Questions tagged [pragmatics]
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning.
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Why are certain there-sentences infelicitous in English?
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language states that the first three of the following four excerpts are semantically or pragmatically anomalous (to give that term some context, it cites We ...
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Is "double positive meaning negative" a common phenomenon?
The following joke is popular:
An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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What range of strategies are common in natural languages for providing unambiguous answers to negative yes-no questions?
I have been told that, in Chinese, terms for "yes" and "no" used as answers for questions are not needed because one answers yes-no questions by either repeating the verb in the question or adding a ...
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What strategies for efficiency are adopted by languages with minimal phonemic inventories?
As the size of a phonemic inventory decreases, the information rate allowed by the inventory should likewise decrease. So are there any (semantico-)pragmatic or morphosyntactic strategies that ...
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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 ...
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What do "titles" and "Beijing" stand for?
I am looking at metonyms and I have two examples I am interested in, but I am not sure what they stand for.
The bookshop holds over 1 million titles.
Since Beijing, the Olympics have got even more ...
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Difference between discourse analysis and pragmatics
Could you explain for me what is the main difference between pragmatics in linguistics and discourse analysis? Both are related to study of use of language in real world.
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Reference request: ways of indicating disagreement
There are lots of ways to indicate you disagree with some aspect of an utterance. I'm thinking here of the spectrum that includes "No, not-X," "Well, not-X," "Hey, wait a minute! Not-X!" "Yes, you're ...
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The meaning of "what"?
"What" is defined grammatically as an interrogative pronoun
... used interrogatively in asking for the specification of an identity, quantity, quality, etc. (Wiktionary)
In dictionaries, however, ...
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What is the difference between "Topic" and "Focus"
What is the difference between grammatical categories "Topic" and "Focus"? They are both optional, and they succeed "Force" and they both seem to stress a part of text. Rizzi places them in the ...
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Is the usage of sarcasm or irony dependent on the language and its structure?
Sarcasm and irony are a form of humor used by a lot of languages. Are they aided by certain features or structure of the language? Are they dependent on the presence of certain structures within a ...
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Clarifications on exophora
An exophora is an expression referring back to something outside the text. Specifically, wikipedia states "not in the immediate text".
Does “not in the immediate text” mean not within the ...
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To what extent does this image accurately express the modularity of linguistic units?
This is a popular image floating around the internet, but like many things floating there, it seems like a gross simplification and just plain inaccurate.
However, I’m more of an armchair linguist ...
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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 ...
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What is the difference between implicature and entailment?
When talking about pragmatics what is the difference between implicature and entailment?
PS. The book I was reading was Pragmatics by George Yule
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"I thought X was Y" vs. "I thought Y was X"
Walking with my wife the other day, I turned around and realized that the person behind me was, in fact, someone else, and my wife had stopped to look in a shop. I said to her
1a Oh, I thought that ...
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Are deictic pronouns at all apparent in written language?
Considering the nature of deixis, I have trouble coming up with written examples where the pronoun is of a deictic nature, other than quotes from speech etc. Or maybe I have misunderstood the meaning ...
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Is 'It' anaphoric or cataphoric, and what is its antecedent/postcedent?
Question 1a: What does 'It' refer to in the following sentence:
It was clearly in the mood to place acknowledgements at the bottom of questions.
The context for the above sentence is provided in ...
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Is there any evidence pro/contra Du Bois' Preferred Argument Structure (ergative patterning in discourse)?
In The Discourse Basis of Ergativity published in Language in 1987, John W. Du Bois proposed a theory which stated that (p. 850)
[universally] the distribution of new information vs. old ...
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Historical changes from 'not yet' to 'not again' and vice-versa
A two part question. Are there attested historical changes whereby a construction C in some language means 'not yet', and then C changes in meaning so that it means 'not again' at a later time (or ...
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What is the name of the type of sentences that describe an action that is realized by saying the sentence?
I know that this specific type of sentences has a name, but I can't remember it.
The sentences I'm referring to are the sentences that describe an action that is performed when saying the sentences, ...
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What is the meaning difference between have+V versus bare V?
In some dialects of English, there seems to be a clear(er) difference between past tense verbs with the auxiliary have as in “I have eaten the pie”, and those without, as in “I ate the pie”. The only ...
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What triggers the presuppositions in these sentences?
I am working with these two sentences:
Alex stopped playing the piano.
What I concluded is that the sentence presupposes that Alex had previously played the piano. But why does the ...
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What is the difference between assertive and non-assertive words?
What is the difference between assertive and non-assertive words?
I haven't been able to find an answer in my online linguistics sources such as the SIL Glossary of Linguistics Terms.
The only ...
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What does it mean if a person says, “I think” a lot
When I speak or write I tend not to speak in absolutes. I generally use phrases like "I think" or "I don't think" a lot. Further, I usually qualify my statements with words like "generally" or "...
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Name for rhetoric expressing a two contradictory meanings in one sentence?
I am looking at finding the name for the rhetoric style which uses two contradictory statements, one positive and the other negative, with the first seemingly giving a sense of positiveness or ...
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Have pronoun introductions spread to non-English-speaking communities/languages?
There seem to be two forms of these pronoun introductions, intended to promote transfeminism, one voluntary/declarative and one interrogative:
For an example of a voluntary/declarative one:
Kamala ...
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What are different types of signs? [closed]
I've read somewhere that there are different types of signs like: natural signs (smoke as a sign of fire), arbitrary signs (language signs) etc. Could someone provide me with a complete list and ...
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A question about pragmatics
I wonder if anybody here is a pragmatics expert because my question relates to this.
I'm learning about Paul Grice's conversational maxims (quality, quantity, relation and manner) and I have a ...
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Is there a good introduction to subjectivity in language?
Since the topic of "subjectivity in language" is all new to me, I am looking for an introduction to the topic that 1) gives an overview of the phenomena usually associated with the topic (...
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Ambiguous active/passive interpretations
This is a general and brief question. Is anyone familiar with a language which can be largely ambiguous with respect to whether the construction is active or passive, to the degree that in some cases ...
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Denotation of common nouns
Do common nouns have any singular 'denotation' or do all of them denote entirely contextually? For example in 'a car' is 'car' denoting a type of object and the entire phrase describing an object of ...
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Grammar/syntax rules for structures larger than the sentence?
All grammar syntax rules (afaik) pertain to words in the same sentence. For example, a complete sentence must have a subject and a verb. But there must be rules for structures larger than the sentence....
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Quantitative methodology for contrastive pragmatics in corpus-based settings
I am interested in literature regarding methodology that could be relevant for quantitative research into differences in pragmatic meaning between two 'equivalent' concepts in two languages (in other ...
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A question regarding semantics of "only"
I have a question regarding semantics of only provided by Beaver & Clark (2009) and Chierchia (2013).
for something like "Sandy only met [Bush]F" (let this proposition be called p). ...
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Syntax as error-correction-code
I vaguely recall from my academic studies that a professor mentioned that the syntax of sentence could be seen as error-correction-code in signal processing.
In other words, from a pragmatic view - ...
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Are there any studies on marked adjective order in the NP in head initial languages like Spanish or Albanian?
For example, Spanish unmarked NP order is Noun-Adjective ("libro rojo", "casa grande"). However, there are many situations where the order is reversed ("un rojo atardecer", "es un buen libro", "tienes ...
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What is the difference between an implicature and a presupposition
I have been reading on pragmatics from Levinson, Yule, Cadzar etc. English is not my native language, though i can understand basic concepts such as maxims, implicatures and its types(generalized, ...
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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 ...
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Does pragmatics cut down or add to the stock of interpretations generated by the semantics?
This is a question similar to the question about the semantics/pragmatics divide, but I have a more specific interest.
I'm thinking of two different ways of conceiving of the way statements come to ...
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Response to 'Thanking' Speech Acts?
Just wondering if anyone is familiar with any research that touches on this. It seems to be a largely untapped topic, other than Wooh-yun Jung's (1994) work.
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Difference between sociolinguistics and pragmatics
I have been doing some intense research on sociolinguistics and pragmatics and am becoming more and more confused as to what the distinction between them is.
If someone could describe both concepts ...
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Formalization and representation of semantic and pragmatic knowledge? [closed]
Are there efforts to formalize and formally represent (e.g. as semantic network, as some kind of logic) of semantic of pragmatic knowledge. It is known, that every speaker/listener has two types of ...
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Does "I don't drink." mean "I don't drink alcohol." in all languages? [duplicate]
In those languages I'm a bit familiar with, the verb for drinking is very often understood as drinking alcohol, especially if its meaning "the oral intake of any fluid", wouldn't make sense.
For ...
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Why grammaticalized perfective aspect marker is reduced to be used only in narrative style?
I am looking at a set of ballistic verbs like nak, phenk 'throw' in a minor Indo Aryan language spoken in Dravidian vicinity, where one verb of the set is reduced to light verb with perfective meaning,...
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What calls the phenomenon that the sounds of two synonyms mix together and form an expression with the same meaning?
Is it a worldwide phenomenon found in many languages?
I give an example here.
I have heard several times in spoken Chinese that people say [t͡ʃaʊ̯˥˩] with the meaning "gotten/found". This is a ...
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Are there instances in which an entire sentence constitutes a focus--new information?
Are there instances in which an entire sentence constitutes a focus--new information? Consider the following scenario:
Three people are talking together about a mutual friend who is in the ...
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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 ...
