Pragmemes And Theories Of Language Use

This volume offers recent developments in pragmatics and adjacent territories of investigation, including important new concepts such as the pragmatic act and the pragmeme, and combines developments in neighboring disciplines in an integrative holistic pragmatic approach. The young science of pragmatics has, from its inception, differentiated itself from neighboring fields in the humanities, especially the disciplines dealing with language and those focusing on the social and anthropological aspects of human behavior, by focusing on the language user in his or her societal environment.This collection of papers continues that emphasis on language use, and pragmatic acts in their context. The editors and contributors share a perspective that essentially considers language as a system for communication and wants to look at language from a societal perspective, and accept the view that acts of interpretation are essentially embedded in culture. In an interdisciplinary approach, some authors explore connections with social theory, in particular sociology or socio-linguistics, some offer a political stance (critical discourse analysis), others explore connections with philosophy and philosophy of language, and several papers address problems in theoretical pragmatics.

This volume brings together a wide array of papers which explore, among other things, to what extent languages and cultures are variable with respect to the interactions around the event of death. Motivated by J. L. Mey’s idea of the pragmeme, a situated speech act, the volume has both theoretical and practical implications for scholars working in different fields of enquiry. As the papers in this volume reveal, despite the terminological differences between various disciplines, the interactions around the event of death serve to provide solace, not only to the dying, but also to the family and friends of the deceased, thus helping them to “accommodate” to the new state of affairs.

Based on Chinese and English online data, this book discusses elasticity in health communication from a cross-cultural perspective.

The twenty-three articles in this volume are based on papers and posters presented at the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium (OLINCO) at Palacký University in the Czech Republic in June 7-9, 2018. This conference welcomed papers that combined analyses of language structure with generalizations about language use. The thematic sections are as follows: Part I. Micro-syntax: The Structure and Interpretation of Verb Phrases; Part II. Micro-syntax: Word-Internal Morphosyntax in Nominal Projections; Part III. Macro-syntax: Structure and Interpretation of Discourse Markers and Projections; Part IV: Empirical Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies. Články v tomto sborníku vycházejí z příspěvků prezentovaných na konferenci Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium (OLINCO), pořádané Univerzitou Palackého v Olomouci ve dnech 7. 6. - 9. 6. 2018. Jako téma byl zvolen "Jazyk jako prostředek a lingvistická struktura", což mělo umožnit prezentaci referátů ze všech současných lingvistických disciplín, pokud se zabývají vědeckým (empirickým, formálním) popisem jazykového systému. Články jsou rozděleny do následujících tematických sekcí: Part I. Micro-syntax: The Structure and Interpretation of Verb Phrases; Part II. Micro-syntax: Word-Internal Morphosyntax in Nominal Projections; Part III. Macro-syntax: Structure and Interpretation of Discourse Markers and Projections; Part IV: Empirical Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies.

Internet-mediated communication is pervasive nowadays, in an age in which many people shy away from physical settings and often rely, instead, on social media and messaging apps for their everyday communicative needs. Since pragmatics deals with communication in context and how more gets communicated than is said (or typed), applications of this linguistic perspective to internet communication, under the umbrella label of internet pragmatics, are not only welcome, but necessary. The volume covers straightforward applications of pragmatic phenomena to internet interactions, as happens with speech acts and contextualization, and internet-specific kinds of communication such as the one taking place on WhatsApp, WeChat and Twitter. This collection also addresses the role of emoticons and emoji in typed-text dialogues and the importance of “physical place” in internet interactions (exhibiting an interplay of online-offline environments), as is the case in the role of place in locative media and in broader place-related communication, as in migration.

Exploring Discourse Practices in Romanian is a glimpse into Romanians’ style of interaction, which has developed eclectically at the crossroads of Eastern and Western cultures. It is oriented towards modern literacy while being deeply rooted in a long oral tradition, and paradoxically displays both attachment to local specifics and commitment to mimetic speech and act(ion)s imported from various cultural spaces. The book presents a characterisation of the Romanian cultural space in terms of various discourse practices, drawing on recent challenging theoretical proposals, and concluding with in-depth corpus-based analyses. The chapters focus on five main topics (the co-construction of discursive identities, discursive polyphony, textualisation of attitudes and emotions, conceptual metaphors, and grammaticalisation of context) explored in various discourse genres (political discourse, media discourse, professional discourse, face-to-face conversation, literature of memoires, and the usage of Romanian by non-natives). The theoretical framework utilised here is discourse analysis, defined in a broad sense (with regards to discourse patterns, pragmatic phenomena, conversation analysis, and rhetoric). The volume, having both a theoretical and an applied dimension, will appeal to an international readership, including researchers interested in current developments of pragmatics and discourse analysis.

This volume provides insight into linguistic pragmatics from the perspective of linguists who have been influenced by philosophy. Theory of Mind and perspectives on point of view are presented along with other topics including: semantics vs. semiotics, clinical pragmatics, explicatures, cancellability of explicatures, interactive language use, reference, common ground, presupposition, definiteness, logophoricity and point of view in connection with pragmatic inference, pragmemes and language games, pragmatics and artificial languages, the mechanism of the form/content correlation from a pragmatic point of view, amongst other issues relating to language use. Relevance Theory is introduced as an important framework, allowing readers to familiarize themselves with technical details and linguistic terminology. This book follows on from the first volume: both contain the work of world renowned experts who discuss theories relevant to pragmatics. Here, the relationship between semantics and pragmatics is explored: conversational explicatures are a way to bridge the gap in semantics between underdetermined logical forms and full propositional content. These volumes are written in an accessible way and work well both as a stimulus to further research and as a guide to less experienced researchers and students who would like to know more about this vast, complex, and difficult field of inquiry.

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use. The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995. Also available as Online Resource: benjamins.com/online/hop/