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...

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...

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime candidates to test the interaction between syntax ...