in this article, on the basis of habermas’ universal pragmatics, we have tried to indicate that empirical pragmatics in linguistics, suffers from ‘normativity deficit’ in the field of foreign language education. what we mean by ‘normativity deficit’, is the lack of normative resources required for judging the validity claims inherent in social interactions. since agreement on the validity claim...

The article has three main concerns: (i) it gives a concise introduction into optimality-theoretic pragmatics; (ii) it discusses the relation to alternative accounts (relevance theory and Levinson's theory of presumptive meanings); (iii) it reviews recent findings concerning the psychological reality of optimality-theoretic pragmatics and its central part concept – bidirectional optimization. A...

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...

Abstract In this paper, we investigate a type of non-canonical question that is not information-seeking, but rather expresses the speaker’s surprise and/or disapproval with respect to event denoted by propositional part question. Our work empirically based on claims have been put forward in syntactic literature, and our study aims at assessing those theoretical about illocutionary status surpri...

This paper provides an outline of the changes in linguistics that gave rise to historical pragmatics in the 1990s and that have shaped its development over the twenty years of its existence. These changes have affected virtually all aspects of linguistic analyses: the nature of the data, the research questions, the methods and tools that are being used for the analysis, as well as the nature of...

An account of utterance interpretation in discourse needs to face the issue of how the discourse context controls the space of interacting preferences. Assuming a discourse processing architecture that distinguishes the grammar and pragmatics subsystems in terms of monotonic and nonmonotonic inferences, I will discuss how independently motivated default preferences interact in the interpretatio...

Current semantic theory on indexical expressions claims that demonstratively used indexicals such as this lack a referent-determining meaning but instead rely on an accompanying demonstration act like a pointing gesture. While this view allows to set up a sound logic of demonstratives, the direct-referential role assigned to pointing gestures has never been scrutinized thoroughly in semantics o...

Our field of research is cognitive pragmatics, that is, the theoretical and empirical study of the mental events involved in human communication. Communication is a form of social activity; more precisely, it is an agent’s intentional and overt attempt to affect a partner’s mental states (Airenti, Bara, & Colombetti, 1993a, 1993b; Tirassa, 1997). While, historically, this area used to have no s...

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...

We survey three domains – scalar implicatures, presupposition, and conventional implicatures – in which the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics has given rise to new empirical and formal insights in the last decade. In each case, there is a vibrant contemporary debate concerning the modular decomposition of rich arrays of data.