Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning, and it is well known that prosody or, more informally, ' tone of voice' can contribute crucially to that meaning. Pragmatic effects in speech are thus the product of both what is said and how it is said, and the two are inextricably linked. However, while many working in pragmatics are well aware of the important contribution of prosody, exactly how...

following a thorough survey of the available literature and concentrating on the wax and wane of testing pragmatic competence so far, the present study firstly is an attempt to develop a comprehensive test of inter-language pragmatics mainly focusing on academic situations in the iranian context. secondly, the study aims to investigate the criteria required for the selection of speech acts of a...

Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution language have advocated adopting a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach, according to which “a more productive framework” for primate research should be “pragmatics, field linguistics that examines role context in shaping meaning linguistic utterances” (Wheeler Fischer, Evol Anthropol 21:195–205, 2012: 203). After distinguishing two different ...

Semantics and Pragmatics of Spatial Reference

The term pragmatics was proposed by Morris in 1938 as a tribute to C. S. Peirce's philosophy of pragmatism, to designate the study of signs and their relationship to interpreters. In 1946 Morris changed this slightly to make pragmatics the study of the origin, use and effect of signs. One of the main differences between the two versions is that in the second version the term use also includes t...

Negation is a fundamental element of language and logical systems, but processing negative sentences can be challenging. Early investigations suggested that this difficulty was due to the representational challenge of adding an additional logical element to a proposition, but in more recent work, supportive contexts mitigate the processing costs of negation, suggesting a pragmatic explanation. ...

Using research on the ageing mind, support is offered for the concept of bio-cultural sciences. The bio-cultural sciences highlight the notion that human behaviour is the joint and co-constructive expression of biological–genetic and cultural–societal processes and conditions. The genome determines the ontogeny of the brain; however, so does the cultural–social environment and individual behavi...

The approach to pragmatics explored in this article focuses on elements of social interaction which are of universal relevance, and which may provide bases for a comparative approach. The discussion is anchored by reference to a fragment of conversation from a video-recording of Lao speakers during a home visit in rural Laos. The following points are discussed. First, an understanding of the fu...

We introduce the principles behind the launch of a new journal in semantics and pragmatics and outline the journal’s processes and policies. S&P is a peer-reviewed open access journal. The main content is high quality, original, selfcontained research articles on the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. While our target audience is primarily academic linguists, we expect to also publi...

This article is concerned with integrating the phenomenon of selectional restrictions in a formal grammar theory. Firstly, the question of treating selectional restrictions purely in the semantic module is discussed, as there are some contextual (or pragmatic) influences, which can repair the ill-formedness of violated selectional restrictions. Secondly, we shed light on the stucture of pragmat...