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.

Emblematic gestures (or emblems) have several denominations in the literature (for instance autonomous, quotable, semiotic, folkloric or symbolic gestures). Emblems are culture-bound gestures; they differ interculturally and intraculturally, both among different cultural and linguistic areas, and among individuals and social groups within the same culture. These gestures are easily translated into verbal language, they are quotable; they are equivalent to utterances, and in many cases, they have names. Typical emblems are used – alongside or without words – for greetings, insults or mockery, to indicate places or people (deictics), to refer to the state of a person (to be drunk, to be asleep …), to give interpersonal orders or to represent actions (to eat, to drink, etc.). Many emblems show a clear perlocutionary component (to offer, to threaten, to promise or to swear …). The tradition in the study of emblems has always emphasized their autonomy from speech (they are interpretable with a high level of context independence). Moreover, emblematic capacity can be regarded as associated with illocutionary force, which is one of the most characteristic features of these units.

Chapter 6 introduces the concepts relevant to speech act theory and discusses difficulties in the study of speech acts, both limitations of the form-to-function approach and obstacles to the function-to-form approach; it then reviews the work-arounds suggested in the literature, including the use of illocutionary-force-indicative devices, of typical syntactic patterns for different speech acts, and of metacommunicative labels. After looking at several studies of performative verbs, the chapter then reviews historical studies of directive, commissive, and expressive speech acts in English. Directives in earlier English would seem to be more direct than we find today, but this can be attributed to the more fixed social structure, not to less politeness. Apologies, curses, greetings, and leave-takings represent expressives that have undergone change in the history of English, in respect to both their formal expression and their functional profile, that is, the very nature of the speech act itself. For example, promises of medieval times, which did not depend upon the sincerity condition of the speaker but were nevertheless “binding,” now rest fundamentally upon this condition.

Given the plurality of uses to which the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘ritual’ are put, we focus on only one tradition of thought about their relationship, namely that stemming from Austin – in which ritual is understood as an act or as a particular modality of action with ethical entailments. After elaborating this position in the first half of the essay, we juxtapose it with an ethnographic description of life in northern Uganda. The ethnography serves both to support aspects of the formal argument and to show that conditions ‘on the ground’ readily escape any formal model. If ritual performance sets the criteria for ethical judgement, ethical concerns establish the choice of ritual performed. Ethical life is shaped by ritual enactment yet is also challenged by circumstances beyond what any given ritual, liturgical order, or theoretical apparatus can provide.

This chapter considers how the Romance languages can contribute to our understanding of the encoding of discourse-oriented meaning, both structurally, at the level of the sentence, and, interpretatively, at the level of the utterance; more precisely, it focuses on the discourse-oriented meaning that interfaces between the wider extra-sentential discourse context on the one hand, and the propositional core of the utterance and the sentence-internal discourse context on the other. We present an overview of the contribution of Romance languages to a number of the key issues associated with theories of discourse at the level of the sentence/utterance, such as the grammatical expression of clause type, the codification of illocutionary force, and the mapping between form and function in the realization of speech acts, which are the communicative actions effected through the production of an utterance; in particular, we distinguish the morphosyntactic notion of clause type, meant as the formal or grammatical structure of a sentence codified through the lexicalization of dedicated functional slots within the left periphery of the clause, from that of illocutionary force, a pragmatic notion which refers to the communicative function attached to that expression.

Chapter 2 reviews the state of the art of current attempts to syntacticize speech acts. These attempts are mostly based on classical speech act theory as developed by Austin and Searle in the sixties. It presents a brief overview of classic speech act theory. It identifies the issues pertaining to the relation between sentence structure and speech act type, which sets the stage for introducing the idea that speech act structure itself is part of syntax. I discuss the various stages and guises of this idea starting with Ross’s performative hypothesis and reviewing reanalyses of the idea within current syntactic theory. I then argue that all existing approaches toward the syntacticization of speech acts suffer from several weaknesses: specifically, most analyses fail to consider advances that have been made since classic speech act theory, namely the focus on the dynamic and interactional component of utterances.

Chapter 1 introduces the empirical domain (interactional language) as well as the Interactional Spine Hypothesis and broadly situates it within the state of the art. It is shown that for the calculation of utterance interpretation, propositional meaning is not sufficient. Rather it is important to take the speaker’s intention into consideration as well as the addressee’s knowledge state. This sets the stage for the development of the interactional spine throughout the monograph.

Conversational and conventional implicatures prevalent in the usage of modal particles explain deeper commonalities between modal particles, topic/thema, illocutionary force, and focus. As modal particles occur between free focus and verum focus, mirative unexpectedness is enacted. We discuss mirative import specified by the legacy of modal particle sources.