Unlike other areas of second language study, which are primarily concerned with acquisitional patterns of interlanguage knowledge over time, most studies in interlanguage pragmatics have focused on second language use rather than second language learning. The aim of this paper is to profile interlanguage pragmatics as an area of inquiry in second language acquisition research, by reviewing exis...

The main concern of this article is to discuss some recent findings concerning the psychological reality of optimality-theoretic pragmatics and its central part – bidirectional optimization. A present challenge is to close the gap between experimental pragmatics and neo-Gricean theories of pragmatics. I claim that OT pragmatics helps to overcome this gap, in particular in connection with the di...

Ethos, the speaker’s image in speech is one of three means persuasion e stablished by Aristotle’s Rhetoric and often studied a loose way. Many scholars develop lists self-images (ethos leader, modesty ethos, etc.), but few explain how arrives at these types ethos. This precisely what inferential approach described here intends to do. Considering, like many discourse analysts, that ethos consubs...