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Questions tagged [pragmatics]

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning.

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7 answers
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What divides semantics from pragmatics?

To my understanding... Semantics is the raw meaning and connotations a word carries on it's own and pragmatics is the context-dependent meaning a word holds. Is this accurate? Can anyone explain it ...
LitheOhm's user avatar
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2 votes
1 answer
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Can the entropy per word be caculated precisely?And relation among information theory, semantics, and pragmatics

What we have gotten about the expected per word entropy of random yet grammatical text is just some upper bound of the the expected per word entropy, because we have not found the exact way to compute ...
XL _At_Here_There's user avatar
11 votes
1 answer
2k views

Correlation between politeness of a culture and its languages

In the question Is there any reason why English doesn’t add respectful words in every sentence? that was asking why there's more respectful language in Korean and Japanese compared to English, the ...
Golden Cuy's user avatar
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7 votes
3 answers
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How do languages with negative concord express the actual negation of negative polarity items?

This is something I started wondering while working on formal logic, but I'm having trouble finding any papers that address it. Obviously, the standard way to express negation with a polarity item in ...
eijen's user avatar
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4 votes
2 answers
262 views

How does a field linguist record rare, unknown features of an undocumented language? Is it likely for him/her to miss the details?

A field linguists is most likely an adult, after all. We all know that babies are capable of hearing the specific sounds in natural languages. As a person grows up, however, he/she starts to lose the ...
user20373's user avatar
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2 votes
1 answer
956 views

What is the relation among connotation, semantics, and pragmatics?

I know that connotation meaning belongs to semantic meaning, but what I'm confused about is the connotation meaning is affected by the context, isn't it? If so, why does it not belong to pragmatic ...
ronghe's user avatar
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