e. comprehension where the word-meaning relations do not seem to be self-evident. And fertile it was! This monograph reports the results of a study into the nonautomatic functioning of the linguistic network which includes idiosyncratic as well as common, coded elements at all levels: semantic, syntactic, and phonetic as well as episodic. To carry it out, a number of adults and children were given nonsense texts to interpret. These interpretations were in turn analyzed as to the strategies applied toward the comprehension of those texts. Various examples of nonsense in mass media were also analyzed in the light of these findings.

This dialogue game approach to the discourse analysis of the English interjection well aims at the formulation of rules which would be informative (marking some contexts of use as more natural than others), systematic (applicable in a mechanical or at least in a non-ad hoc way), and adequate (showing putative competitors to be either false to fact, too narrow or too wide, or demonstrably equivalent).

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.