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Indirectness has been a key concept in pragmatic research for over four decades, however the notion as a technical term does not have an agreed-upon definition and remains vague and ambiguous. In this collection, indirectness is examined as a way of communicating meaning that is inferred from textual, contextual and intertextual meaning units. Emphasis is placed on the way in which indirectness serves the representation of diverse voices in the text, and this is examined through three main prisms: (1) the inferential view focuses on textual and contextual cues from which pragmatic indirect meanings might be inferred; (2) the dialogic-intertextual view focuses on dialogic and intertextual cues according to which different voices (social, ideological, literary etc.) are identified in the text; and (3) the functional view focuses on the pragmatic-rhetorical functions fulfilled by indirectness of both kinds.
This book proposes a socio-pragmatic exploration of the discursive practices used to construe and dynamically negotiate positions in news interviews. It starts with a discursive interpretation of ‘positioning’, ‘role’ and ‘challenge’, puts forward the relevance of a distinction between social and interactional roles, demonstrates how challenges bring to the fore the relevant roles and role-components of the participants, and shows that in news interviews speakers constantly position and re-position themselves and each other through discourse.The discussion draws on an empirical fine-grained analysis of a 24-hour corpus of news interviews on Israeli television and a corpus of medi...
Incorporating perspectives from religious studies, humor studies, cultural and film studies, and theology, as well as original data from textual analysis and the voices of religious comedians, this book critically analyses the experiences of believers who appreciate that their faith is not necessarily a barrier to their laughter. It is often thought that religion and humor are incompatible, but Religious Humor in Evangelical Christian and Mormon Culture shows that humor is not only a popular means of entertainment, but also a way in which an individual or community expresses their identity and values. Elisha McIntyre argues that believers embrace their sense of humor, actively producing and ...
This book provides a first thorough analysis of internet humour from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, covering a wide range of discourses that are pervasive online and focusing especially on messaging interactions, social networking sites and memes. Its chapters describe the inferential strategies implemented to turn online coded discourses into meaningful interpretations, which in turn can be devised and manipulated for the sake of humour. Furthermore, and apart from the typical object of pragmatic research (humorous discourses), the book emphasises the importance of the interfaces’ design and of the qualities of the users engaged in humorous interactions (called contextual constraints)...
The Manual section of the Handbook of Pragmatics, produced under the auspices of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), is a collection of articles describing traditions, methods, and notational systems relevant to the field of linguistic pragmatics; the main body of the Handbook contains all topical articles. The first edition of the Manual was published in 1995. This second edition includes a large number of new traditions and methods articles from the 24 annual installments of the Handbook that have been published so far. It also includes revised versions of some of the entries in the first edition. In addition, a cumulative index provides cross-references to related topical ent...
Linguistic Theories of Humor appeared thirty years ago. It attracted a lot of attention and ended up being one of the most quoted books in the linguistics of humor. Partly due to its broad coverage which includes both theoretical and socio-pragmatic aspects and partly due to the depth of its bibliography it remained an indispensable reference in many areas, despite the growth of the field. The original fully corrected text is supplemented by a long essay, in which the author revisits the topics of the book to discuss how three decades have shifted the perspective of the field.
Meaning in Translation: Illusion of Precision represents a collection of papers on fundamental and applied research on a wide range of linguistic topics, including terminology standardisation and harmonisation, the pragmatic, semantic and grammatical aspects of meaning in translation, and the translation of sacred, legal, poetic, promotional and scientific and technical texts. This volume offers a platform where scholars from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds, studying a variety of subjects, share their opinions on matters of utmost importance in the field of translation theory and practice. This book will appeal to researchers working within the various fields of linguistics, language planners, terminologists, practicing translators, and students at all levels, as well as anybody interested in the dynamic development of a language.
This book offers fresh perspectives on untruthfulness entailed in various forms of irony, deception and humour, which have so far constituted independent foci of linguistic and philosophical investigation. These three distinct (albeit sometimes co-occurring) notions are brought together within a neo-Gricean framework and consistently discussed as representing overt or covert untruthfulness. The postulates that represent the interface between language philosophy and pragmatics are illustrated with scripted interactions culled from the series House, which help appreciate the complexities of the three concepts at hand. Apart from affording new insights into the nature of irony, deception and humour, this book critically examines previous literature on these notions, as well as relevant aspects of Grice's philosophy of language. Giving a state-of-the-art picture of untruthfulness, this publication will be of interest to both experienced and inexperienced researchers studying Grice’s philosophy, irony, deception and/or humour.
This book offers a cognitive-pragmatic, and specifically relevance-theoretic, analysis of different types of humorous discourse, together with the inferential strategies that are at work in the processing of such discourses. The book also provides a cognitive pragmatics description of how addressees obtain humorous effects. Although the inferences at work in the processing of normal, non-humorous discourses are the same as those employed in the interpretation of humour, in the latter case these strategies (and also the accessibility of contextual information) are predicted and manipulated by the speaker (or writer) for the sake of generating humorous effects. The book covers aspects of research on humour such as the incongruity-resolution pattern, jokes and stand-up comedy performances. It also offers an explanation of why ironies are sometimes labelled as humorous, and proposes a model for the translation of humorous discourses, an analysis of humour in multimodal discourses such as cartoons and advertisements, and a brief exploration of possible tendencies in relevance-theoretic research on conversational humour.
With the “discursive turn” has come a distrust – a complete rejection by some – of theories that seek deeper reasons for surface phenomena. Rong Chen argues that this distrust, with its accompanying overemphasis on specificity and fluidity of linguistic meaning and social values, is unwarranted and unhelpful. Drawing on insights from social theories and various strands of pragmatics, he proposes a motivation model of pragmatics (MMP), contending that language use can be adequately, coherently, and elegantly studied via the motivation behind it in its varied and dynamic contexts. The model, with its well-laid out components, is then applied to (im)politeness research, cross-cultural p...