Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between (context-invariant) encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on seman...

Despite the ’apparent clarity’ of a given legal provision, its application may result in an outcome that does not exactly conform to the semantic level of a statute. The vagueness within a legal text is induced intentionally to accommodate all possible scenarios under which such norms should be applied, thus making the role of pragmatics an important aspect also in the representation of a legal...

The sudden onset of the Coronavirus pandemic created need for contemporary societies to adjust quickly new rules that frequently limit our civil rights. Governments are obliged take decisions and inform society such. On other hand, imposing unpopular on potential voters can result in a loss popularity be devastating politician. This is true even face force majeure. Therefore, from point view pr...

Prosody and Speaker State: Paralinguistics, Pragmatics, and Proficiency

Our commentary is mainly concerned with Kissine's first argument in his 2021 target article: that mind reading not necessarily needed for pragmatics. We fully agree Kissine, and we present (i) additional recent empirical evidence support of this view (ii) a new model pragmatics reading, based on the situation language use rather than type pragmatic phenomenon instantiated. The last part our con...