Pragmatics & Beyond
From 1980–1986 texts in Pragmatics & Beyond were published at irregular intervals. The series then evolved into <a href="0922842x">Pragmatics & Beyond New Series</a>.
51 - 55 of 55 results
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Under the Tumtum Tree
More LessAny 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.
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Understatements and Hedges in English
More LessThe 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.
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‘Well’ in Dialogue Games
More LessThis 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).
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What Do We Talk About When We Talk?
More LessThis 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.
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You Know
More LessThe 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.
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