Books in the Mouton Series in Pragmatics [MSP] series

The history of linguistics has witnessed the development of some disciplines that were conceived apart but benefited from common intuitions. This volume is an homage to the symbiosis of Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics.

In pragmatics, it is widely accepted that the overall meaning of an utterance performed as part of a verbal interchange is underdetermined by the meaning of the sentence uttered. Speaker meaning has to be considered as a complex utterance level combining semantic knowledge and context-driven, pragmatic information as an integrated whole.

In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions such as: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second/foreign language.

Brings together original papers by linguists and philosophers on the role of context and perspective in language and thought. This title deals with the contextualism/relativism debate, which has loomed large in philosophical discussions. It surveys the field and maps out the relevant issues and positions.

A collection of essays by the Linguistic Politeness Research Group that presents the group's research, discussions, seminars and conferences on the subject of linguistic politeness. It brings together advanced essays reflecting a range of forms of analysis of politeness and impoliteness.

Studies on the nature of quotation have become a topic of growing interest among linguists and philosophers of language. This volume is a collection of original papers by leading researchers in the field on such issues and related linguistic and philosophical aspects of quotations.

A collection of papers that provides complex dual purpose analyses at the interface of semantics and pragmatics. Based on several theories and various types of data taken from a number of languages, it discusses object theoretical issues of referentiality, scalar implicatures, implicit arguments, grammaticalization, and more.

Salience and Defaults in Utterance Processing

Pragmatic theories emphasize the importance of intention, cooperation, mutual knowledge, and relevance in executing communicative acts. This book presents the research that discusses some of the major issues in pragmatics from the perspectives, and directs attention to aspects of fundamental tenets that have been investigated to a limited extent.

This theoretically motivated approach to pragmatics (vs. semantics) produces a radically new view of culture and its role vis-a-vis society. Understanding what words mean in use requires an open-ended recourse to pragmatic cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge makes up a productive conceptual system. Members of a cultural community share the system but not all of the system's content, making culture a system of parallel distributed cognition. This book presents such a system, and then elaborates a version of "e;cultural models"e; that relates actions to goals, values, emotional content, and context, and that allows both systematic generative capacity and systematic variation across cultural and subcultural groups. Such models are offered as the basic units of cultural action. Culture thus conceived is shown as a tool that people use rather than as something deeply internalized in their psyches.

Addresses issues that emerged as result of research in pragmatics proper and neighboring fields such as cognitive psychology, philosophy, bilingualism and communication. This book discusses theoretical and empirical work in these paradigms which directed attention to questions that warrant reexamination and revision of some tenets of the field.

Jonathan Berg argues for the Theory of Direct Belief, which treats having a belief about an individual as an unmediated relation between the believer and the individual the belief is about. After a critical review of alternative positions, Berg uses Grice's theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution failure in belief ascriptions and goes on to defend this view against objections, including those based on an unwarranted "e;Inner Speech"e; Picture of Thought. The work serves as a case study in pragmatic explanation, dealing also with methodological issues about context-sensitivity in language and the relation between semantics and pragmatics.

In legal interpretation, where does meaning come from? Law is made from language, yet law, unlike other language-related disciplines, has not so far experienced its "pragmatic turn" towards inference and the construction of meaning. This book investigates to what extent a pragmatically based view of l linguistic and legal interpretation can lead to new theoretical views for law and, in addition, to practical consequences in legal decision-making.With its traditional emphasis on ?the letter of the law? and the immutable stability of a text as legal foundation, law has been slow to take the pragmatic perspective: namely, the language-user?'s experience and activity in making meaning. More accustomed to literal than to pragmatic notions of meaning, that is, ?in? the text rather than constructed by speakers and hearers ¿ the disciplines of law may be culturally resistant to the pragmatic turn. By bringing together the different but complementary perspectives of pragmaticians and lawyers, this book addresses the issue of to what extent legal meaning can be productively analysed as deriving from resources beyond the text, ¿ beyond the letter of the law.This collection re-visits the feasibility of the notion of literal meaning for legal interpretation and, at the same time, the feasibility of pragmatic meaning for law. Can explications of pragmatic meaning support court actions in the same way concepts of literal meaning have traditionally supported statutory interpretations and court judgements? What are the consequences of a user-based view of language for the law, in both its practices of interpretation and its definition of itself as a field? Readers will find in this collection means of approaching such questions, and promising routes for inquiry into the genre- and field-specific characteristics of inference in law.In many respects, the problem of literal vs. pragmatic¿ meaning confined to the text vs. reaching beyond it ¿ will appear to parallel the dichotomy in law between textualism and intentionalism. There are indeed illuminating connections between the pair of linguistic terms and the more publicly controversial legal ones. But the parallel is not exact, and the linguistic dichotomy is in any case anterior to the legal one. Even as linguistic-pragmatic investigation may serve legal domains, the legal questions themselves point back to central conditions of all linguistic meaning.

Cognitive pragmatics is a mature field of research, characterized by robust theories and a growing amount of experimental work. In particular, Relevance Theory has provided a rich framework for research in the field. However, this theory makes a number of assumptions that are rooted in a modular view of cognition. This book provides a detailed analysis of such assumptions, arguing for an alternative model which has, however, some support in ideas explored by relevance theorists. First of all, inferences are explained in terms of associative pattern completion within associative networks, based on the schematic organization of memory. This explanation is shown to apply to a number of cognitive domains besides pragmatics, including mindreading. Moreover, such a view is compatible with a general understanding of the neurocomputational machinery of our cortex, suggesting a general argument to the effect that modularity in its standard version cannot be right. Second, the book argues for a crucial role of conscious attention in pragmatics as well as in most cognitive processes. In the end, what is proposed is not only a revision of Relevance Theory but also a fresh analysis of reasoning, which vindicates some Gricean intuitions.

This volume brings together two highly researched but also highly controversial concepts, those of politeness and implicature. A theory of implicature as social action and im/politeness as social practice is developed that opens up new ways of examining the relationship between them. It constitutes a fresh look at the issues involved that redresses the current imbalance between social and pragmatic accounts of im/politeness.