1,721,055 research outputs found
Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy. part 1: From theory to practice.
No full textThis book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area.The book presents perspectives which, generally, make most of the Gricean idea of the centrality of a speaker's intention in attribution of meaning of utterances, whether one is interested in the level of sentence-like units or chunks od discourse. Papers by: K. Allan, B. Butler, D. Atlas, A. Capone, M: Carapezza, V. Cuccio, M. Devitt, D. Delfitto, G. Forbes, A. Giorgi, N. Norrick, N. Salmon, G. Sent, A. Voltolini, R. Warner
Introduction
No full textThis book illustrates how pragmatics transcends the boundaries of linguistics. This volume covers Gricean pragmatics as well as topics including: conversation and collective belief, the norm of assertion, speech acts, what a context is, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and implicature and explicature, pragmatics and epistemology, the pragmatics of belief, quotation, negation, implicature and argumentation theory, Habermas’ Universal Pragmatics, Dascal’s theory of the dialectical self, theories and theoretical discussions on the nature of pragmatics from a philosophical point of view.
Conversational implicatures are generally meaning augmentations on top of explicatures, whilst explicatures figure prominently in what is said. Discussions in this work reveal their characteristics and tensions within current theories relating to explicatures and implicatures. Authors show that explicatures and implicatures are calculable and not (directly) tied to conventional meaning
Not Only Slurs. A Pragma-rhetorical Approach to Verbal Abuse
No full textThe topic of this paper is the complex phenomenon of verbal abuse.The aim is to show the productivity of a pragma-rhetorical approach in addressing this issue. Indeed, integrating modern pragmatics with classical rhetoric, this approach does not isolate words from social practices and therefore is not exclusively focused on slurs (as is the case in the current debate on this topic in the field of the philosophy of language) but it concerns verbal abuse in general. I argue that this wider approach, especially thanks to its focus on the intertwining of linguistic and social components, is more adapted to shedding light on the role that words play in performing violence. Particularly, I take into account three (interrelated) controversial issues: (1). the question of whether intrinsically offensive words exist; (2). the problem concerning the existence of the so-called “neutral-counterpart” of a slurring word; (3). the reclamation or rehabilitation of a slur. Finally, I briefly focus on the case of the N-word as a paradigmatic example able to show the advantages of the pragma-rhetorical approach
Discourse, sentence grammar and the left periphery of the clause
Full text linkThe term left periphery refers to that area on the left of the subject, in the syntactic representation of a clause, where the relationships with the context are encoded. In this work I propose a syntactic analysis that goes beyond mere sentence grammar and integrates prosodic and discourse features as well. On the one hand, this move accounts for some observations previously not fully understood, such as the anomalous syntactic properties of Clitic Left Dislocation and Hanging Topic, their differences with respect to Focus and their similarities with parentheticals. On the other, it aims at providing a theory of grammar able to encode the relationships between sentence grammar, context and bigger units such as discourses
Polysemy and gestaltist computation. some notes on gestaltist compositionality
No full textThe paper is devoted to the concept of Gestaltist Compositionality. It is divided into two parts. The first part will introduce a minimal definition of «Gestaltist Compositionality». Moreover, it will prove that the computations implemented by this model of compositionality are sufficiently flexible to ensure the presence of several orders of semantic determination. The second part will be devoted to an investigation of the consequences of this result with particular reference to the identification of some versions of compositionality which relax the condition of semantic atomism without weakening the links of determination between understanding of the compounds and understanding of the components. These versions give priority to a particular interpretation of the “whole-parts” dependencies, on which are based the assertions of compositionality. In the conclusions, we we will suggest a possible theoretical extension of this last perspective with particular reference to language operations of interlocution
Abductive Inferences in pragmatic processes
No full textAbstract In pragmatic theories, the notion of inference plays a central role, together with the communicative act in which it is activated. Although some scholars, such as Levinson, Sperber and Wilson, propose detailed and accurate analyses of this notion, we will maintain that these analyses can be better systematized if seen through Peirce’s notion of abduction. We will try to maintain that the variety of inferential processes in play in a linguistic act is mostly of an abductive nature. Moreover, we will maintain that the typological tripartition of abductions discussed by Eco (1981) allows to account for a signi cant part of the mechanisms involved in the comprehension of an utterance, ranging from quasi-immediate and spontaneous levels of understanding to processes that draw on creative resources. In our proposal the vast majority of our linguistic activities implies the automatic retrieval of a habit of action (automatic abduction). In the other cases we need more onerous processes. We might need to identify, among a range of possibilities, the appropriate rule (habit of action/linguistic routine) to be applied to the contextual situation (abduction by selection) or, depending on the context and on our background knowledge, we might be forced to create ex novo a new linguistic routine (creative abduction). In our view, this typology of abductive inferences (Eco, 1981; see also Bonfantini and Proni, 1980) provides us with all the necessary tools to account for the different inferential demands entailed by different levels of the process of lan-guage comprehension. On the basis of this typology we can, develop a finne-grained model of linguistic inferences and, thus, simplify the terms of some problematic nodes debated within contextualist approaches
Language Game: calculus or Pragmatic act?
No full textThe authors have tried to make the potentiality inherent in the concept of the linguistic game evident by taking it back to its original context in the work of Wittgenstein. This paper aims to re-examine some features of Wittgenstein’s thought, considering in particular the notion of ‘language-game’. The authors believe that the language-game might play a role in overcoming once and for all the classic distinction between semantics and pragmatics. We deal with the exegetical discussion of the notion ‘language-game’ as it was interpreted in two different senses: as a synonym of calculus or as a minimal unit of linguistic activity that is directed to obtaining certain pragmatic effects in a societal context. The latter, broader interpretation, is characterized by three different features: topicality, broader normativity and multimodality. Starting from an interpretation of language game as a pragmatic act, the authors work out a possible parallel between language games and the notion of pragmeme as presented by Mey. Both language game and pragmeme refer to an extended notion of the linguistic symbol seen as a non- linear, multimodal concept that overlaps the mere verbal unit of expression and is now considered as a set of diverse expressive resources (such as gesture, tone of voice and so on). This comparison will also work for a problem common to both language-game and pragmeme, that is the need to set a boundary to these units of analysis, thanks to which they could be identified. The authors advance a possible solution to this problem, which is rooted in a rethinking of Wittgenstein’s notions. The proposal consists in focusing on the topic for which the language game is played. The topic is taken to be the organizing aspect of understanding of the game. The societal rules, the worldly knowledge, often taken to be the ground of understanding in our discourse are considered as merged together in a holistic unit called language game
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