Language and Reason opens up new territory for social theorists by providing thefirst general introduction to Habermas's program of formal pragmatics: his reconstruction of theuniversal principles of possible understanding that, he argues, ...

Language Use offers a philosophical examination of the basic conceptual framework of pragmatic theory, and contrasts this framework with detailed descriptions of our everyday practices of language use. While the results should be highly relevant to pragmatics, the investigation is not a contribution to pragmatic theory. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, Language Use brings out the relevance of Wittgenstein's methods to fundamental problems in central pragmatic fields of research such as deixis, (...) implicatures, speech acts and presuppositions. (shrink)

A core area of pragmatics is conversational implicatures, where speakers imply a meaning that is not part of what is literally said. Not all people have the ability to easily understand such common (implicit) forms of communication. For these people, Easy Language has been developed, i.e. a form of barrier-free communication with substantially simplified syntax and lexis. Moreover, Easy Language is based on the principle of maximum explicitness. However, the heterogeneous target groups and the different types of implicature (...) have not been systematically taken into account. Therefore, this article is the first to take an in-depth look at conversational implicatures in Easy Language. It shows that a universal principle of maximum explicitness for Easy Language is too short-sighted. Instead, the principle of explicitness must be considered in relation to the different target groups and the types of implicature. The article provides an impulse for further (empirical) research in this emerging field. (shrink)

By the beginning of the twenty-first century essentialism is giving way to the constructivist paradigm in the field of social sciences and humanities. However, linguistic essentialism survived all the shocks and received a classical form in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativism. The application of this hypothesis to the analysis of linguistic communities puts majority and minority languages in different positions: it makes strong languages even stronger, and simply kills small ones. The task of preserving minority languages in programs built (...) using this methodology turns out to be impossible. In our humble opinion, two research paradigms are more adequate for the purpose. One of them is associated with the pragmatic turn in the analytical philosophy of language and represents a transition from the analysis of the structure of the language itself to the analysis of the conditions of communication, taking into account all the sociocultural components of this process. The second methodology is Erving Goff man’s concept of social face and performative behavior. (shrink)

Language and Theory of Mind come together in communication, but their relationship has been intensely contested. I hypothesize that pragmatic markers connect language and Theory of Mind and enable their co-development and co-evolution through a positive feedback loop, whereby the development of one skill boosts the development of the other. I propose to test this hypothesis by investigating two types of pragmatic markers: demonstratives and articles. Pragmatic markers are closed-class words that encode non-representational information that (...) is unavailable to consciousness, but accessed automatically in processing. These markers have been associated with implicit Theory of Mind because they are used to establish joint attention and mark shared knowledge. Here I develop a theoretical account of how joint attention is the basis for children’s later tracking of common ground. The developmental path from joint attention to common ground parallels language change, with demonstrative forms giving rise to definite articles. This parallel opens the possibility of modelling the emergence of Theory of Mind in human development in tandem with its routinization across language communities and generations of speakers. I therefore propose that, in order to understand the relationship between language and Theory of Mind, we should study pragmatics at three parallel timescales: during language acquisition, language use, and language change. (shrink)

Language Turned on Itself examines what happens when language becomes self-reflexive; when language is used to talk about language. Those who think, talk, and write about language are habitual users of various metalinguistic devices, but reliance on these devices begins early: kids are told, 'That's called a "rabbit"'. It's not implausible that a primitive capacity for the meta-linguistic kicks in at the beginning stages of language acquisition. But no matter when or how frequently these (...) devices are invoked, one thing is clear: they present theorists of language with a complex data pattern. Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore show that the study of these devices and patterns not only represents an interesting and neglected project in the philosophy of language, but also carries important consequences for other parts of philosophy. Part I is devoted to presenting data about various aspects of our metalinguistic practices. In Part II, the authors examine and reject the four leading metalinguistic theories, and offer a new account of our use of quotation in a variety of different contexts. But the primary goal of this book is not to promote one theory over another. Rather, it is to present a deeply puzzling set of problems and explain their significance. (shrink)

El trabajo comienza desarrollando la postura del filósofo Karl-Otto Apel, desde su propuesta pragmático-trascendental, frente al estructuralismo lingüístico de Saussure. A partir de aquí, se presentarán los conceptos de lenguaje y sujeto desde el psicoanálisis de Jacques Lacan, heredero y crítico del pensamiento saussureano, con el objetivo de realizar una confrontación entre ambas teorías, además del esclarecimiento inicial necesario para futuras discusiones. The following paper starts by developing philosopher Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental-pragmatic position towards Saussure’s linguistic structuralism. At this point, (...) from Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, heir and critic to the saussurean line of thought, concepts of language and subject will be presented. The main goal is to confront both theories and start initial clarifications necessary for further discussions. (shrink)

This study intends to contribute to the delimitation of selected offensive language categories based on an analysis of a corpus of contributions to discussion forums in Czech online national newspapers and news platforms called Czech Corpus of Offensive Language (CCOL). It endeavours to study three problematic areas (1) delimitation between the speech acts performed, (ii) lexical realisation of specific properties of the target and (iii) identification and categorisation of implicit offence (e.g. figurative semantic shifts) by exploring contextual cues (...) for the speech act identification, the keywords indicating the properties of the target and the types of semantic shifts in implicit expressions of offence. The findings indicate that annotation systems that do not use context information for the detection of offensive language may face problems with adequate interpretation of the language means under investigation. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to expatiate on the poetic function of language on the basis of considerations by Jakobson and Waugh. I try to bring in the consideration that pragmatics plays an important role in elucidating the poetic function of language. Contextualism allows us to interpret a poem: referents must be fixed or need not be fixed due to the requirements of the discourse; citations are brought in through pragmatic ways; polyphony is achieved by taking into (...) account the context of previous analyses of a poetic text; the vicinity of a certain word, or concept or line is likely to affect the interpretation of a certain expression; the poetic text can take different forms, from graffiti to discourse at the market place, to discourse between lovers. All these forms of poetic text would not exist if the notion of poetry did not include the idea of semantic/pragmatic compression which is matched, in interpretation, by expansions. (shrink)

In June 22-27,1970, an International Working Symposium on Pragmatics of Natural Languages took place in Jerusalem under the auspices of The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science.! Some thirty philosophers, logicians, linguists, and psychologists from Israel, U.S.A., West-Germany, England, Belgium, France, Scotland, and Denmark met in seven formal and a number of informal sessions in order to discuss some ofthe problems (...) around the use and acquisition oflanguage which in the eyes of an increasing number of scholars have been left under treated in the recent upsurge ofinterest in theoretical linguistics and philos ophy of language. More specifically, during the formal sessions the following topics were discussed: The validity of the syntactics-seman tics-pragmatics trichotomy The present state of the competence-performance issue Logic and linguistics The New Rhetoric Speech acts Language acquisition. The participants in the Symposium distributed among themselves re prints and preprints of relevant material, partly in advance of the meeting, partly at its beginning. Each session was introduced by one or two modera tors, and summaries of each day's proceedings were prepared and distri buted the next day. The participants were invited to submit papers after the symposium, written under its impact. The eleven essays published here are the result. (shrink)

Richard Martin's thoroughly philosophical as well as thoroughly tech nical investigations deserve continued and appreciative study. His sympathy and good cheer do not obscure his rigorous standard, nor do his contemporary sophistication and intellectual independence obscure his critical congeniality toward classical and medieval philosophers. So he deals with old and new; his papers, in his neat self-descriptions, consist of reminders, criticisms, and constructions. They might also be seen as studies in the understanding of truth, ramifying as widely in mathematics, logic, (...) and epistemology as well as metaphysics, as such understanding has required. For us it is a pleasant occasion to welcome Richard Martin's new Boston Studies, and to note his continuously con collection to the structive and critical interventions at the Boston Colloquium for the of Science. Philosophy Boston University Center for the R. S. COHEN Philosophy and History of Science M. W. WARTOFSKY July 1979 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL PREFACE vii PREFACE xi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xv I. Truth and Its Illicit Surrogates II. Some Reminders concerning Truth, Satisfaction, and Reference 17 III. On Disquotation and Intensionality 30 IV. On Truth, Belief, and Modes of Description 42 V. The Pragmatics of Self-Reference 55 VI. On Suppositio and Denotation 72 VII. Of Time and the Null Individual 82 VIII. Existence and Logical Form 95 IX. Tense, Aspect, and Modality 110 X. Of 'Of' 130 XI. Events and Actions: Brand and Kim 144 XII. Why I Am Not a Montague Grammarian 160 XIII. (shrink)

The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. They document in an astoundingly uniform way the develop ments in the formal analysis of natural languages since the late sixties. The avowed aim of the' workshop was in fact to assess the progress made in the application of formal methods to semantics, to confront different approaches to essentially the same problems on the one (...) hand, and, on the other, to show the way in relating semantic and pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena. Several of these papers can in fact be regarded as attempts to close the 'semiotic circle' by bringing together the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of certain constructions in an explanatory framework thereby making it more than obvious that these three components of an integrated linguistic theory cannot be as neatly separated as one would have liked to believe. In other words, not only can we not elaborate a syntactic description of (a fragment of) a language and then proceed to the semantics (as Montague pointed out already forcefully in 1968), we cannot hope to achieve an adequate integrated syntax and semantics without paying heed to the pragmatic aspects of the constructions involved. The behavior of polarity items, 'quantifiers' like any, conditionals or even logical particles like and and or in non-indicative sentences is clear-cut evidence for the need to let each component of the grammar inform the other. (shrink)

In The Pragmatics of Text Messaging: Making Meaning in Messages Michelle A. McSweeney seeks to explore the meaning to be found in the labyrinth of text messaging language, and offers explanations b...

Sweet describes the pragmatic foundations of standard logic and applies these foundations to the task of developing a theory of intended models as an extension of standard model theory in which the relevant "intending" is represented pragmatically. Methods of formal logic are used to investigate the structure of the relation between language and the world. The truism which holds that this relation includes the speaker as well as the object spoken about is formally explicated and applied to the (...) problem of illuminating one of the deepest phenomena in standard model theory: the existence of non-isomorphic models of complete theories. To this end it is shown that standard logic admits pragmatic foundations upon which a theory of intended models can be built as an extension of standard model theory. The relevant "intending" is represented by the very forms of verbal behavior which determine the grammatical and logical structure of the sentences whose referential meaning is in question. The uniqueness properties of the class of intended models may then be described. The first section of the book states the immediate goal of standard pragmatics as that of recovering the algebraic structure first-order logic by means of a purely pragmatic construction. The second section, the major portion of the work, then provides the foundation for a semiotic theory of intended models and referential meaning. The theory is then applied to the problem of referential indeterminancy, which has been associated with the phenomenon of scientific revolutions. The theory is also applied to the problem of the apparent synonymy of observationally equivalent theories. Sweet concludes that such theories are not referentially synonymous in any natural sense which is analogous to the paradigm sense in which theories of alternative scales of measurement are referentially synonymous. A novel feature of this book is the formal explication of the idea that the factors, pragmatical in nature, which distinguish the actual meaning of a sentence from among its possible meanings, whose range is defined by the manner in which the sentence is parsed, determine that very parsing. Applicability to natural language of the model-theoretic semantics thereby obtained is made possible by another feature of the book: the development of a theory of locally standard grammar which provides the foundation for representing the structure of natural language as that of standard first-order logic, in a local, as distinguished from a global, sense. This book is intended for scholars in logic, semiotics, and the philosophies of language and of science. Those concerned specifically with such philosophers as Peirce, Martin, and Davidson will also find the study valuable. (shrink)

Pragmatics, Truth and Language is a collection of 21 papers, 8 previously published elsewhere, a companion volume to Martin's Events, Reference and Logical Form and Semiotics and Linguistic Structure ; it will be of interest to linguists as well as philosophers of language. Many of the papers are quite technical, but Martin writes very clearly, and the book should be accessible to advanced graduate students.

The brief sketch of the problematic character of the traditional semantic conception of meaning demonstrated that meaning cannot be separated from the role the users of a language play in their communication with one another. One of the features of this role is the control of the language use and verbal behavior of individuals by the community. It is thus the community that determines and judges what words and sentences ‘mean’. This is just indicative of the pragmatic (...) dimension of language. Consequently, what medical terms and sentences ‘mean’, and what someone ‘means’ by using a particular medical term or sentence, also depends on pragmatic contexts and circumstances. To understand the importance and practical consequences of this pragmatic perspective, we will now consider the following three central aspects: 3.1 The So-Called Language Games, 3.2 Assertion, Acceptance, and Rejection, 3.3 Speech Acts in Medicine, 3.4 The Pragmatic Impact of Medical Language, 3.5 The Communal Origin of Medical Language. (shrink)

The roots of pragmatics reach back to Antiquity, especially to rhetoric as one of the three liberal arts. However, until the end of the 18th century proto-pragmatic insights tended to be consigned to the pragmatic, that is rhetoric, wastepaper basket and thus excluded from serious philosophical consideration. It can be said that pragmatics was conceived between 1780 and 1830 in Britain, but also in Germany and in France in post-Lockian and post-Kantian philosophies of language. These early ‘conceptions’ (...) of pragmatics are described in the first part of the book. The second part of the book looks at pragmatic insights made between 1830 and 1880, when they were once more relegated to the philosophical and linguistic underground. The main stage was then occupied by a fact-hunting historical comparative linguistics on the one hand and a newly spiritualised philosophy on the other. In the last part the period between 1880 and 1930 is presented, when pragmatic insights flourished and were sought after systematically. This was due in part to a new upsurge in empiricism, positivism and later behaviourism in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. Between 1780 and 1930 philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and linguists came to see that language could only be studied in the context of dialogue, in the context of human life and finally as being a kind of human action itself. (shrink)

Research on the evolution of language is often framed in terms of sharp discontinuities in syntax and semantics between animal communication systems and human language as we know them. According to the so-called “pragmatics-first” approach to the evolution of language, when trying to understand the origins of human language in animal communication, we should be focusing on potential pragmatic continuities. However, some proponents of this approach (e.g. Seyfarth and Cheney Animal Behavior 124: 339–346, 2017) find (...) important pragmatic continuities, whereas others (e.g. Origgi and Sperber 2000) find sharp discontinuities. I begin (in Section 1) by arguing that this divergence is due to the fact that the proponents implicitly rely, respectively, on two different views of pragmatics, corresponding to different conceptions of what is involved in context-dependence – one “Carnapian”, the other “Gricean”. I argue that neither conception is fit to serve the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the evolution of language. In Section 2, I examine a recent formal “semantic-pragmatic” analysis of monkey calls, due to Philippe Schlenker et al. (in, e.g., Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (6): 439–501, 2014, Trends in Cognitive Science 20 (12): 894–904, 2016a, Theoretical Linguistics 42 (1–2): 1–90, 2016b), which appears to improve on the Carnapian and Gricean conceptions. However, I argue that the appearances are misleading and that the S-P analysis is no better suited than Carnapian analyses for the purposes of those seeking to establish human-nonhuman pragmatic continuities. Understanding why this is so will point the way toward my preferred, genuinely intermediate conception of pragmatics (as defended in Bar-On Biology & Philosophy 36 (6): 1–25, 2021), which – I argue in Section 3 – is better fit for these purposes. Drawing on recent discussions of chimpanzee communication, I briefly indicate which aspects of extant primate call communication – both gestural and vocal – could potentially count as pragmatic according to this conception. (shrink)

Chapter One Introduction Located in northeastern Peru, Yagua comes from an area of the world which has to date figured little in formulations of linguistic ...

This is a collection of papers resulting from an international symposium on pragmatics of natural languages held in Jerusalem, June, 1970. The topic is one of intense, and renewed interest today. The eleven papers include a five page brief for the "New Rhetoric"; a piece on "universal semantics" which "establishes" that intuitionists cannot talk to anyone and presents "an unambiguous instance where we may, by mathematical logic deduce a falsehood from a truth"; an attempt at partial formalization of the subdivisions (...) that Morris and Carnap made under the heading semiotic; three papers that consist of inconclusive and disjointed, though interesting, notes and putative formalizations concerning linguistic competence, linguistic performance, and language-learning and communication with children; a formalized message theory which may lead somewhere; and papers by Leo Apostel, Robert Martin, and L. Jonathan Cohen. (shrink)

The study aimed to investigate the functional-pragmatic and communicative-pragmatic use of morphological and syntactic diminutive resources of Kazakh and English in the example of artistic contexts. The following methods were used: comparative-comparative, morphological-syntactic, communicative-pragmatic, analytical-synthetic, and contextual. This paper analysed the main morphological and syntactic resources used for word formation of diminutive adjectives in Kazakh and English languages. In particular, the results of the study showed that synthetic means (use of suffixal morphemes with diminutive semantics) and analytical (...) means (use of special lexemes with diminutive semantics) are frequent in Kazakh. It was determined that suffixal morphemes to express the diminutiveness of adjectives were most often used to warn addressees about the properties of objects and phenomena, to soften categorical evaluation in Kazakh, to diminish the attributes of the object, to demonstrate the incompleteness of the attribute in English. This work can be used in the spheres of communicative linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, word formation, and morphology. (shrink)

We agree with Heintz & Scott-Phillips that pragmatics does not supplement, but is prior to and underpins, language. Indeed, human non-linguistic communication is astonishingly rich, flexible, and subtle, as we illustrate through the game of charades, where people improvise communicative signals when linguistic channels are blocked. The route from non-linguistic charade-like communication to combinatorial language involves (1) local processes of conventionalization and grammaticalization and (2) spontaneous order arising from mutual constraints between different communicative signals.

Focusing on Guattari and Deleuze's collaborative critique of structural linguistics, this article claims that rather than offering an ‘escape from language’, Guattari and Deleuze recast language as a social and political practice. Through a reading of Guattari and Deleuze's analysis of Saussure, their reinterpretation of Hjelmslev, and a discussion of the concepts of order-words and minor use of language, the article shows how, to do this, the authors develop a social and semiotic critique whereby the very concept (...) of language changes from representation to intervention in a material and social field. (shrink)

It can be a great challenge for second language learners to comprehend meanings that are implied in utterances rather than the surface meaning of what was said. Moreover, L2 learners’ attitudes toward pragmatic learning are unknown. This mixed-methods study investigates L2 learners’ ability to comprehend conversational implicatures. It also explores their beliefs about and intentions to develop this ability using Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior. A total of 498 freshmen from a public university in China participated in the (...) study. Data were collected using a web-based test, stimulated recall tasks and semi-structured interviews. Results show that the participants differed in recognizing the intended meanings. Complicated factors account for the variations. In addition to the types of implicature, learners’ beliefs about developing pragmatic comprehension also influence their learning intention, and subsequent performance. These beliefs include learners’ multi-layered, complex attitudes toward the outcomes of pragmatic learning, perceived self-efficacy beliefs regarding language proficiency and L2 cultural knowledge, actual behavioral control over opportunities and resources for pragmatic learning, and perceptions of less social pressure on pragmatic learning. The use of TPB may help language teachers and test designers to understand learners’ beliefs about L2 pragmatic learning in the English as a foreign language context. Understanding the factors influencing learners’ intention will help design more effective teaching curricula that may integrate pragmatic instruction and testing in the future. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

The purpose of this essay is to explore some of the main pragmatic aspects of communication within the legal context. It will be argued that in some crucial respects, the pragmatics of legal language is unique, involving considerations that are not typically present in ordinary conversational contexts. In particular, certain normative considerations that are typically settled in a regular conversational context are unresolved and potentially contentious in the legal case. On the other hand, the essay also argues that (...) a careful distinction between various pragmatic aspects of language use enables us to offer some generalizations about types of pragmatic enrichment that could be taken to form, or not to form, part of what is actually determined by legal expressions. (shrink)