Introduction to Pragmatics

Author: Betty J. Birner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118348303
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
Introduction to Pragmatics guides students through traditional and new approaches in the field, focusing particularly on phenomena at the elusive semantics/pragmatics boundary to explore the role of context in linguistic communication. Offers students an accessible introduction and an up-to-date survey of the field, encompassing both established and new approaches to pragmatics Addresses the traditional range of topics – such as implicature, reference, presupposition, and speech acts – as well as newer areas of research, including neo-Gricean theories, Relevance Theory, information structure, inference, and dynamic approaches to meaning Explores the relationship and boundaries between semantics and pragmatics Ideal for students coming to pragmatics for the first time

Meaning in Interaction

Author: Jenny A. Thomas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317887603
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics is a comprehensive introductory text which discusses the development of pragmatics - its aims and methodology - and also introduces themes that are not generally covered in other texts. Jenny Thomas focuses on the dynamic nature of speaker meaning, considering the central roles of both speaker and hearer, and takes into account the social and psychological factors involved in the generation and interpretation of utterances. The book includes a detailed examination of the development of Pragmatics as a discipline, drawing attention to problems encountered in earlier work, and brings the reader up to date with recent discussion in the field. The book is written principally for students with no previous knowledge of pragmatics, and the basic concepts are covered in considerable detail. Theoretical and more complicated information is highlighted with examples that have been drawn from the media, fiction and real-life interaction, and makes the study more accessible to newcomers. It is an ideal introductory textbook for students of linguistics and for all who are interested in analysing problems in communication.

Pragmatics: The Basics

Author: Billy Clark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000423921
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
Pragmatics: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introduction to the study of verbal and nonverbal communication in context. Including nine chapters on the history of pragmatics, current theories, the application of pragmatics, and possible future developments in the field, this book: Offers a comprehensive overview of key ideas in contemporary pragmatics and how these have developed from and beyond the pioneering work of the philosopher Paul Grice; Draws on real-world examples such as political campaign posters and song lyrics to demonstrate how we convey and understand direct and indirect meanings; Explains the effects of verbal, nonverbal, and multimodal communication and how the same words or behaviour can mean different things in different contexts, including what makes utterances more or less polite; Highlights key terms and concepts throughout and provides chapter-end study questions, further reading suggestions, and a glossary. Written by an experienced researcher and teacher, this book will be an essential introduction to this topic for all beginning students of English Language and Linguistics.

Introducing Pragmatics in Use

Author: Anne O'Keeffe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000690962
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
Introducing Pragmatics in Use is a lively and accessible introduction to pragmatics which both covers theory and applies it to real spoken and written data. This textbook systematically draws on a number of different language corpora and the corresponding software applications. Its primary focus is the application of a corpus methodology in order to examine core component areas such as deixis, politeness, speech acts, language variation and register. The main goal of the book is to contextualise pragmatics in the study of language through the analysis of different language contexts provided by spoken and written corpora. Substantially revised and updated, this second edition covers a wider range of topics, corpora and software packages. It consistently demonstrates the benefits of innovative analytical synergies and extends this to how corpus pragmatics can be further blended with, for example, conversation analysis or variational pragmatics. The second edition also offers a new chapter specifically dedicated to corpus pragmatics which proposes a framework for both form-to-function and function-to-form approaches. The book also addresses the – sometimes thorny – area of the integration of the teaching of pragmatics into the language classroom. All chapters in the second edition include a number of cohesive, step-by-step tasks that can be done in small groups in class or can be used as self-study resources. A wide range of illustrative language samples drawn from a number of English language corpora, coupled with instructive tasks and annotated further reading sections, make this an ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate or postgraduate students of pragmatics, discourse analysis and corpus linguistics within applied languages / linguistics or TESOL programmes.

Pragmatics

Author: Louise Cummings
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135468095
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
The first truly multidisciplinary text of its kind, this book offers an original analysis of the current state of linguistic pragmatics. Cummings argues that no study of pragmatics can reasonably neglect the historical and contemporary influences on this discipline of neighboring fields of inquiry, particularly philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, and language pathology. By the same token, these fields can begin to address their own questions more productively by examining the insights of pragmatics. The book's range of topics and depth of analysis will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and more specialized readers in linguistics, communication studies, speech and language therapy, and cognitive science. Topics discussed include: *coverage of pragmatic concepts and theories; *criticisms of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory, Habermas's theory of communicative competence, and Kasher's views on the modularity of pragmatics; *pragmatic deficits in a range of child and adult language disorders; and *a pragmatic analysis of argumentation in topical issues such as AIDS and BSE theories of meaning, inferences, pragmatics and AI.

The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics

Author: Yan Huang
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199697965
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 753

Book Description
This volume brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world to present an authoritative, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current issues in pragmatics. Following an introduction by the editor, the volume is divided into five thematic parts. Chapters in Part I are concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories, while Part II deals with central topics in pragmatics, including implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, reference, and context. In Part III, the focus is on cognitively-oriented pragmatics, covering topics such as computational, experimental, and neuropragmatics. Part IV takes a look at socially and culturally-oriented pragmatics such as politeness/impoliteness studies, cross- and intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics. Finally, the chapters in Part V explore the interfaces of pragmatics with semantics, grammar, morphology, the lexicon, prosody, language change, and information structure. The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics will be an indispensable reference for scholars and students of pragmatics of all theoretical stripes. It will also be a valuable resource for linguists in other fields, including philosophy of language, semantics, morphosyntax, prosody, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, and for researchers and students in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computer science, anthropology, and sociology.

Analyzing meaning

Author: Paul R. Kroeger
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101361
Category : Context (Linguistics)
Languages : en
Pages : 502

Book Description
This book provides an introduction to the study of meaning in human language, from a linguistic perspective. It covers a fairly broad range of topics, including lexical semantics, compositional semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters are organized into six units: (1) Foundational concepts; (2) Word meanings; (3) Implicature (including indirect speech acts); (4) Compositional semantics; (5) Modals, conditionals, and causation; (6) Tense & aspect. Most of the chapters include exercises which can be used for class discussion and/or homework assignments, and each chapter contains references for additional reading on the topics covered. As the title indicates, this book is truly an INTRODUCTION: it provides a solid foundation which will prepare students to take more advanced and specialized courses in semantics and/or pragmatics. It is also intended as a reference for fieldworkers doing primary research on under-documented languages, to help them write grammatical descriptions that deal carefully and clearly with semantic issues. The approach adopted here is largely descriptive and non-formal (or, in some places, semi-formal), although some basic logical notation is introduced. The book is written at level which should be appropriate for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students. It presupposes some previous coursework in linguistics, but does not presuppose any background in formal logic or set theory.

Introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics

Author: Patrick Griffiths
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748626883
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
An introduction to the linguistic study of meaning, this book outlines the meaning potential (semantics) of English and how language knowledge is put to use (pragmatics). As well as gaining a systematic overview of meaning in English, readers can learn how to argue for analyses. Among the significant concepts introduced are denotation, sense relations, event types, explicature, implicature, presupposition, metaphor, reference, speech acts and (at an elementary level) Generalised Quantifier Theory. Sense relations--such as antonymy and hyponymy--are presented as summarising patterns of entailment. The sense of a word is seen as the contributions it makes to the entailments carried by sentences.

Understanding Utterances

Author: Diane Blakemore
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631158677
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
This textbook provides an introduction to pragmatics from the point of view of Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. The first part lays down the foundations of a relevance theoretic approach to utterance understanding, which is then applied to the analysis of a range of phenomena which are central to pragmatics.

Pragmatics

Author: Joan Cutting
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000244822
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
Routledge English Language Introductions cover core areas of language study and are one-stop resources for students. Assuming no prior knowledge, books in the series offer an accessible overview of the subject, with activities, study questions, sample analyses, commentaries, and key readings – all in the same volume. The innovative and flexible ‘two-dimensional’ structure is built around four sections – introduction, development, exploration, and extension – that offer self-contained stages for study. Each topic can also be read across these sections, enabling the reader to gradually build on the knowledge gained. Now in its fourth edition, this best-selling textbook: Covers the core areas of the subject: speech acts, the cooperative principle, relevance theory, corpus pragmatics, politeness theory, and critical discourse analysis Has updated and new sections on intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics, critical discourse analysis and the pragmatics of power, second language pragmatic competence development, impoliteness, post-truth discourse, vague language, pragmatic markers, formulaic sequences, and online corpus tools Draws on a wealth of texts in a variety of languages, including political TV interviews, newspaper articles, extracts from classic novels and plays, recent international films, humorous narratives, and exchanges on email, messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp Provides recent readings from leading scholars in the discipline, including Jonathan Culpeper, Lynne Flowerdew, and César Félix-Brasdefer Is accompanied by eResources featuring extra material and activities. Written by two experienced teachers and researchers, this accessible textbook is an essential resource for all students of English language and linguistics.