Pragmatics and the Flexibility of Word Meaning PDF Download

Author: Eniko Nemeth
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 0585474265
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Recently, the investigation of word meaning in utterances has connected two different fields: lexical semantics and pragmatics. A new linguistic discipline, namely lexical pragmatics, is emerging. The eleven papers of the present book constitute a unit in the sense that they have a common aim: to explore the interaction between lexical semantics and pragmatics. The authors examine phenomena such as productive sense extension, regular polysemy, multifunctionality, implicit arguments and predicates, and non-typical anaphoric pronouns, on the basis of linguistic data, for instance, from English, Norwegian, Russian, and Hungarian, as well as using a great variety of frameworks (optimality framework, two-level semantics, the theory of generative lexicon, cognitive grammar, Gricean theory, and relevance theory.

Author: Enikő Németh T.
Publisher: Brill Academic Pub
ISBN: 9780080439716
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Recently, the investigation of word meaning in utterances has connected two different fields: lexical semantics and pragmatics. A new linguistic discipline, namely lexical pragmatics, is emerging. This volume explores the interaction between lexical semantics and pragmatics.

Author: Doris L. Payne
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902728590X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
For some time the assumption has been widely held that for a majority of the world's languages, one can identify a “basic” order of subject and object relative to the verb, and that when combined with other facts of the language, the “basic” order constitutes a useful way of typologizing languages. New debate has arisen over varying definitions of “basic”, with investigators encountering languages where branding a particular order of grammatical relations as basic yielded no particular insightfulness. This work asserts that explanatory factors behind word order variation go beyond the syntactic and are to be found in studies of how the mind grammaticizes forms, processes information, and speech act theory considerations of speakers' attempts to get their hearers to build one, rather than another, mental representation of incoming information. Thus three domains must be distinguished in understanding order variation: syntactic, cognitive and pragmatic. The works in this volume explore various aspects of this assertion.

Author: Katarzyna Jaszczolt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199602468
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This work builds on Kasia Jaszczolt's earlier work on Default Semantics. It draws on data from a variety of languages to show that meaning should be understood as a merger of information coming from different sources and via a variety of interacting processes.

Author: Kasia M. Jaszczolt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108606938
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Semantics and pragmatics – the study of meaning, and meaning in context, respectively – are two fundamental areas of linguistics, and as such are crucial to our understanding of how meaning is created. However, their theoretical ideas are often introduced without making clear connections between views, theories, and problems. This pioneering volume is both a textbook and a research guide, taking the reader on a journey through language and ultimately enabling them to think about meaning as linguists and philosophers would. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, it introduces semantics, pragmatics, and the philosophy of language, showing how all three fields can address the 'big questions' that run through the study of meaning. It covers key theories and approaches, while also enabling increasingly more sophisticated questions about the interconnected aspects of meaning, with the end goal of preparing the reader to make their own, original contributions to ideas about meaning.

Author: Klaus von Heusinger
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 008046260X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
The Current Research in the Semantic / Pragmatics Interface series has carved out a new and vibrant area of research. This volume offers the reader a state-of-the-art record of new and established research in this area. Von Heusinger and Turner's careful selection of topics and contributors ensures that each chapter integrates semantic and pragmatic facts into a single theory, that each finds an adequate division of theoretical labour and that each attempts to design and corroborate an elegant account of meaning and use that would be compatible with other aspects of human behaviour. Importantly, each paper in the volume focuses on linguistic detail, not merely abstract discussions of a theoretical nature. Thus each paper makes extensive reference to the semantic and pragmatic facts of English and also other languages. This reference gives each of the proposed analyses a more adequate empirical edge and a sharper theoretical focus. This book is a must for all scholars and students interested in the new and vibrant discipline of semantics-pragmatics and to anyone who is fascinated by the prospect of working beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries of linguistics and the philosophy of language. The chapters in this volume originate from a workshop at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, held at Michigan State University.

Author: Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080552935
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This book elucidates the nature of the semantics / pragmatics distinction in both synchrony and diachrony and proposes a definition of semantics and pragmatics that is orthogonal to the question of truth-conditionality. A corollary aim of the study is to propose an account of how and why erstwhile pragmatically-determined elements of meaning may, in the course of time, become semanticized.

Author: Ken Turner
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 0857249096
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
A collection of invited papers that intends to explore the nature of the semantics/pragmatics interface by examining the extent to which the analysis of certain expressions or constructions can be pragmaticised. It contains papers that address the topic of 'making pragmatics semantic'.

Author: Guangwu Feng
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1849509344
Category : Chinese language
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Conventional implicature is itself a highly controversial term, understood very differently by various brands of contemporary pragmatic theory. This book sets out to advance a Gricean theoretical framework of conventional implicature. It also intends to offer an analysis of pragmatic markers in Chinese.

Author: Tobias Ålöw
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004686959
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Contrary to the prevailing view that βασιλεία is a verbal noun signifying God’s rule, this study demonstrates how the term’s pragmatic range in Matthew’s Gospel covers both five distinct types of use and their integration into a coherent concept. The study, which is the first to examine all occurrences of βασιλεία in the First Gospel from the perspective of semantic monosemy, extends and enhances our appreciation of the Matthean Zentralbegriff, and engenders a more accurate apprehension of the nature and aims of the Matthean narrative and the theological views it conveys.