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...

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...