Experimental Pragmatics


Book Description

Explains the phenomena, theoretical debates, experiments and historical development of experimental pragmatics, which investigates how utterances communicate a speaker's intended meaning.




The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics


Book Description

The ability to communicate through spoken and written language is one of the defining characteristics of the human race, yet it remains a deeply mysterious process. The young science of psycholinguistics attempts to uncover the mechanisms and representations underlying human language. This interdisciplinary field has seen massive developments over the past decade, with a broad expansion of the research base, and the incorporation of new experimental techniques such as brain imaging and computational modelling. The result is that real progress is being made in the understanding of the key components of language in the mind. The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics brings together the views of 75 leading researchers in psycholinguistics to provide a comprehensive and authoritative review of the current state of the art in psycholinguistics. With almost 50 chapters written by experts in the field, the range and depth of coverage is unequalled. The contributors are eminent in a wide range of fields, including psychology, linguistics, human memory, cognitive neuroscience, bilingualism, genetics, development and neuropsychology. Their contributions are organised into six themed sections, covering word recognition, the mental lexicon, comprehension and discourse, language production, language development, and perspectives on psycholinguistics. The breadth of coverage, coupled with the accessibility of the short chapter format should make the handbook essential reading for both students and researchers in the fields of psychology, linguistics and neuroscience.




Experimental Pragmatics/semantics


Book Description

In recent years, a lively debate ensued on an old issue, namely the proper distinction between semantics and pragmatics against the background of the classical Gricean distinction between what is said and what is implicated . From a linguist s point of view, however, there has always been a regrettable lack of empirical data in this otherwise sophisticated debate. Recently, a new strand of research emerged under the name of experimental pragmatics, the attempt to gain experimental data on pragmatic and semantic issues by using psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods. This volume brings together work by scholars engaging in experimental research on the semantics/pragmatics distinction. The contribution of experimental pragmatics to pragmatic and semantic theory is discussed from a number of different angles, ranging from implicature and pragmatic enrichment to pragmatic acquisition, pragmatic impairment, and pragmatic processing. In addition, methodological issues are discussed. The contributions will appeal to theoretical linguists, psycholinguists, neurolinguists, and language philosophers."




The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics


Book Description

This handbook is the first to explore the growing field of experimental semantics and pragmatics. In the past 20 years, experimental data has become a major source of evidence for building theories of language meaning and use, encompassing a wide range of topics and methods. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters in this volume offer an up-to-date account of research in the field spanning 31 different topics, including scalar implicatures, presuppositions, counterfactuals, quantification, metaphor, prosody, and politeness, as well as exploring how and why a particular experimental method is suitable for addressing a given theoretical debate. The volume's forward-looking approach also seeks to actively identify questions and methods that could be fruitfully combined in future experimental research. Written in a clear and accessible style, this handbook will appeal to students and scholars from advanced undergraduate level upwards in a range of fields, including semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive science, and neuroscience.







The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics


Book Description

This handbook is the first to explore the growing field of experimental semantics and pragmatics. In the past 20 years, experimental data has become a major source of evidence for building theories of language meaning and use, encompassing a wide range of topics and methods. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters in this volume offer an up-to-date account of research in the field spanning 31 different topics, including scalar implicatures, presuppositions, counterfactuals, quantification, metaphor, prosody, and politeness, as well as exploring how and why a particular experimental method is suitable for addressing a given theoretical debate. The volume's forward-looking approach also seeks to actively identify questions and methods that could be fruitfully combined in future experimental research. Written in a clear and accessible style, this handbook will appeal to students and scholars from advanced undergraduate level upwards in a range of fields, including semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive science, and neuroscience.




Lexical Pragmatics and Theory of Mind


Book Description

The concept of theory of mind (ToM), a hot topic in cognitive psychology for the past twenty-five years, has gained increasing importance in the fields of linguistics and pragmatics. However, even though the relationship between ToM and verbal communication is now recognized, the extent, causality and full implications of this connection remain mostly to be explored. This book presents a comprehensive discussion of the interface between language, communication, and theory of mind, and puts forward an innovative proposal regarding the role of discourse connectives for this interface. The proposed analysis of connectives is tested from the perspective of their acquisition, using empirical methods such as corpus analysis and controlled experiments, thus placing the study of connectives within the emerging framework of experimental pragmatics.




Pragmatics and Classical Sanskrit


Book Description

This book explores the possibilities and limitations of pragmatic research in classical Sanskrit concentrating on linguistic politeness. The four case studies it comprises are in essence empirical, and try to accurately describe a fairly limited number of interactions between an also limited number of people. The underlying assumption is that a micro-analysis yields recognizable patterns of communicative styles and that these generalizations improve our insight in the workings of politeness (deference) in this language and in languages in general. This book also shows that the relation between classical languages and pragmatics is not necessarily a one-way street. The data provide ample evidence that a detailed text study offers rich opportunities both to supplement experimental studies (e.g. the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project) and to evaluate existing pragmatic theories constructed on the basis of contemporary languages.




Pragmatics


Book Description

Routledge Applied Linguistics is a series of comprehensive textbooks, providing students and researchers with the support they need for advanced study in the core areas of English language and applied linguistics. Each book in the series guides readers through three main sections, enabling them to explore and develop major themes within the discipline. Section A: Introduction, establishes the key terms and concepts and extends readers’ techniques of analysis through practical application. Section B: Extension, brings together influential articles, sets them in context, and discusses their contribution to the field. Section C: Exploration, builds on knowledge gained in the first two sections, setting thoughtful tasks around further illustrative material. This enables readers to engage more actively with the subject matter and encourages them to develop their own research responses. Throughout the book, topics are revisited, extended, interwoven and deconstructed, with the reader’s understanding strengthened by tasks and follow-up questions. Pragmatics: provides a broad view of pragmatics from a range of perspectives, gathering readings from key names in the discipline, including Geoffrey Leech, Michael McCarthy, Thomas Kohnen, Joan Manes and Nessa Wolfson covers a wide variety of topics, including speech acts, pragmatic markers, implicature, research methods in pragmatics, facework and politeness, and prosody examines the social and cultural contexts in which pragmatics occurs, such as in cross-cultural pragmatics (silence, indirectness, forms of address, cultural scripts) and pragmatics and power (the courtroom, police interaction, political interviews and doctor-patient communication) uses a wide range of corpora to provide both illustrative examples and exploratory tasks is supported by a companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/archer featuring extra activities and additional data for analysis, guidance on undertaking corpus analysis and research, including how to create your own corpus with CMC, and suggestions for further reading. Written by experienced teachers and researchers in the field, Pragmatics provides an essential resource for students and researchers of applied linguistics.




Pragmatics


Book Description

This core textbook provides an engaging and accessible introduction to the field of pragmatics: the study of the relationship between linguistic meaning and context. Assuming no prior knowledge, Siobhan Chapman surveys the development of pragmatics from the very beginning to the present day and engages with recent debates on topics such as experimental pragmatics and (im)politeness theory. Readers will develop their knowledge of how pragmatics interacts with other areas of language, such as semantics, and of how it has been applied to the study of various aspects of language in use, including literature, language acquisition and clinical linguistics. Comprehensive and highly readable, this is an essential text for undergraduates or postgraduates enrolled on specialist modules in pragmatics or on more general linguistics courses. It is also an ideal resource for researchers in linguistics or related disciplines who are interested in how the field is developing.