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The volume brings together twenty articles written by established linguists, language philosophers, sociologists and psychologists, sharing their academic interest in a broad and interdisciplinary field of linguistic pragmatics. The collection consists of four thematic parts: “Pragmatics and Cognition,” “The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface,” “Conversational and Text Analysis” and “Pragmatics, Social Research and Didactics.” It aims to contribute to the debate on the present-day status of pragmatics, by examining three fundamental issues. The first involves the question of the current explanatory power of pragmatics, namely, how successful is the existing apparatus of pragmatic...
The volume provides a thorough look into Marina Sbisà’s distinctive, Austinian-inspired approach to speech acts. By gathering original essays from a world-class lineup of philosophers of language, linguists, social epistemologists, action theorists, and communication scholars, the collection provides the first comprehensive critical treatment of Sbisa’s outstanding contribution to speech act theory.
Taboo words, Quentin Tarantino’s films, humorous dialogues from “Sex and the City”, witty advertising slogans, the Bible, Barack Obama’s speeches, or legal discourse are only a few of the topics addressed in the volume. The study of discourse is a diversified and fast-developing field of language research, embracing methodological proposals, discourse analyses, comparative research, translation studies and teaching perspectives. Within each of the approaches, theoretical frameworks and postulates abound. The list of research topics is inexhaustible, especially that each year brings new real-life material subject to analysis and issues to elaborate. Each chapter is devoted to a different topic and deploys a separate theoretical framework. The diversity of research data, methodologies and theoretical viewpoints guarantees the volume’s being a representative sample of multifarious developments in discourse approaches. The book should thus be an interesting resource for enterprising researchers and students of linguistics.
This volume is one of the first books to present a comprehensive view of lexical pragmatics, describing its origins, assumptions, scope, methodology and the various approaches to it, focusing specifically on the approach offered by relevance theory. In addition to theoretical considerations, the book discusses particular linguistic expressions and pragmatic phenomena, showing how the relevance-theoretic tools may be used to explore pragmatically motivated changes to lexically encoded meanings. The most recent developments are discussed and questions are asked to indicate directions for further research within this rapidly developing field.
This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic, evidential, hearsay and attitudinal sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German, it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Couched in relevance theory, the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition, and refines the no...
Numerous linguists of various orientations, translators and literary scholars share an interest in text. As students of language with very diverse interests and aims, they ask themselves, if only subconsciously, the following questions: What kind(s) of texts do we study? Why do we study them? What are we looking for? What do and don’t we find? What do we do with whatever we do find? What does it tell us about language, its speakers or the human mind? Generally, what is (a) text for me as a linguist and/or translator? In the present volume, the questions are brought onto the level of the conscious and addressed by several practitioners in the fields of linguistics and translation – contributions with a literary slant also have a linguistic orientation. Although ultimate answers to these questions may not exist, the ambition of the book is to help the reader appreciate the richness of text and the variety of texts as a treasure-trove for scholars representing multifarious approaches to language.
This book collects seventeen essays published between 1984 and 2020, in which Marina Sbisà develops her distinctive approach to speech acts and related pragmatic phenomena. Drawing inspiration from the work of J. L. Austin, the essays examine the categories of speech act theory and apply these categories in the context of natural discourse and conversation, with the aim of providing an accurate analysis of how speech can be action. Sbisà devotes particular attention to normative aspects of language and language use: speech acts reshape the normative context in which they occur by assigning or unassigning deontic properties to relevant parties. Emphasis is placed on the normative aspect of ...
Brings together a range of contributions on the linguistics of humour. This title elucidates the whole gamut of humorous forms and mechanisms, such as surrealist irony, incongruity in register humour, mechanisms of pun formation, as well as interpersonal functions of conversational humour
Language and Humour in the Media provides new insights into the interface between humour studies and media discourse analysis, connecting two areas of scholarly interest that have not been studied extensively before. The volume adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, concentrating on the various roles humour plays in print and audiovisual media, the forms it takes, the purposes it serves, the butts it targets, the implications it carries and the differences it may assume across cultures. The phenomena described range from conversational humour, canned jokes and wordplay to humour in translation and news satire. The individual studies draw their material for analysis from traditional print and broadcast media, such as magazines, sitcoms, films and spoof news, as well as electronic and internet-based media, such as emails, listserv messages, live blogs and online news. The volume will be of primary interest to a wide range of researchers in the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, intercultural studies, pragmatics, communication studies, and rhetoric but it will also appeal to scholars in the areas of media studies, psychology and crosscultural communication.
This book provides pioneering research on the rhetorical characteristics of Arab political discourse in Israel. It shows how such politicians, especially Arab Members of the Knesset (MKs), use a variety of lively rhetorical devices in order to convey their messages, to promote their ideological positions and to criticize the Israeli government’s policies, which discriminate against Israeli Arabs and the Palestinian people and deprives them of their rights. It argues that the rhetorical devices used in this discourse possess unique features which contribute to focusing and structuring the message, in order to highlight the plight of Israeli Arabs and the Palestinian people, to impact positively on the Israeli government's discriminatory policies towards them, to emotionally manipulate the government and to bring about a significant change in its attitude towards them.