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40 years of research into children’s irony comprehension Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Julia Fuchs
Children’s ability to understand irony is believed to be acquired late compared to other pragmatic skills. To explore this assertion, this article presents a review of four decades of research, to determine the age at which children actually do become capable of understanding ironic utterances, and what the crucial influencing factors are. As this systematic examination of the state of research shows
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Non-standard uses of hybrid evaluatives and the echoic view Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Dan Zeman
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“Slurs and thick terms: When language encodes values” Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Bianca Cepollaro
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Narrating and focalizing visually and visual-verbally in comics and graphic novels Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Charles Forceville
Literary narratology has rightly devoted much attention to analysing the source(s) of verbal information about the story world, usually discussed under the label “narration”, and to any agent(s) that present(s) non-verbalized perspectives on it, usually discussed under the label “focalization”. Assessing the identity of narrators and focalizers is crucial for understanding what is going on in the story
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The annotative dual-clause juxtaposition construction in Japanese Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Yoko Hasegawa
This study introduces an enigmatic construction in Japanese called chūshakuteki nibun-renchi ‘annotative dual-clause juxtaposition’ (ADCJ), exemplified below: Hiro wa, dare ni au no ka, resutoran o yoyakushita. top who dat meet nmlz int restaurant acc reserved Lit. ‘Hiro, (I wonder) who (he) will meet, reserved a restaurant.’ This construction is ubiquitous and yet little known even in Japanese linguistics
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Linguistic and pragmatic ways of committing oneself Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Carla Vergaro
In this study I focus on the complementation patterns of commissive shell nouns in Ghanaian English (GhE). Commissive shell nouns are a type of illocutionary shell noun, i.e. a noun that encapsulates a content that is usually expressed in a complement or even separate clause or sentence thereby ascribing it an illocutionary force. I use the usage-based approach to the study of language and investigate
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Recalling presupposed information Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Viviana Masia, Davide Garassino, Nicola Brocca, Louis de Saussure
This article addresses, experimentally, the question of how presuppositions are cognitively processed and retrieved in discourse. In the proposed research, we have administered tweets produced by Italian politicians to native speakers so as to assess how easily they could retrieve the presupposed content of two presupposition triggers (definite descriptions and change of state verbs), as opposed to
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Mirative evidentials, relevance and non‑propositional meaning Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Elly Ifantidou, Lemonia Tsavdaridou
In this study, we are addressing the call for further research (Aikhenvald 2015) into how languages, in our case Modern Greek, mark the unexpected. Our first research question is: Can we identify a class of mirative evidential markers in Modern Greek? The expected answer is that we can, if we take account of frequency rates in a variety of sources in the real world, namely plays, corpora and tags in
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Monolingual and bilingual children’s performance learning words from ostensive teaching Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Isabelle Lorge, Napoleon Katsos
Children who grow up exposed to more than one language face a range of challenges and developmental environments which differ from those of monolinguals. Recently, studies have suggested that this may lead to differences in the development of pragmatic skills and sensitivity to socio-pragmatic cues. We investigate whether bilingually exposed children are able to make further use of these cues in an
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Investigation into the linguistic category membership of the Finnish planning particle tota Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Minna Kirjavainen, Alexandre Nikolaev
Even though hesitations (e.g., um/uh) were historically perceived as involuntary non-linguistic items (e.g., Maclay & Osgood 1959), more recently, a number of scholars have suggested that hesitations can behave like (a) lexical items (e.g., Clark & Fox Tree 2002), and (b) at least in some contexts and with some functions as grammatical items like suffixes/clitics (Kirjavainen, Crible & Beeching 2022;
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Managing turns, building common ground, planning discourse Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Chiara Fedriani, Piera Molinelli
This paper discusses the discursive and interpersonal functions conveyed by the Italian negative operator no(?) ‘no’, suggesting a possible pathway of functional enrichment that can account for its high degree of polyfunctionality. Drawing on the KIParla corpus of contemporary spoken Italian, we chart the values of no(?) as a discourse marker, which are all clearly connected to the incremental co-construction
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Linguistic and paralinguistic constraints on the function of (eu) acho que as DM in Brazilian Portuguese Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Raquel Meister Ko. Freitag, Paloma Batista Cardoso, Julian Tejada
Like I think in English, (eu) acho que in Brazilian Portuguese can function as a discourse marker (DM) with more than one meaning, and these meanings are curiously diametrically opposed. Certainty, doubt or uncertainty is inferred by hearers in an interactional context. In a sample of audio-video recorded interviews, the occurrences of this DM were classified by meaning, and association tests between
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Between placeholder and filler Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Inga Hennecke, Wiltrud Mihatsch
French truc and machin (‘thing’) can function as placeholders, fillers or in general extender constructions. The aim of our paper is to investigate whether the prosodic characteristics of these three different uses may give a clue as to their respective status. For our analysis, we extracted 112 occurrences of truc and 57 occurrences of machin from the audio data of the PFC Corpus, which were analysed
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Exploring the status of filled pauses as pragmatic markers Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Loulou Kosmala
The present study aims to explore the status of filled pauses as pragmatic markers by taking into account their accompanying visual and gestural behavior. This aspect has not yet been widely explored, and the current study breaks new ground by demonstrating that the analysis of gaze and gesture can shed substantial light on the pragmatic functions of filled pauses and other pausing phenomena. Filled
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The three-dot sign in language contact Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Annika Labrenz, Heike Wiese, Tatiana Pashkova, Shanley Allen
In this study, we investigate the three-dot sign as a discourse marker (DM) with textual, subjective and intersubjective discourse functions. As a graphical marker that is used across languages, the three-dot sign is especially suitable for comparative studies and dynamics in language contact. Our corpus study targeting instant messages of different languages (English, German, Greek, Russian, Turkish)
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L1 and non-L1 perceptions of discourse markers in English Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Lieven Buysse, Meaghan Blanchard
Although critical reception of discourse markers (DMs) such as like and you know has often been noted, surprisingly little research has actually investigated this attitudinal perspective on usage. Moreover, a recent, rapidly expanding body of research on non-L1 speakers’ use of discourse markers in English has suggested that their more or less frequent use of specific markers may be due to familiarity
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Crosslinguistic paths of pragmatic development Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Kate Beeching, Ludivine Crible
Diachronic studies of discourse markers suggest they follow a unidirectional developmental path, from propositional to textual and expressive uses. The present study tests whether children acquire the propositional (literal) before the expressive (pragmatic) functions of two adversative discourse markers in French and English, which have similar core meanings and pragmatic functions. Our results partially
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Discourse-pragmatic markers, fillers and filled pauses Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Kate Beeching, Grant Howie, Minna Kirjavainen, Anna Piasecki
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Worrying about your future Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Heng Li
According to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis, people’s sagittal mental space-time mappings are conditioned by their temporal-focus attention. Based on this, it can be predicted that, by virtue of their future-oriented thinking, individuals with high anxiety should be more likely to think about time according to the future-in-front mapping than those with low anxiety. Utilizing a combined correlational
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“Dr. Shelby, that’s a world record!” Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Shelby R. Miller, Hilal Ergül, Salvatore Attardo
Participation in experimental studies can be conceptualized as Goffmanian frames, i.e. a set of rules which include the fact the experimenter will be observing participant behavior through (the recording of) the experiment. This study is focused on frame breaches in 16 video- and audio-recorded dyadic conversations taking place in an experimental setting. Our main conclusion is that the experimental
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Modular vs. diagrammatic reasoning Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Angelina Bobrova, Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
Mercier and Sperber (MS) have ventured to undermine an age-old assumption in logic, namely the presence of premise-conclusion structures, in favor of two novel claims: that reasoning is an evolutionary product of a reason-intuiting module in the mind, and that theories of logic teach next to nothing about the mechanisms of how inferences are drawn in that module. The present paper begs to differ: logic
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On the strength of presumptions Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Petar Bodlović
Traditionally, a presumption is a dialogically privileged, yet defeasible proposition that allocates the burden of proof to a party who challenges it. This paper investigates the strength of presumptions. First, it explains how ‘strength’ contributes to defining the concept of presumption. Second, it provides an overview of (contextual, justificatory, and deontic) factors determining a presumption’s
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Mathematics, relevance theory and the situated cognition paradigm Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Kate McCallum
Mathematics is a highly specialised arena of human endeavour, one in which complex notations are invented and are subjected to complex and involved manipulations in the course of everyday work. What part do these writing practices play in mathematical communication, and how can we understand their use in the mathematical world in relation to theories of communication and cognition? To answer this,
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From implicit to explicit Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Grisot, Liesbeth Degand
The presence of discourse relations can be marked explicitly with lexical items such as specialized and underspecified connectives or left implicit. It is now well established that the presence of specialized connective facilitates the processing of these relations. The question is to gauge how different degrees of explicitness affect the processing of discourse relations. This study investigates this
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Ad hoc concepts, affective attitude and epistemic stance Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2022-12-31 Manuel Padilla Cruz
In relevance-theoretic pragmatics the lower-level or first-order explicature is a propositional form resulting from a series of inferential developments of the logical form. It amounts to the message the speaker communicates explicitly. The higher-level or second-order explicature is a description of the speech act that the speaker performs, her affective attitude towards what she says or her epistemic
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Word norms and measures of linguistic reclamation for LGBTQ+ slurs Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Daniel Edmondson
While databases of taboo language word norms exist, none focus specifically on slurs as a category of taboo language. Furthermore, no existing databases include measures of linguistic reclamation, a phenomenon which may specifically affect the processing of slurs. I produced a database in which 155 native or near-native speakers of British English rated 41 LGBTQ+ slurs for a number of word properties
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When humour questions taboo Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Philipp Heidepeter, Ursula Reutner
The article examines the ways in which humour twists regular euphemism use. Based on the classical fields of euphemisms anchored in religion, aesthetics, social politics, and amorality, it identifies the characteristics of their twisted variants with a humorous component: playing-with-fire euphemisms that jocosely provoke supernatural forces, innuendo euphemisms that entertain, mocking euphemisms that
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The sound of taboo Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Robin Vallery, Maarten Lemmens
Swear words of English and French, both real and fictional ones, significantly tend to contain the least sonorous consonants, compared to the rest of the lexicon. What can explain the overrepresentation of such sounds among swear words? This might be a case of sound symbolism, when sounds are unconsciously associated with a meaning. We examine the pragmatic vs. semantic nature of the meaning involved
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Obscene language and the renegotiation of gender roles in post-Soviet contexts Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Cristiana Lucchetti
Mat is a specific domain of Russian obscene vocabulary including words related to sexuality. The first sociolinguistic studies on mat emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, concomitantly with the formation of Russian gender studies in the early 1990s (Tëmkina & Zdravomyslova 2003: 51). Until today, research on gender and taboo in Russian has been exiguous. Many scholars claim that the use of mat
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Tongan honorifics and their underlying concepts of mana and tapu Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Svenja Völkel
Abstract The Tongan language has honorific registers, called a ‘language of respect’ (Churchward 1953). These are two limited sets of lexemes used to refer to people of chiefly and kingly rank and thus honour the societal stratification. Anthropological-linguistic research reveals that these honorifics are a tapu-motivated linguistic practice. The Polynesian concept of tapu (source of the loanword
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Circumnavigating taboos Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Melanie Keller, Philipp Striedl, Daniel Biro, Johanna Holzer, Kate Burridge
This article elaborates on Wolfgang Schulze’s keynote speech of the same title at the 26th LIPP Symposium in Munich in 2019. It is based on the slides from his talk and various teaching materials, of which some figures have been translated from German to English before their inclusion in this article. While this article’s foundation rests on Schulze’s theories and research, we have done our best to
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Sex, death & politics – taboos in language Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Melanie Keller, Philipp Striedl, Daniel Biro, Johanna Holzer, Benjamin Weber
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Why truth matters Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Jacques Moeschler
This article is about truth and relevance. It first discusses the concept of truth in formal semantics and pragmatics, mainly the Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean approaches to meaning. What is particularly crucial is the relationship between pragmatic meaning and truth, since, from a Gricean perspective, meaning is defined as non-truth-conditional, which in turn raises the question of how truth
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Interpretation, relevance and the ideological effects of discursive practice Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Stavros Assimakopoulos
Research in Critical Discourse Studies has for long recognised the central role that both direct and indirect communicative strategies play in the reproduction of social inequality, but a main proponent of this approach has expressed scepticism with regard to the contribution that theories of pragmatics which specifically focus on speaker intentions can make to its agenda. This paper sets out to examine
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Being ambivalent by exploiting indeterminacy in the explicit import of an utterance Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Agnieszka Piskorska
In line with recent interest in weak and often not fully determinate effects of communication permeating relevance-theoretic research, I contribute a discussion on two possible sources of speaker-intended indeterminacy within explicit import of an utterance: one residing in an intentionally underspecified location of an ad hoc concept between literal or non-literal (e.g. metaphorical or hyperbolic)
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Onomatopoeia, translation and relevance Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Ryoko Sasamoto
It is generally acknowledged that onomatopoeia poses challenges for translation. However, there is little research into the translation of onomatopoeia in Pragmatics. This study seeks to examine the nature of onomatopoeia and its implications for translation from the perspective of relevance theory, addressing, in particular, the following questions: (i) Can notions from pragmatics help to account
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Relevance Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Tim Wharton
Deirdre Wilson (2018) provides a reflective overview of a volume devoted to the historic application of relevance-theoretic ideas to literary studies. She maintains a view argued elsewhere that the putative non-propositional nature of (among other things) literary effects are an illusion, a view which dates to Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995: 224): “If you look at [non-propositional] affective effects
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Metaphor and mental shortcuts Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Elly Ifantidou, Anna Piata
Cognitive-pragmatic approaches to how metaphors are understood view the activation of perceptual or motor effects as inferred (Steinhart 2001; Bergen 2005; Wilson and Carston 2006; Carston 2010; Gibbs and de Macedo 2010; Wilson and Carston 2019). Crucially, inferences elicit conceptual representations, e.g. in the form of implicatures, and/or mental simulations, e.g. in the form of imagery, memory
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Memes as multimodal metaphors Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Kate Scott
In this article I analyse object labelling image macro internet memes as multimodal metaphors, taking the Distracted Boyfriend meme as a case study. Object labelling memes are multimodal texts in which users add labels to a stock photograph to convey messages that are often humorous or satirical in nature. Using the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor, I argue that object labelling memes are multimodal
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On the interpretation of utterances with expressive expletives Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Manuel Padilla Cruz
Expressive adjectives or expressive expletives have been argued to voice the speaker’s attitude towards the referent of the noun with which they co-occur, even though the attitude may be felt to be expressed about the referent of another sentential constituent or the state of affairs alluded to in the sentence where they are inserted. A previous pragmatic approach suggests that this is possible because
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Pragmatic resolutions of temporal and aspectual mismatches Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Louis de Saussure
This paper proposes a pragmatic solution to utterances where the various indicators of time and aspect (tenses, lexical-conceptual features of Aktionsart, adverb phrases and contextual cues) seem to have divergent temporal reference and aspectual properties. This type of cases is usually treated at the semantic level as ‘mismatches’ and resolved compositionally through logical operations of ‘aspectual
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New developments in relevance theory Pragmatics and Cognition (IF 0.424) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Manuel Padilla Cruz, Agnieszka Piskorska