The Pragmatics of Adaptability


Book Description

Humans are adaptive beings. Gradually, we have produced the fundamental capacities for our cooperation, recognition of intentions, and interaction which led to the development of language and culture. The present collective volume builds on an orientation to pragmatics as the sustained and principled human adaptability in interaction, form, and meaning. Working on different strands of such a socially oriented pragmatics, the authors gathered in this volume study the adaptability of language as shaped by the conditions of society, culture, and cognition. Grouped in four sections, the book’s chapters explore the embedding of adaptability in language ideology, text, communicative practice, and learning. Adopting these various perspectives, the authors gauge how language users navigate the different layers of societal, cognitive, and communicative constraints, while adapting their communicative practices, language ideologies, and technologies of interaction to their everyday living conditions.




Approaches to Internet Pragmatics


Book Description

Internet-mediated communication is pervasive nowadays, in an age in which many people shy away from physical settings and often rely, instead, on social media and messaging apps for their everyday communicative needs. Since pragmatics deals with communication in context and how more gets communicated than is said (or typed), applications of this linguistic perspective to internet communication, under the umbrella label of internet pragmatics, are not only welcome, but necessary. The volume covers straightforward applications of pragmatic phenomena to internet interactions, as happens with speech acts and contextualization, and internet-specific kinds of communication such as the one taking place on WhatsApp, WeChat and Twitter. This collection also addresses the role of emoticons and emoji in typed-text dialogues and the importance of “physical place” in internet interactions (exhibiting an interplay of online-offline environments), as is the case in the role of place in locative media and in broader place-related communication, as in migration.




Developmental and Clinical Pragmatics


Book Description

This handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of a wide range of developmental and clinical issues in pragmatics. Principally, the contributions to this volume deal with pragmatic competence in a native language, in a second or foreign language, and in a selection of language disorders. The topics which are covered explore questions of production and comprehension on the utterance and discourse level. Topics addressed concern the acquisition and learning, teaching and testing, assessment and treatment of various aspects of pragmatic ability, knowledge and use. These include, for example, the acquisition and development of speech acts, implicatures, irony, story-telling and interactional competence. Phenomena such as pragmatic awareness and pragmatic transfer are also addressed. The disorders considered include clinical conditions pertaining to children and to adults. Specifically, these are, among others, autism spectrum disorders, Down syndrome, and Alzheimer's disease.




Handbook of Pragmatics


Book Description

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access — for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language — to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use. The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995. Also available as Online Resource: https://www.benjamins.com/online/hop/




Strategies of Adaptation in Tourist Communication


Book Description

The papers in this volume study the relationship between language use and the concept of the “tourist gaze” through a range of communicative practices from different cultures and languages. From a pragmatic perspective, the authors investigate how language constantly adapts to contextual constraints which affect tourism discourse as a strategic meaning-making process that turns insignificant places into desirable tourist destinations. The case studies draw on both, in situ interactions with visitors, such as guided tours and counter information, old and new mediatized genres, i.e. guide books, travelogues, print advertising as well as TV-commercials, service web-sites and apps. Despite the diversity of data, one of the common findings in the volume is that staging the sensory ‘lived’ tourist experience is the lynchpin of all communicative practices. Hence, the use of tourism language reveals itself as the mirror of how ‘people on the move’ continuously enact as ‘tourists’ and ‘places’ are constructed as must-see ‘sights’.




Teaching and Learning Second Language Pragmatics for Intercultural Understanding


Book Description

This collection argues for the need to promote intercultural understanding as a clear goal for teaching and learning pragmatics in second and foreign language education. The volume sees the learning of pragmatics as a challenging yet enriching process whereby the individual expands their capacity for understanding how meaning making processes influence social relationships and how assumptions about social relationships shape the interpretation and use of language in context. This locates pragmatics within a humanistically oriented conception of learning where success is defined relative to the enrichment of human understanding and appreciation of difference. The book argues that intercultural understanding is not an “add on” to language learning but central to the learner’s ability to understand and construct meaning with individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Chapters analyse teachers’ and learners’ ways of making sense of pragmatics, how their assumptions about social relationships impact their perceptions of language use, and how reflection on pragmatic judgments opens up possibilities for developing intercultural understanding. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, language education, and applied linguistics.




Handbook of Pragmatics


Book Description

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use. The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995. Also available as Online Resource: https://benjamins.com/online/hop




The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy


Book Description

As a first attempt to date, this book addresses the notion of hypocrisy from a pragmatic perspective and devises a comprehensive model of verbal hypocrisy. The studies included adopt emic and etic approaches in order to contribute jointly towards an understanding of what appears to be a ubiquitous and multifaceted phenomenon. Going beyond hypocrisy as a mere moral vice, this volume establishes its pragmatic space and confronts it with adjacent notions which, unlike hypocrisy, have been subject to pragmatic examination. The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy is of interest to students and scholars in pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, rhetoric, communication and media studies, as well as corpus linguistics, and by its transdisciplinary nature, to researchers in philosophy, sociology, and political science. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in the interplay between language, culture and society, across varieties and registers of English.




Second Language Pragmatics


Book Description

Inside Reading Second Edition is a five-level academic reading series that develops students’ reading skills and teaches key academic vocabulary from the Academic Word List.




The Pragmatics of International and Intercultural Communication


Book Description

This volume contains a selection of papers from a special session of the International Pragmatics Conference (Antwerp, August 1987) and from the Symposium on Intercultural Communication (Ghent, December 1987). Studying the communicative styles of cultures and social groups, both at the descriptive level and at the level of pragmatic theory construction, should be a target of pragmatics as a discipline. A clear view is needed of the restrictions on adaptability involving potential fields of conflict in intercultural and international communication. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, very little should be taken for granted in this respect.