Most theorists agree that sarcasm serves some communicative function that would not be achieved by speaking directly, such as eliciting a particular emotional response in the recipient. One debate concerns whether this kind of language serves to enhance or mute the positive or negative nature of a message. The role of textual devices commonly used to accompany written sarcastic remarks is also ...

In his 1970 paper ‘Remarks on nominalization’, Noam Chomsky provided several arguments for the lexicalist hypothesis, namely the idea that nouns like refusal, rejection, growth, and so on are nouns throughout the entire syntactic derivation. Tom Roeper’s paper ‘Chomsky’s Remarks and the transformationalist hypothesis’ challenges the lexicalist hypothesis, arguing that such nouns are syntactical...

There is accumulating evidence that the degree of vagility explains little of the extent of population subdivision found within elasmobranch species. Instead, patterns of gene flow in elasmobranchs appear more closely linked to the presence of dispersal barriers, either physical or biological. Here, we investigate the potential role of some of these isolating mechanisms in shaping the populatio...

This paper seeks answer to the question why exactly we say what we say the way we say it. Although Giora (1997, 2003) argued that cognitively prominent salient meanings, rather than literal meanings, play the most important role both in production and comprehension of language, most attention in pragmatics research has been focused on comprehension rather than production. This paper claims that...