Opening the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the foundations of pragmatics. It covers the central theories as well as concepts and topics characteristic of mainstream pragmatics, i.e. the most widespread approach to the ways and means of using language in authentic social contexts. The articles provide both state of the art reviews and critical evaluations of research in pragmatics. Topics are thus not only considered within their scholarly context but are also critically evaluated from current perspectives.
Opening the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the foundations of pragmatics. It covers the central theories as well as concepts and topics characteristic of mainstream pragmatics, i.e. the most widespread approach to the ways and means of using language in authentic social contexts. The articles provide both state of the art reviews and critical evaluations of research in pragmatics. Topics are thus not only considered within their scholarly context but are also critically evaluated from current perspectives.
The Handbook of Pragmatics is a collection of newly commissioned articles that provide an authoritative and accessible introduction to the field, including an overview of the foundations of pragmatic theory and a detailed examination of the rich and varied theoretical and empirical subdomains of pragmatics. Contains 32 newly commissioned articles that outline the central themes and challenges for current research in the field of linguistic pragmatics. Provides authoritative and accessible introduction to the field and a detailed examination of the varied theoretical and empirical subdomains of pragmatics. Includes extensive bibliography that serves as a research tool for those working in pragmatics and allied fields in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. Valuable resource for both students and professional researchers investigating the properties of meaning, reference, and context in natural language.
This volume brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world to present an authoritative, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current issues in pragmatics. Following an introduction by the editor, the volume is divided into five thematic parts. Chapters in Part I are concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories, while Part II deals with central topics in pragmatics, including implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, reference, and context. In Part III, the focus is on cognitively-oriented pragmatics, covering topics such as computational, experimental, and neuropragmatics. Part IV takes a look at socially and culturally-oriented pragmatics such as politeness/impoliteness studies, cross- and intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics. Finally, the chapters in Part V explore the interfaces of pragmatics with semantics, grammar, morphology, the lexicon, prosody, language change, and information structure. The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics will be an indispensable reference for scholars and students of pragmatics of all theoretical stripes. It will also be a valuable resource for linguists in other fields, including philosophy of language, semantics, morphosyntax, prosody, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, and for researchers and students in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computer science, anthropology, and sociology.
Understanding Pragmatics takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide an accessible introduction to linguistic pragmatics. This book discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, social and interpersonal contexts, as well as to culture specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this book: debates the core issues of pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, deixis, gesture, interaction strategies, ritual communication, phatic communion, linguistic relativity, ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, languages and social classes, and linguistic ideologies incorporates examples from a broad variety of different languages and cultures takes an innovative and transdisciplinary view of the field showing linguistic pragmatics has its predecessor in other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, ethology, ethnology, sociology and the political sciences. Written by an experienced teacher and researcher, this introductory textbook is essential reading for all students studying pragmatics.
Pragmatics of Fiction provides systematic orientation in the emerging field of studying pragmatics with/in fictional data. It provides an authoritative and accessible overview of this versatile new field in its methodological and theoretical richness. Giving center stage to fictional language allows scholars to review key concepts in sociolinguistics such as genre, style, voice, stance, dialogue, participation structure or features of orality and literariness. The contributors explore language as one of the creative tools to craft story worlds and characters by drawing on concepts such as regional, social and ethnic language variation, as well as multilingualism. Themes such as emotion, taboo language or impoliteness in fiction receive attention just as the challenges of translation and dubbing, the creation of past and future languages, the impact of fictional language on language change or the fuzzy boundaries of narratives. Each contribution, written by a leading specialist, gives a succinct, representative and up-to-date overview of research questions, theories, methods and recent developments in the field.
The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics is the first volume to offer a comprehensive overview of advances in Spanish Pragmatics, addressing different types of interaction and the variables, both social and linguistic, that can affect them. Written by a diverse set of experts in the field, the handbook unifies two major approaches to the study of pragmatics, the Anglo-American and European Continental traditions. Thirty-three chapters cover in detail both pragmatic foundations (e.g. speech act theory, implicature and relevance, deixis) and interfaces with other concepts, including: • Discourse • Variation; Culture and interculture • (Im)politeness; humor • Learning contexts and teaching • Technology This is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, and researchers of Spanish language and linguistics.
Open publication Opening the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the foundations of pragmatics. It covers the central theories and approaches as well as key concepts and topics characteristic of mainstream pragmatics, i.e. the traditional and most widespread approach to the ways and means of using language in authentic social contexts. The in-depth articles provide reliable orientational overviews useful to researchers, students, and teachers. They are both state of the art reviews of their topics and critical evaluations in the light of subsequent developments. Topics are thus considered within their scholarly context and also critically evaluated from current perspectives. The five major sections of the handbook are dedicated to the Conceptual and Theoretical Foundations (with a historiographic overview of the establishment and subsequent development of pragmatics), Key Topics (investigating indexicality, reference and other concepts that were the first to make their way from grammar into pragmatics and mainstream notions like speech acts, types of inference), the Place of Pragmatics in the Description of Discourse (delimiting pragmatics from grammar, semantics, prosody, literary criticism), and Methods and Tools.
This book presents both general issues in pragmatic theories and specific arguments for an inferential approach to pragmatics. At the present time, pragmatics is generally approached from the neo- and post-Gricean perspectives. These perspectives, which stem from philosophical theories of meaning, can be viewed as paradigms, that is, sets of concepts, procedures and results which structure scientific investigations. The main purpose of the book is to defend a new post-Gricean approach to the substantial lexicon and to the functional lexicon (tenses, connectives), and more specifically to explore lexical and non-lexical pragmatics. A precise approach to lexical and non-lexical pragmatic contents will be developed, with special emphasis on non-lexical temporal and causal information. A model for inferring temporal relations in discourse (the directional inferences model based on French data) is developed. This approach to temporal representations and inferences will be completed by a discussion on how causal inferences are triggered in discourse interpretation. The role of conceptual causal relations, as well as causal procedural information encoded in discourse connectives (mainly parce que ‘because’, donc ‘therefore’, et ‘and’), is empirically and theoretically supported. Pragmatic theory can be described as a very powerful interface system which gives access to lexical and functional information, and which contains rich pragmatic enrichment processes, for non-lexical information (quantifier, tenses, connectives) as well as for lexical information (event predicates). The book’s originality stems from its demonstration that pragmatic enrichment is structurally constrained, and occurs at the level of explicature.
The central task of future-oriented computational linguistics is the development of cognitive machines which humans can freely speak to in their natural language. This will involve the development of a functional theory of language, an objective method of verification, and a wide range of practical applications. Natural communication requires not only verbal processing, but also non-verbal perception and action. Therefore, the content of this book is organized as a theory of language for the construction of talking robots with a focus on the mechanics of natural language communication in both the listener and the speaker.
