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.

The primary goal of this chapter is to present the state of the art on Chinese intonation research, with a focus on how tone and intonation interact. To this end, the general functions and forms of intonation observed in (Mandarin) Chinese are first introduced. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the multiplexing of the f0 channel for tone and intonation in varieties of Chinese as well as the different proposals posited for intonation modeling. The secondary goal of this chapter is to highlight open issues and suggest potential points for future research on intonation in Chinese.

An exploration of what made Cavell’s debut with Wittgenstein so revolutionary, not only at the time he wrote it, but in relation to themes that have continued to rise tenaciously to prominence within philosophy, especially philosophy of language and epistemology, since 1969. Rule-following and skepticism; truth, conventionalism, necessity, and creativity in meaning; the New Wittgenstein and Cavell’s overcoming of the idea of Wittgenstein as an end-of-philosophy or conservative philosopher; the transformation of Wittgenstein into a radically reformist philosopher. These are strewn throughout Must We Mean What We Say? through Cavell’s radically new redeployment of Wittgenstein in and for ordinary language philosophy conceived as a liberatory tradition, a tradition whose significance has lasted into our time.

Here, we look at a number of syntactic differences that are used for different pragmatic purposes, specifically the characteristic but imperfect relations between the following clause types and speech acts: declarative clauses for making statements, closed interrogative clauses for asking closed questions, open interrogative clauses for asking open questions, imperative clauses for issuing commands, and exclamative clauses for uttering exclamations. These relations exist for both main and subordinate clauses.

Declarative clauses are the basic clause type that we’ve been describing so far. Interrogatives have a number of characteristics differences, including subject–auxiliary inversion and the use of interrogative words and fronting of the interrogative phrase in open interrogatives. The exclamatives are always marked by an initial exclamative phrase that begins with either adjective ‘what’ or adverb ‘how’. Imperatives characteristically lack a subject and use the plain form of the verb. We conclude with a brief description of a few minor clause types.

Chapter 6 provides a summary of our cross-cultural pragmatic analytic framework. The framework breaks down cross-cultural pragmatic data into three units of analysis, expressions, speech acts and discourse, and provides a systematic approach to disentangle and compare these units across linguacultures.

This chapter begins with an overview of several terms important to a discussion of meaning in language, and introduces the reader to the theory of linguistic relativism and the relationship between language and thought. This section transitions into a review of the extension, reference, and the features that begin to form a comprehensive theory of semantics. With this foundation, students turn to a deeper investigation of formal semantics, including definitions for logical expressions and relationships, and then to a presentation of word sense, and the interactions between various parts of speech in the lexicon. The principle of compositionality is introduced, and it is used to explore several examples of non-compositional language. The end of the chapter ties these concepts to an investigation of pragmatics, including politeness, Gricean Maxims, and implicature.

Using as an example an exchange between Donald Trump and FBI director James Comey in the Oval Office in February 2017, this chapter revisits in a post-structuralist perspective canonical concepts from pragmatics and sociolinguistics , such as Austin’s performative, Searle’s speech act, Goffman’s participation framework and Brown and Levinson's concept of politeness through facework. It shows the workings of symbolic power in the most mundane interaction rituals. It introduces the notion of institution, not only in the form of particular organizations such as the Government, the Family, the Army, or the Church, but also any durable social relation which endows individuals with power, status and resources of various kinds, for example, membership in a club, association, corporation or online community, but also more unspoken relations of wealth, race, ethnicity or gender that represent institutionalized forms of symbolic power. These institutions give people authority, legitimacy and the right to speak and be listened to. Communicative practice is therefore not just the ability to speak correctly and appropriately, but an individual and institutional struggle to be heard and taken seriously.