Pragmatics & Beyond

Code-switching and related phenomena have met with linguists’ increasing interest over the last decade. However, much of the research has been restricted to the structural (grammatical) properties of the use of two languages in conversation; scholars who have tried to capture the interactive meaning of switching have often failed to go beyond more or less anecdotal descriptions of individual, particularly striking, cases. The book bridges this gap by providing a coherent, comprehensive and generative model for language alternation, drawing on recent trends and methods in conversational analysis. The empirical basis is the speech of Italian migrant children in Constance, Germany.

René Thom, the famous French mathematician and founder of catastrophe theory, considered linguistics an exemplary field for the application of his general morphology. It is surprising that physicists, chemists, biologists, psychologists and sociologists are all engaged in the field of catastrophe theory, but that there has been almost no echo from linguistics. Meanwhile linguistics has evolved in the direction of René Thom’s intuitions about an integrated science of language and it has become a necessary task to review, update and elaborate the proposals made by Thom and to embed them in the framework of modern semantic theory.

This is the first of the two volumes – the second volume being Thomas Ballmer’s Biological Foundations of Linguistic Communication (P&B III:7) – treating biocybernetical questions of language. This book starts from a cybernetic explication of some action theoretic notions, like control and ability. These notions are used in order to provide adequate means of describing the complex and subtle phenomena of communication, both from a general point of view as well as from a specifically linguistic perspective. In addition the relation between biological systems and language is discussed.

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.

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.

Deixis – the rooting of utterances in the speech situation – is one of the most salient universals of natural language. The ways in which different languages link utterances to pragmatic factors such as speech time, speech place, and speech participants show a rich variation. This makes deixis a particular fruitful domain for the study of universals, language comparison, and the relationship between language and reality. This volume presents and discusses deictic systems of both Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages, including Russian, Czech, Spanish, German (standard and dialect), Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, Hausa, Swahili, Hopi, Eipo, Tolai, Diyari. Focus is on spatial deixis, but other deictic and demonstrative expressions are treated as well.

With reference to a brief description of inherent properties of the international news reporting process in a free press tradition, Verschueren criticizes their being neglected in linguistic approaches to the language of the media. In an attempt to illustrate the potential contribution of functional linguistic analyses to a better understanding of the printed media as a channel for international communication, he investigates the use of metapragmatic metaphors (in particular metaphorical verbs of speaking) in the reporting by The New York Times on the U-2 incident in May 1960. The framing of the incident as a communicative event is evaluated along the dimensions of factual truth, interpretational accuracy, and understanding.

Suleiman provides a linguistic analysis of Jordanian Arabic spoken by educated groups and in particular by students at Yarmouk University. He investigates the extent to which spoken Jordanian Arabic is affected by the classical-colloquial dichotomy (i.e. the extent to which diglossia is involved). In addition, the influence of language contact between English and Arabic is studied (with reference to code-switching, interference and integration) by comparing the linguistic repertoire of Yarmouk students (where English is often used as a medium of instruction) with that of students at other Arab universities (where the medium of instruction is basically Arabic).

This study sheds light on the problem of communicative inequality, neglected both by linguists and communication scholars, among speakers of different languages. It provides a four-step Critical Theory analysis of language-based inequality and distortion between speakers of a few dominant languages, especially English, and speakers of minority languages in the context of international and intercultural communication. Based on a theoretical framework of “Distorted Communication” developed by J. Habermas and C. Müller, the analysis focuses on a critical description, definition, and interpretation of “Distorted Intercultural Communication”, and exposes the ideology that legitimates linguistic inequality and distortion in communication.

According to the traditional view, meaning presents itself under the form of some kind of identity. To give the meaning of a sentence amounts to being capable of producing some substitute based on the identity of the terms of the sentence. Is then the meaning of a book, or of any text, the capacity of rewriting it? Instead of retaining a double-standard theory of meaning, one for sentences and another for texts, that would allow for an ad hoc gap, the author provides a unified conception, called the question view of language he has developed, known as problematology. He pursues a systematic analysis of questioning in literature and shows how questioning makes the understanding process possible.

This study is an attempt to uncover the structure of three emotion concepts: anger, pride and love. The results indicate that the conceptual structure associated with these emotions consists of four parts: (1) a system of metaphors, (2) a system of metonymies, (3) a system of related concepts, and (4) a category of cognitive models, with a prototypical model in the center. This goes against an influential view of the structure of concepts in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, according to which the structure of a concept can be represented by a small number of sense components.

Non-declarative sentences such as interrogatives, imperatives and exclamations are analyzed together as a single class. The author gives a general characterization of all three types and shows that there are no other types of non-declarative sentences. Definitions are offered for the notions of declaration and presupposition. These definitions are applicable to all types of sentence, both declarative and non-declarative. A defining characteristic of non-declarative sentences is that only strongly intensional operators can apply to them to form complex sentences. It is shown that this property of non-declaratives implies that such sentences do not have declarations. A particular case of the relation between questions and conditionals is studied in more detail.

Walburga von Raffler-Engel takes a novel approach to compiling information about doctor-patient communication. She has surveyed popular literature around the world to gain a grass-roots' perception of this relationship in various cultures. Most of the contributions are by practicing physicians, illustrating reflections on doctor-patient communication from both the physician's as well as the patient's points of view. A variety of disciplines are involved in the study of this subject, such as discourse analysis, non-verbal communication, psychology, sociology, education, etc.

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.

This volume deals with the relation between pragmatics and the philosophy of mind. Unlike most of the books written on the subject, it does not defend the view that a specific form of dependence holds between language and thought, to the exclusion of all other possible relations. Taking pragmatics in its original sense of “that part of semiotics that is concerned with the users of a semiotic system”, the book analyses the nature of the mental processes and states mirrored in language use. Drawing on results from cognitive psychology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, linguistics, etc., a unified view of the mental dimension in the use of language, both as an instrument of communication and as an instrument of thought, is offered. After offering a tour d’horizon of the relationship between language and mind, this volume deals with the way thought is manifested in language.

In this book, a study is made of ethnic prejudice in cognition and conversation, based on intensive interviewing of white majority group members. After an introductory survey of traditional and more recent approaches in social psychology to the study of prejudice, a new 'sociocognitive' theory is sketched. This theory explains how cognitive representations and strategies of ethnic prejudice depend on their social functions within intergroup relations. It is also shown how ethnic prejudice is communicated in society through everyday talk among majority members. The major part of the book systematically analyzes the various dimensions of prejudiced conversations, such as topical structures, storytelling, argumentation, local semantic strategies, style and rhetoric, and more specific conversational properties. It is shown that such an explicit discourse analysis may reveal underlying cognitive representations and strategic uses of prejudice. Moreover, it appeared that many aspects of prejudiced talk are geared towards the overall strategic goals of adequate self-expression and positive self-presentation. This book is interdisciplinary in nature and should be of interest to linguists, discourse analysts, cognitive and social psychologists, sociologists, and all those interested in ethnic stereotypes, prejudice, and racism.

The various contributions to this volume converge on two themes. First, the explanatory role of social interaction, which, for a long time, has been a source of criticism of Piaget’s view of intelligence, is dealt with not only in relation to cognitive development, but also to language acquisition and to education. The second point of thematic convergence is the compatibility of genetic epistemology and psychoanalytic theory in view of the establishment of relationships between emotional and cognitive development.

Looking at the ‘semiotic landscape’ – the panorama of constituted semiotics – two traditions seem to have developed separately and without interpenetration. Anglo-Saxon semioticians consider the Peircean framework to provide the adequate conceptual apparatus, whereas so-called ‘Continental’ semioticians refer to the sign theory in Saussure and in its interpretation by Hjelmslev (for instance, the École sémiotique de Paris). Evaluating each other’s projects, methods, and results could lead to a balanced view. The purpose of this monograph is to get the best out of the adequate insights from both sides, and to make suggestions how the semioticians from the Peircean or Saussuro-Hjelmslevian school can be removed from their isolationist positions. A comparison and homologation of these two orientations will be carried out from the angle of the impact of pragmaticism on both semiotic orientations. How intentionality, action, conventionality, interlocution are integrated in both orientations will be given particular emphasis.

Ceux qui parlent une langue seconde, savent par leur propre expérience que, malgré une bonne connaissance du vocabulaire et des règles de la grammaire, ils n’arrivent pas à réagir verbalement à des situations concrètes de la même manière que ceux qui la parlent en langue maternelle. Cet ouvrage, à la fois théorique et pratique, tâche de combler ce vide par une analyse contrastive serrée des enonces en situation, à partir d’un corpus étendu et varié, et de tests nombreux avec des sujets français, anglais, italiens, hongrois et japonais.

Mentally retarded individuals have been studied almost exclusively as clinical entities, not as persons immersed in the stream of social life. This has led not only to a lack of appreciation for the complexity of their lives and concerns, but also to an underestimation and incomplete understanding of their intellectual and linguistic skills. By exploring aspects of the ongoing linguistic and social lives of retarded individuals in various community contexts, this volume contributes to a growing body of literature which attempts to fill in this inadequate picture. In addition, the studies in this volume offer social scientists insights into the way that stigma such as that associated with intellectual and social incompetence affects social groups and influences conversational behavior and language use.

This study is intended to design measures for ethnographic description including speech acts in an etic instrumental approach, oriented toward an analysis of the functions of communicative events in relation to the ongoing stream of behavior. A revised taxonomy of speech acts is applied to an empirical corpus and is shown to produce a systematic set of behavioral measures which are potentially productive for cross-cultural comparison.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The goal of this monograph is a comprehensive analysis of understatements and other forms of non-direct speech (hedges) in modern English. It is based on a multi-level approach, including philosophical, cultural, and socio-psychological arguments. The main part consists of an investigation of the linguistic restrictions for understatements and hedges to be formed by means of the following grammatical categories: negation of predicates, gradation of predicates, modalization of affirmative sentences by means of parenthetical verbs, modal adverbs, modal verbs, and questions.

This monograph deals with the ‘aboutness’ of language. First, the sense in which language ‘is about’ or ‘reflects’ both reality and a mental picture of reality is turned into a cornerstone of a reflectionist or ‘Speculative Grammarian’ semantics and pragmatics. Second, the ‘Speculative Grammar’ idea is made concrete in a logico-linguistic account of the way language ‘is about’ the whole of reality as well as about certain fractions of it. Third, the reflectionist perspective is used for a universalist account of the way speech acts ‘are about’ their subjects, topics, and foci.