This chapter discusses a language component that has not received sufficient research attention, that is, pragmatics. The chapter answers socially oriented questions such as How can I make this request politely? and What’s the best way to address this person? The chapter explains how pragmatics knowledge helps learners be aware of the requirements of the larger social context surrounding the language, and understand which grammatical and lexical forms are appropriate and helpful in different social contexts. Different pragmatic knowledge is discussed, that is, sociopragmatics (i.e., knowledge about the context) and pragmalinguistics (i.e., knowledge about specific linguistic forms). In addition, the chapter discusses speech acts, such as requests and compliments, which are used to achieve goals in our daily life by using language appropriately and effectively. The chapter then explains how pragmatics is embedded in our society by discussing illocutionary force and intercultural communicative competence. Finally, the chapter explores different ways of teaching pragmatics.

This chapter overviews broad issues related to language acquisition research and answers fundamental questions related to first language acquisition, such as What is language? and How do children learn their first language? It begins by introducing some components of language, such as grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, pragmatics, and discourse. It also discusses language varieties (e.g., American English vs. Indian English) and explains their legitimacy. Then, the chapter addresses language learning during the first years of a child’s life. It also discusses bilingualism, especially of those who start learning multiple languages in their early years (simultaneous bilingualism). In order to understand second language acquisition for the rest of the textbook, the chapter focuses on a question: How are children able to learn a language without formal instruction? In order to answer this question, multiple language acquisition theories will be discussed.

Linguistic pragmatics is one of the fastest growing fields in contemporary theoretical linguistics. It grew from the influential work of philosophers such as Grice, Austin, Stalnaker, Lewis, and others on context and communicative inferences. It engages directly with general rationality, theory of mind, and systems of intention. One of the major debates in pragmatics has been where to precisely draw the line between semantic phenomena and pragmatic phenomena. In this chapter, three classical and influential ideas on the nature of pragmatics, courtesy of Grice (1975), Stalnaker (1978), and Lewis (1979), are discussed. This discussion leads to three further general philosophical frameworks for separating semantic from pragmatic processes and analyses that have roots in the aforementioned triumvirate: (P1) the indexical conception, (P2) the cognitivist conception, and (P3) social-inferential conception. Each option offers a different demarcation. Finally, three linguistic theories of pragmatics are selected as candidate representations of the contemporary state of the art: (L1) optimality-theoretic pragmatics, (L2) game-theoretic pragmatics, and (L3) Bayesian pragmatics. It’s shown that each of these prominent frameworks exploit the philosophical demarcations (P1–P3) presented to different degrees.

This chapter offers a toolbox of Methods for Gesture Analysis (MGA). Developed in the context of research on emerging protolinguistic structures in cospeech gestures, the present version of MGA differs from earlier publications (Bressem, Ladewig, Müller 2013; Bressem 2013) in offering sets of tools for gesture analysis that adapt flexibly to different research questions. Essential starting points for MGA are an understanding of hand gestures as temporal forms embedded in a dynamically unfolding context and an understanding of context that itself varies with the adopted framework. The baseline for any chosen tool is a microanalysis that entails some account of the form of the gesture (as temporal form), i.e. ‘form analysis’,and some analysis of how a gesture, a sequence of gestures, a multimodal sequence is placed in a given temporally unfolding context-of-use, i.e. context-analysis. Macroanalyses of gesture dynamics are briefly introduced. MGA offers a toolbox with a flexible set of tools that encourages critical reflection on the insight that can be gained from analyzing gestures in multimodal communication and interaction.

The chapter considers gesture studies in relation to corpus linguistic work. The focus is on the Multimedia Russian Corpus (MURCO), part of the Russian National Corpus. The chapter includes a brief biography of the creator of this corpus, Elena Grishina. The compilation of the corpus out of a set of Russian classic feature films and recorded lectures is described as well as the methods of annotating it in detail. The gesture coding is not limited to manual/hand gestures, but also includes head gestures and use of eye gaze. The chapter considers the findings from the corpus, and reported in Grishina’s posthumously published volume on Russian gestures from a linguistic point of view. The categories include pointing gestures, representational gestures, auxiliary (discourse-structuring) gestures, and several cross-cutting categories, including gestures in relation to pragmatics and to grammatical categories, like verbal aspect. Additional consideration is given to other video corpora in English (and other languages) which are being used for gesture research, namely the UCLA NewsScape library being managed by the Red Hen Lab and the Television Archive.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the present book, by outlining its objectives, providing a working definition for ritual, and introducting the concept of the ritual perspective. The chappter also introduces the conventions used in this book and overviews its contents.

In this chapter the focus moves beyond Pāṇini’s grammar to address a topic of major concern within the broader Indian tradition: semantics. While some observations regarding semantics can be drawn from Pāṇini, for the most part semantics was treated as a separate field of inquiry within the Indian tradition until the early modern period. This chapter provides introductions to the traditions of semantic analysis in ancient India and the modern West, and a comparison of their approaches to one issue of central concern in semantic theory: compositionality.

We conclude our book with brief summaries of our responses to the challenges we outlined in Chapter 2. We argue that the account we offer here shows promise and that the evidence is clear that, of all theories of utterance interpretation, relevance theory is uniquely positioned to accommodate emotion and affect.

This chapter introduces the two essential challenges in accommodating emotional communication within a theory of utterance interpretation: the challenge of description versus expression and the challenge of propositions and ineffability. We sketch the prehistory of philosophical thought and show how the sidelining of emotional communication in modern linguistic pragmatics is very much a consequence of the propositional foundations on which modern theories of semantics and pragmatics are built. Consequently, such theories have problems accounting for expression and ineffability. Two further challenges are also articulated. The first of these concerns the nature of the term pragmatics, and this chapter concludes with some background on what we mean by pragmatics in this book. The second concerns the nature of emotion itself: what is emotion? We turn to that challenge in the next chapter.

The relationship between context and prosody is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive ones in language. At the same time, it is one of the most difficult to describe because it is based on acoustic cues that only need milliseconds to create an image in our brain. However, speakers of a language can generally understand their interlocutors’ emotional and cognitive status through their prosodic realization. Prosodic pragmatics is the branch of pragmatics that attempts to identify the intentionality of the speaker’s meaning in a real context based on the analysis of the suprasegmental aspects of speech production. If prosody studies how an utterance is pronounced in unison with the perceptual features of pitch, length, and loudness, then prosodic pragmatics studies the acoustic and cognitive contextual parameters in conversation. The chapter will show the relationship between prosody, information, and context in communication. Starting from the essential acoustic parameters of speech, it will revise the most influential theories of intonation through the prosodic pragmatics lens to understand the cognitive adaptation of a message in a specific context.

The chapter gives a state-of- the-art overview of the themes and issues in corpus pragmatics and describes new directions in the field represented by empirical corpus studies where synchronic pragmatic variation and change are analyzed in a broader social and cultural perspective. The interaction between corpora and pragmatics implies both challenges and possibilities. Corpora are ideal for studying the relationship between form and function.This is illustrated by studies using corpora for the purpose of investigating the functions of pragmatic markers, interjections, address forms, and pauses. Nowadays there is also a great deal of interest in finding strategies, making it possible to study the linguistic realisations of functions such as speech acts, hedging, and politeness. Pragmatic annotation systems are expected to be interesting from this perspective. New developments in corpus pragmatics are characterized by alliances between corpus pragmatics and other fields such as variational pragmatics and sociopragmatics with a shared interest in the influence of context on language. Pragmatic markers are, for example, now studied on the basis of corpora with respect to macro-sociolinguistic variables such as region, genre, and the age, gender, and social class of the speakers. Attention is also given to a new discipline of historical corpus pragmatics emerging at the intersection between historical linguistics, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics.

Language is paradigmatically a human activity, largely consisting of speakers saying things in order to inform, warn, misinform, threat, sell, and so on. Language is important because it is a system for doing things. This suggests that the philosophy of action should be a part – a very important part – of the philosophy of language. To a certain extent it is. And, in consequence, the focus has moved from sentences to utterances. It has moved, but not entirely. Not because philosophers and logicians are unaware of utterances, but because the working assumption is that semantics should focus on what all utterances of an expression or sentence have in common, due to meaning, and not on how they differ, due to the particular facts of the utterance. In this chapter we first consider how this assumption has been challenged and express some reservations about alternatives. Then we turn to our own theory, the reflexive-referential theory, which takes utterances as basic to the semantics and pragmatics of natural language.