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This chapter provides an overview of foundational principles that guide CA research, offered both on the basis of our own experiences as researchers, and from our discussions with other conversation analysts as they authored contributions for the present volume. We begin by briefly sketching of some of the fundamentals of human social interaction, in order to underscore CA’s central focus, the study of social action, and describe some of the basic features of how interaction is procedurally organized. These basic features of interaction, which CA research has rigorously evidenced and which guide our examination of new data, are then shown directly to inform CA as a research methodology. Put another way, it is precisely due to the procedural infrastructure of action in interaction that conversation analysts use and work with interactional data in particular ways. We conclude with advice for readers as they continue to explore the volume’s contents.
The aim of this study is to track the evolution in the use of the markers nenny, non + verb (non fait ‘no, it doesn’t’) and non in its absolute use between the middle of the 15th century and the end of the 18th. In Middle French, non already covers all the uses of the old markers nenny and non fait, but it remains in the minority. In Pre-Classical French (1550–1650), the frequency of nenny and non fait decreases considerably and, in Classical French (1650–1789), they become archaic. In the mid-17th century, non definitively assumes the functions of the medieval markers, which disappeared. The analysis of the temporal distribution of these markers helps to date the transition from ancient to modern uses. Several studies of phonetic, morphological and syntactic phenomena have also aimed to date the turning point between the medieval and the “classical” language, which occurs during the so-called “pre-classical” period. This research also seeks to contribute to the debate on the position of the boundary between Pre-Classical and Classical French on the basis of pragmatic criteria. The results support placing this boundary within the decade 1620–1630, as other studies did for morphosyntactic phenomena.
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.
This Element explores the role of pragmatics, and its relationship with meaning and grammar, in second language acquisition. Specifically, this Element examines the generative paradigm, with its focus on purely linguistic aspects, in contrast with, and complemented by, the view of language adopted in the wider perspective on communication that Relevance Theory offers. It reviews several theoretical standpoints on how linguistic phenomena that require combining semantic, pragmatic and syntactic information are acquired and developed in second languages, illustrating how these perspectives are brought together in analysing data in different linguistic scenarios. It shows that the notion of procedural meaning casts light on the range of interpretative effects of grammatical features and how they vary across languages, suggesting ways to complete the picture of the interface factors that affect second language development.
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.
This Element tries to discern the known unknowns in the field of pragmatics, the 'Dark Matter' of the title. We can identify a key bottleneck in human communication, the sheer limitation on the speed of speech encoding: pragmatics occupies the niche nestled between slow speech encoding and fast comprehension. Pragmatic strategies are tricks for evading this tight encoding bottleneck by meaning more than you say. Five such tricks are reviewed, which are all domains where we have made considerable progress. We can then ask for each of these areas, where have we neglected to push the frontier forward? These are the known unknowns of pragmatics, key areas, and topics for future research. The Element thus offers a brief review of some central areas of pragmatics, and a survey of targets for future research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The final intonation in French wh-in-situ questions is subject to much debate. Although a wide variety of final pitch movements has been observed, recent studies generally agree on a tendency for final rises. In our study, we analysed the answered wh-in-situ questions (e.g. Tu veux savoir quoi ? – Tout ! ‘What do you want to know? – Everything!’) in a corpus of eleven audio books.
For our analysis, we used perceptual classifications by three annotators. Annotations included not only the perception of final intonational movement (‘rise’/‘fall’/‘plateau’), but also string-related (wh-lexeme; ‘wh-word final’/‘wh-word non-final’) and pragmatic (‘information-seeking’/‘non-information-seeking’; ‘hierarchical’/‘non-hierarchical’) features.
Our results show that a) even string-identical wh-in-situ questions can be pronounced with rises as well as falls and b) pragmatics affect the final pitch movement. If the speaker is hierarchically superior to the hearer, rises are less likely, and questions that are answered by the same speaker are even associated with a non-rising default. However, our data also suggest that pragmatic functions cannot be directly mapped to pitch movement. Information-seeking questions can be pronounced with all three final intonations and speakers may even choose opposite patterns for the same interrogative in the same context.
Humans produce utterances intentionally. Visible bodily action, or gesture, has long been acknowledged as part of the broader activity of speaking, but it is only recently that the role of gesture during utterance production and comprehension has been the focus of investigation. If we are to understand the role of gesture in communication, we must answer the following questions: Do gestures communicate? Do people produce gestures with an intention to communicate? This Element argues that the answer to both these questions is yes. Gestures are (or can be) communicative in all the ways language is. This Element arrives at this conclusion on the basis that communication involves prediction. Communicators predict the behaviours of themselves and others, and such predictions guide the production and comprehension of utterance. This Element uses evidence from experimental and neuroscientific studies to argue that people produce gestures because doing so improves such predictions.
In the Arabian Peninsula, lexically diminutive personal names, family names and place names are ubiquitous. In a dataset of 9,060 Arabian names, 1,717 (19 per cent) are diminutive. This article finds that the diminutive pattern CiCēC (cf. Classical CuCayC) has meanings and functions in Arabic names that are distinct from its meanings and functions in common nouns. In addition to expected meanings related to size, the diminutive carries partitive and attributive meanings. It may simply mark a name (as an onymic) or derive a name (as a transonymic). The diminutive may disambiguate two similar names found in close proximity (e.g. Diba ≠ Dubai). The form and function of the diminutive differ categorically according to what kind of name is diminutivized, supporting the semantic-pragmatic theory of names. A quantitative analysis of toponyms indicates that diminutive names are associated with Bedouin dialects and practices, as suggested by previous research.
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.
It has long been received wisdom in semantics and pragmatics that 'the head' and 'the heart' are two opposing forces, a view that has led scholars, until now, to explore the mental processes behind cognition, and the mental processes behind emotion, as two separate entities. This bold, innovative book challenges this view, and provides an original study of how we communicate our emotions through language, drawing on both pragmatic theory and affective science. It begins with the assumption that emotional or expressive meaning plays such a central role in human interaction that any pragmatic theory worth its salt must account for it. It meets the associated challenges head-on and strives to integrate affect within one theory of utterance interpretation, showing that emotional meaning and rationality/reasoning can be analysed within one framework. Written in a clear and concise style, it is essential reading for anyone interested in communication and emotion.