Acquisition of Pragmatics
Myrto Grigoroglou and Anna Papafragou
To become competent communicators, children need to learn that what a speaker means often goes beyond the literal meaning of what the speaker says. The acquisition of pragmatics as a field ...
More
Clinical Linguistics
Louise Cummings
Clinical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that applies linguistic concepts and theories to the study of language disorders. As the name suggests, clinical linguistics is a ...
More
Cognitively Oriented Theories of Meaning
Peter Gärdenfors
There are two main theoretical traditions in semantics. One is based on realism, where meanings are described as relations between language and the world, often in terms of truth ...
More
Conversational Implicature
Nicholas Allott
Conversational implicatures (i) are implied by the speaker in making an utterance; (ii) are part of the content of the utterance, but (iii) do not contribute to direct (or explicit) ...
More
Conversation Analysis
Jack Sidnell
Conversation analysis is an approach to the study of social interaction and talk-in-interaction that, although rooted in the sociological study of everyday life, has exerted significant ...
More
Deixis and Pragmatics
William F. Hanks
Deictic expressions, like English ‘this, that, here, and there’ occur in all known human languages. They are typically used to individuate objects in the immediate context in which they ...
More
Evaluatives in Morphology
Nicola Grandi
Evaluative morphology is a field of linguistic studies that deals with the formation of diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives, and amelioratives. Actually, evaluative constructions cross ...
More
Experimental Pragmatics
Florian Schwarz
While both pragmatic theory and experimental investigations of language using psycholinguistic methods have been well-established subfields in the language sciences for a long time, the ...
More
Experimental Semiotics
Bruno Galantucci
Experimental Semiotics (ES) is a burgeoning new discipline aimed at investigating in the laboratory the development of novel forms of human communication. Conceptually connected to ...
More
Game Theory in Pragmatics: Evolution, Rationality, and Reasoning
Michael Franke
Game theory provides formal means of representing and explaining action choices in social decision situations where the choices of one participant depend on the choices of another. Game ...
More
Humor in Language
Salvatore Attardo
Interest in the linguistics of humor is widespread and dates since classical times. Several theoretical models have been proposed to describe and explain the function of humor in language. ...
More
The Language of the Economy and Business in the Romance Languages
Franz Rainer
The expression language of the economy and business refers to an extremely heterogeneous linguistic reality. For some, it denotes all text and talk produced by economic agents in the ...
More
Meanings of Constructions
Laura A. Michaelis
Meanings are assembled in various ways in a construction-based grammar, and this array can be represented as a continuum of idiomaticity, a gradient of lexical fixity. Constructional ...
More
Noun-Modifying Clause Construction in Japanese
Yoshiko Matsumoto
The noun-modifying clause construction (NMCC) in Japanese is a complex noun phrase in which a prenominal clause is dependent on the head noun. Naturally occurring instances of the ...
More
Politeness in Pragmatics
Dániel Z. Kádár
Politeness comprises linguistic and non-linguistic behavior through which people indicate that they take others’ feelings of how they should be treated into account. Politeness comes into ...
More
Pragmatics and Intonation
Brady Clark
Intonation impacts pragmatic meaning. A range of empirical evidence shows that the pragmatic functions of intonation are specifiable. The dimensions of meaning impacted by intonation ...
More
Pragmatics and Language Evolution
Marieke Woensdregt and Kenny Smith
Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that deals with language use in context. It looks at the meaning linguistic utterances can have beyond their literal meaning (implicature), and also ...
More
Pragmatics of Focus
Jon Scott Stevens
Generally speaking, ‘focus’ refers to the portion of an utterance which is especially informative or important within the context, and which is marked as such via some linguistic means. It ...
More
Semantic Change
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Traditional approaches to semantic change typically focus on outcomes of meaning change and list types of change such as metaphoric and metonymic extension, broadening and narrowing, and ...
More