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.
The aim of this article is to analyse the components of the addional notes contained in Polish- language messages sent on postcards in the second half of the 20th century and at the beginning of ...the 21st century. The conducted examinaon is intended to identify the elements constung the structure of the addional notes (i.e. the speech acts used most commonly there) and to determine the funcons fulfilled by the individual components of the postscript. The smulus for taking up this type of invesgaons was the fact that no research on correspondence sent on postcards had been carried out before. Overall, the analysis covered more than 2,600 postscripts separated from postcard messages. The study proves that constave statements as well as iniave and reactive speech acts are frequently found in the addional notes. It also points to the numerous funcons the postscript or its individual components might play in a postcard leer. The polite and phac funcons come to the foreground, but the informave and emoonal funcons are also among the important ones.
The paper deals with German pragmatic phrasemes, i.e. routine and conversational formulas, used in parliamentary speeches as “texts of public debate” (Klein 2009:2115). The aim of the article is to ...investigate what formulas are typical of parliamentary speeches and what function they perform. Thus, the article aims to provide an insight into linguistic formulaicity manifested in this text type. The empirical basis consists of 40 parliamentary speeches made by MPs in German Bundestag. The qualitative analysis of the research material was performed using MAXQDA software.
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.
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.
This paper addresses how the Wikipedia community has debated the existence of an EU culture on a Wikipedia discussion site between 2001 and 2019. That is, a corpus of discussions among Wikipedia ...editors (‘Wikipedians’) was examined to shed light on how the Wikipedians involved argue for/against the idea that an overarching EU culture exists at present. This, combined with an examination of debates about concrete cultural elements associated with the EU, permits an insight into Wikipedians’ conception(s) of the union. Drawing on argumentation analysis shows that the data examined indicates that cultural commonality across EU member states is not necessarily ascribed to the EU but to their being European countries. Additionally, even Wikipedians who argue that an overarching EU culture exists do not necessarily actually subscribe to this view but argue for reference to cultural elements in the Wikipedia article on the EU in order to signal to Wikipedia readers that the EU is “more than a set of treaties”.
Given the importance of stance expression in the writing of abstracts, this study adopted a corpus-based comparative approach to investigate the stance expression in abstracts of the Translation ...Practice Report (TPR) and the Interpretation Practice Report (IPR), which are two newly emerging reporting genres in Master of Translation and Interpretation (MTI) in China. Based on a set of corpora composed with 30 TPR abstracts (8,738 tokens) and 30 IPR abstracts (8,699 tokens) collected from 30 universities located in 16 provinces in China, the stance expression was examined in terms of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mention by employing the stance framework in Hyland’s (2005) interactional model. The findings revealed a genre-specific convention in utilizing the four categories of stance in both the TPR abstracts and the IPR abstracts, which is different from that in the abstracts of the empirical studies. The analysis also found discipline-specific variations of stance expression between the two corpora due to different disciplinary conventions and practice of the two subdisciplines. Then, the interviews with the insider informants were conducted to clarify and to enrich the research findings. The results in the study may be taken as a useful reference to expressing attitude in writing the abstracts in the MTI field of China, and possibly in other fields.
The present study investigates evidentiality in its broadest sense (Chafe 1986) in PhD dissertations as a genre of academic writing. For this purpose, Chafe’s taxonomy (1986), revised by Ifantidou ...(2001), has been used as a framework in order to analyze three different groups of datasets, including one group of native speakers of English and two groups of non-native speakers: a group of Turkish speakers of English and the other non-native speakers with different L1 backgrounds. The texts of these three groups are examined in order to find out whether the native language of the participants is a factor in the choice of evidential markers. The results show that the native speakers of English use evidential markers more frequently compared to the non-native authors. In terms of the Native Language/Interlanguage comparison in Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger 1996, 1998), the overall use of evidentiality reveals that non-native authors do not show native-like features in the use of evidentiality. In terms of the Interlanguage/ Interlanguage comparison, Turkish authors of academic texts differ from the authors with various native language backgrounds in terms of the use of evidentiality.
