This Element tries to discern the known unknowns in the field of Pragmatics, the 'Dark Matter' of the title. The authors can identify a key bottleneck in human communication, the sheer limitation on ...the speed of speech encoding: Pragmatics occupies the niche nestled between slow speech encoding and fast comprehension. Pragmatic strategies are tricks for evading this tight encoding bottleneck by meaning more than you say. Five such tricks are reviewed, which are all domains where the authors have made considerable progress. The authors can then ask for each of these areas, where have the authors neglected to push the frontier forward? These are the known unknowns of pragmatics, key areas, and topics for future research. The Element thus offers a brief review of some central areas of pragmatics, and a survey of targets for future research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Volumul élaborai de Anamaria-Paula Mädäras, intitulât Nume si imagini: semiótica verbalului pictural, îmbinâ, într-un stil original, cele douä pasiuni ale autoarei: arta si lingvistica. Mai extins, ...capitolul al IV-lea, Semiótica verbalului pictural, Stabileste, pentru început, necesitatea intelegerii termenilor semnificat - semnificant - referent si a relatiei dintre acestia, deoarece „dacä admitem faptul cä numele propriu este un semn lingvistic care are un semnificant si un semnificat, atunci nu putem afirma cä numele propriu nu are un sens, deoarece am nega statutul säu de semn lingvistic" (p. 146). în continuare, Anamaria-Paula Mädäras interpreteazä opera de artä ca mijloc de comunicare verbalä, din punct de vedere pragmatic, fâcând referire la elementele procesului de comunicare. Demersul interdisciplinar este sustinut de numeroasele legäturi ale onomasticii cu alte stiinte (lexicologie, etimologie, dialectologie, geografie, religie si picturä), orientând cititorul spre subiectul lucrärii. Asadar, picturile transpun portretele copiilor, ale sotiilor sau amantelor, fac referire la cälätorii sau la alte aspecte personale. Acest tip de nume neconventional poate substituí numele adevärat („Francisco Mazzuola este cunoscut sub numele de Parmeggianimo" p. 76), poate fi un prenume luat ca pseudonim, un nume modificat sau un pseudonim diminutival. Chiar dacä existä titluri identice, tablourile nu sunt la fei, flecare manifestä un mod original de exprimare" (p. 99). Aceste observatii sunt complétate de о paletä largä de reproducer! ale tablourilor analízate.
Legal language is presented in the form of texts which are not easily accessible to the uninitiated persons. Yet some of these texts, such as the texts of laws, are of general use and concern ...everyone. Dependent on major works dealing with legal theory onlegal uncertainty and with French law-making practice, the paper tries to search for the systemic sources of this paradoxical situation using examples taken mainly from the French Civil Code. Stating that these contradictions which manifest themselves at language level are immanent to any legal order, from the opposition between precision and ambiguity of legal terms and concepts, through the conflict between their traditional or modern side, to the divergence between intelligibility and technicality of legal texts, the paper tries to identify the main systemic contradictions responsible for the limited accessibility of legal language at the level of both legal vocabulary and legal discourse.
Apologies appearing in postcard texts have not been the subject of linguistic studies so far. Therefore, the aim of this article is to examine and compare the acts of apology in Polish and Russian ...postcard messages. The conducted analysis concerns the location of apologies in the structure of messages, their pragmatic and formal characteristics, speech acts which co-constitute apology formulas and actions that cause speakers to perform acts of apology. The results of the study show that there are differences between both languages in terms of the number and frequency of acts of apology. It is difficult to clearly indicate the reasons for this state of affairs, but it can be presumed that they should be sought, among others in cultural differences.The fact that Russians use acts of apology less frequently than Poles might be the result of less individual autonomy and greater power distance. Also, differences in the location of acts of apology in the structure of messages and the type of actions that cause senders to apologize have been identified. Moreover, it has been shown that in both languages the senders of apologies are mainly women. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the examined acts of apology are formulaic, which is the result of conforming to the convention of postcard messages.
In university syllabuses Discourse analysis and Interpretation appear as separate courses. Nevertheless, as our teaching experience showed us, they are quite complementary and rely on a conceptual ...basis that nourish our students’ knowledge of discourse and the practice of it. As this paper aims at showing, the analysis of one of Emmanuel Macron’s discourses on the Gilets jaunes brought us to the understanding that being familiar with some discursive strategies may help future interpreters’ performance especially when knowledge is transferred from one discipline to the other, in an integratedapproach.
Since the 1970s, when it came to the attention of researchers as the subject of systematic investigations, conversation has always been a tempting field not only for linguists, but also for ...sociologists, psychologists, ethnologists or ethnographers. The communicative resources of the cultural communities were studied by the followers of linguistic ethnography, of sociolinguistics, of conversational analysis. Therefore, it is explicable that numerous analysis models have been developed, which have highlighted the multitude of speech acts in a community, as well as the complexity of the terminological system specific to this field. For those concerned with this issue, Sanda Golopenția’s studies are of permanent interest. Upon careful reading, the reader discovers a series of original concepts regarding the participants in the conversation, the conversational roles and units, but also the graphic transcription of the conversation. These are studies such as: Morfologia conversației, Conversația – un studiu de caz (I), Conversația – un studiu de caz (II), Trois types de séries conversationnelles, Notaţia conversaţională ca revelator pragmatic, L’histoire conversationnelle (I). I mentioned here only some of the many materials that demonstrate a permanent interest of the author for the study of language in action, materials that were brought together in the recently edited volume Action, interaction, identity, studies of linguistic pragmatics Acţiune, interacţiune, identitate, studii de pragmatică lingvistică.For the classification and analysis of recorded conversational situations, the author compiles a true glossary of terms, which she establishes through a “concrete and explicit act by which a name is given”, which makes the “world of everyday experience” and the “scientific world” intersect in the process of terminological constitution. On the one hand, these meticulous definitions recall, by the precision of the formulation, the mathematical theorems, and on the other hand, by the ease of the formulation, they recall the apparenly spontaneous interventions of the field researcher who provokes his interlocutor to dialogue. The originality and value of the ideas presented in the numerous studies of Sanda Golopenția result largely from the polyphonic character of the concerns manifested in various fields. Polyphony is, moreover, a true leitmotif of the prodigious activity carried out, which has shown that there is both an art of the science of conversation and a science of the art of conversation.
The phenomenon of approximation must take into consideration the levels of expression of approximate or indeterminate uses, which, at the same time, determine the operating mechanisms. Pertaining to ...lexical vagueness, as well as to the speaker’s attitude towards his own utterance and the speech act that he performs, the interpretation of approximation must take place at the semantic and referential level, at the level of the epistemic modality and at the pragmatic and discourse level (how speech acts are being actualized, the inferences generated by the lexical, sentential or enunciative indetermination and the lexical decontextualizations through discourse) (Sweetser 1990, Zafiu 2002a, Mihatsch 2010). With respect to polysemy, one simply needs to use appropriate contexts. The imprecision which characterizes the phenomenon of approximation requires the linguistic and extra-linguistic context, as well as the relation to the referent.The partial identification approximation of the referent causes an indetermination break in the class of categorical units, triggering their semantico-discursive relativisation, via a series of operators, identified as enclosures according to Kleiber or hedges according to Lakoff. The study of some of these meaning deformers concerning the categorizers, such as un soi de, un fel de, o specie de, un gen de, etc. allows to measure the degree of belongingness or resemblance of the modified term to a prototypical or stereotyped class, or to a set of elements.
Ignored by the traditional grammar because of their non-words status the interjections have been placed under a new focus from a pragmatic perspective and recognized as discourse markers (Schiffrin ...1987, Fraser 1990). Due to their complex functionality the interjections allow multiple perspectives in recent studies: syntactic (Krieb 2001), pragmatic (Vasilescu 2001, Ștefănescu 2007, Pop 2009), contrastive (Pop 2001, 2003). From the point of view of intercultural pragmatics Romanian language is considered to be an interjectional language that uses interjections as signals to the addressees by comparison with French that uses more message structuring markers (Pop 2006). Certain Romanian interjections with numerous occurrences in spontaneous conversations have been pragmatised during the evolution of language for expressing numerous roles: repair markers, answer particles, topic signals etc.The corpus-driven analysis explores several corpora of Romanian spoken interactions and will demonstrate that certain Romanian interjections (such as a! and e!) are no longer simply emotional or affective words, but significant tools pragmaticalised for expressing an important range of functions: feedback signals, repair markers, answer particles, topic signals, etc. Most examples are excerpted from transcribed familiar conversations published in corpora of spoken Romanian (CORV, CRVA, IVLRA1, IVLRA2, ROVA) and from literature.
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