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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Pragmatics. Linguistics'

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Published: 4 June 2021

Last updated: 1 February 2022

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1

Lin, Kevin Chaolun. "Understanding pragmatics and pragmatic understanding : towards a socio-pragmatic approach to interpersonal communication." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.305689.

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2

Cama-Calderon, Ahida Emperatriz. "Pragmatic linguistic methodology for biblical interpretation." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), 1998. http://www.tren.com.

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3

Carston, Robyn Anne. "Pragmatics and the explicit/implicit distinction." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.300147.

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4

Walton, Alan Leslie. "The pragmatics of English modal verbs." Thesis, Boston Spa, U.K. : British Library Document Supply Centre, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.283842.

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5

Greenhall, Owen F. R. "The semantics/pragmatics distinction : a defence of Grice." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:00db9bdd-143d-4900-b564-3af9d002f1ea.

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The historical development of Morris’ tripartite distinction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics does not follow a smooth path. Examining definitions of the terms ‘semantic’ and ‘pragmatic’ and the phenomena they have been used to describe, provides insight into alternative approaches to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Paul Grice’s work receives particular attention and taxonomy of philosophical positions, roughly divisible into content minimalist and maximalist groups, is set up. Grice’s often neglected theory of conventional implicature is defended from objections, various tests for the presence of conventional implicature are assessed and the linguistic properties of conventional implicature defined. Once rehabilitated, the theoretical utility of conventional implicature is demonstrated via a case study of the semantic import of the gender and number of pronouns in English. The better-known theory of conversational implicature is also examined and refined. New linguistic tests for such implicatures are devised and the refined theory is applied to scalar terms. A pragmatic approach to scalar implicatures is proposed and shown to fare better than alternatives presented by Uli Sauerland, Stephen Levinson and Gennaro Chierchia. With the details of the theory conversational implicature established, the use made of Grice’s tool in the work of several philosophers is critically evaluated. Kent Bach’s minimalist approach to quantifier domain restriction is examined and criticised. Also, the linguistic evidence for semantic minimalism provided by Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore is found wanting. Finally, a content maximalist approach to quantifier domain restriction is proposed. The approach differs from other context maximalist theories, such as Jason Stanley’s, in relying on semantically unarticulated constituents. Stanley’s arguments against such theories are examined. Further applications of the approach are briefly surveyed.

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6

Thomas, Andrew Lambert. "The grammar and pragmatics of context-dependence in discourse." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.281423.

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7

Itani, Reiko. "Semantics and pragmatics of hedges in English and Japanese." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1995. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1318049/.

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Hedges are expressions used to communicate the speaker's weak commitment to information conveyed; i.e. by hedging, speakers may moderate the assertive force of their utterances. They include sentence adverbials such as probably and technically, adjectives such as regular and typical, particles such as ne and kedo in Japanese etc. Hedges crosscut parts of speech and therefore do not form a natural syntactic class. This thesis argues that existing analyses of hedging devices fall short of full adequacy and presents a Relevance-theoretic account. In Chapter 1, I argue that hedging is a pragmatic phenomenon as the effect may be derived via features of the ostensive stimulus other than encoded linguistic content; e.g. the speaker can communicate her weak commitment by using certain prosodic features, facial expressions, shoulder shrugging etc. Discussions of hedging often arise in sociolinguistic contexts. However, I argue that the moderation of social relations such as the consideration of politeness is not its intrinsic function. The inadequacy of existing analyses I point out in Chapter 1 is due to the lack of a sufficiently articulated pragmatic framework, and for this reason, I turn to Relevance theory. In Chapter 2, I outline Relevance theory which provides a cognitively based explanation of communication. The theory makes rigorous distinctions between encoded meaning and inferred meaning, between the explicit and implicit content of an utterance, between descriptive and interpretive representations, etc. which provide the concepts necessary to isolate the semantics of the hedging devices as I explain in Chapters 3 and 4. In Chapter 3 and 4, I propose Relevance-theoretic analyses of particular English and Japanese expressions, which appear regularly in the literature on hedging. I try to capture the intrinsic semantic content of these elements and show how the familiar hedging effects arise as a result of the interaction between this encoded content, the particularities of context and considerations of relevance.

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8

Gokcen, Ajda Zeynep. "A Matter of Debate: Using Dialogue Relation Labels to Augment (Dis)agreement Analysis of Debate Data." The Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1462813013.

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9

Matuka, Yeno Mansoni. "The pragmatics of palavering in Kikoongo." Virtual Press, 1991. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/776693.

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Studies in African languages beyond the common core of linguistics are lacking. This motivates this dissertation which investigates the use of Kikoongo, a Bantu language, focusing on natural data produced by the Maniaanga of BesiNgombe region, Bas-Zaire, Zaire. The data are referred to as palavers. These consist of three complex speech events namely, wedding, bereavement and reconciliation viewed as instances of `conflict' management. Each of them is taken not only as a speech event but also as a highly structured sociocultural unit with linguistic implications.The study of palavering as a speech behavior aimed at resolving disputes (Frake 1979) contributes to Pragmatics as defined by Levinson (1983) and Leech (1983). This study provides a body of information that supports the new discipline as an adequate means for demonstrating that any language is an entity that is divisible into units of a higher order than sentences and/or utterances. The fundamental approach adopted to analyze this unit is that of ethnographyof `speaking' (Hymes 1972) and discourse or text analysis, especially, conversation analysis (CA). This approach is descriptively adequate for this study because palavering is basically an extended verbal exchange between two representatives (spokesmen) of two parties who may allow duetting (Falk 1979) and audience involvement or response elicitation whenever appropriate. Speaking publicly, the main participants generate most of the speech intended to achieve their goals as geared toward dispute resolution. The involved speakers operate systematically, following an elaborate code of conduct.This study demonstrates that the pragmatic competence required for palavering consists of paralinguistic and linguistic behaviors which make a palaver an essential institutionalized instrument of survival in Koongo society. In the end of such an event the speakers project a structurally and functionally coherent macro-unit. This appears through the use of metalinguistic terms that also demonstrate that their activity consists in an attempt to find a compromise according to established norms. The participants perform their speech acts within the confines of a mind-unifying event.
Department of English

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10

Lee, Bo Hyun Languages &amp Linguistics Faculty of Arts &amp Social Sciences UNSW. "Unexplored aspects of socio-pragmatics in Korean refusals." Publisher:University of New South Wales. Languages & Linguistics, 2008. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/41432.

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This study explores socio-pragmatic aspects of refusals in Korean. Past researches asserted that 1) Korean speakers seldom use direct refusal formulas (e.g., Byon 2003; Lyuh 1994; Sohn 1986) and 2) Korean speakers frequently employ statement of regret/apology when refusing (e.g., Byon 2003; Kwon 2004; Lyuh 1994). Upon analysing 133 refusals drawn from Korean drama data, four generalisations are formulated, two of which are in direct conflict with the findings of past studies. The four generalisations have been further substantiated through survey process of 118 native Korean speakers in Seoul, Korea. Through the use of drama data and reinforcement via surveys, this study proposed that 1) direct refusals (e.g., direct no, negatives willingness/ability) are a common attribute of Korean refusals (showing 23.8% of total semantic formulas in the drama data), to a much greater extent than previously thought. 2) Statement of regret/apology is not a common strategy employed by native Korean speakers (1.9% of total semantic formulas in the drama data) unless a large power and/or distance variable is involved. 3) Positive opinion/feeling (e.g., "I would love to but. .. ") is also not frequently employed by native Korean speakers. 4) Frequent uses of criticism of the request/requester etc. (15.3%) identified in the data were mostly in argumentative contexts and through the results of the survey, we argue that some offrecord strategies are equally strong or stronger than bald-on-record strategies. This study introduces the use of drama as a valuable source of near-natural speech data. To date, the use of drama data in analysing speech acts have been very limited. By analysing drama data, new aspects of Korean refusals have been uncovered. In particular, this study has been found that many of the refusals involve more the augmentation of face threat than its minimisation, unless there is a large power difference and/or a distance to maintain. This is seemingly in contrast to what is assumed in the politeness theory formulated by Brown and Levinson (1987).

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11

Whiting, Miriam. "Globalism vs. nationalism: The pragmatics of business naming in Tomsk, Russia." The Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1228718917.

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12

Geluykens, Ronald. "The pragmatics of discourse anaphora in English : evidence from conversational repair." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.359356.

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13

Bucher, Barbosa da Silva Tahnee. "Bringing Pragmatics into the ESL Classroom." Thesis, West Virginia University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1522520.

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As a result of the expanding interest in the cognitive and social dimensions of language use beyond single sentences, a great number of research studies have been conducted in order to examine nonnative speakers’ ability to use language appropriately in a social context. Recently, with a growing understanding of the key role pragmatic competence plays in second language development, researchers have also investigated the benefits of direct instruction in helping language learners become aware of the pragmatic conditions governing the uses of grammatical structures. This thesis reports on the design and administration of a study that investigated language learners’ knowledge of pragmatics and how instruction can help them develop this knowledge in an environment where English is taught as a second language. Specifically, this project had two aims: (1) to observe the relationship between language proficiency and pragmatic competence of learners of English as a Second Language (ESL), and (2) to examine whether instruction was effective in improving those learners’ pragmatic knowledge. Pragmatic competence was measured quantitatively, through discourse judgment tasks, multiple-choice discourse completion tasks (MDCTs) and written discourse completion tasks (WDCTs) in a pre-, post-, and delayed post-test, designed specifically for this study. The participants in this research, thirty-nine adult ESL learners with a range of proficiency studying in the Intensive English Program (IEP) and in a university-level English course at West Virginia University, first took a language proficiency test and a pre-test on pragmatic knowledge. The participants were then assigned into two groups, experimental and comparison. The experimental group received four hours of direct instruction in five types of speech acts (requests, refusals, apologies, compliments, suggestions) and other aspects of pragmatic knowledge over a period of two weeks, while the comparison group was taught lessons on other topics without intervention during the same amount of time. An immediate post-test on pragmatic knowledge and a delayed post-test were given to both groups. The results showed that language proficiency and pragmatic knowledge were positively correlated with a moderate strength (r = .71, p < .001). Analysis of covariance and further analysis showed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the comparison group in both the post-test and delayed post-test. The experimental group benefited from the instruction, which used a blended methodological approach, and the instructional effect was retained after a one-week delay. The results of this research helped understand the communicative skills and intercultural competence of ESL learners and demonstrated that instruction in the area of pragmatics is not only important but it can be beneficial at all levels of language proficiency. It is hoped that the topics reported and discussed here and the findings may help both English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and ESL teachers gain a better understanding of second language learners’ pragmatic competence and development through instruction, so that when they incorporate pragmatics instruction into their teaching, they will be in a better position to adapt their practices to facilitate pragmatic development.

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14

Noh, Eun-Ju. "The semantics and pragmatics of misrepresentation in English : a relevance-theoretic approach." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1998. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317897/.

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This thesis deals with the nature of metarepresentation in language. It proposes linguistic-semantic and pragmatic analyses of a variety of metarepresentational expressions in English, using the framework of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995). The main aim is to deepen the relevance-theoretic analysis of metarepresentation, to apply it to a range of data which have not been previously analysed in this framework, and to compare the resulting account with alternative semantic and pragmatic accounts. Chapter 1 looks at various types of quotation (including mention, reported speech and thought, and mixed quotation) and surveys some of the problems encountered by traditional and more recent alternative accounts; the chief problem being that they either do not acknowledge the range and variety of semantic indeterminacies in quotation, or do not provide an adequate account of how these indeterminacies are resolved during utterance comprehension. Chapter 2 introduces relevance theory and shows how the comprehension strategy it provides can be used to resolve the various indeterminacies in quotation. It also shows how the relevance-theoretic notion of metarepresentation (representation by resemblance) can be applied not only to paradigmatic cases of direct and indirect quotation, but also to a range of other cases involving the exploitation of linguistic or conceptual resemblances. What is common to all these cases is that a representation is used with a guarantee of faithfulness to some other representation, rather than truthfulness to some state of affairs. The claim that a metarepresentation can be faithful enough without being identical to the original is illustrated and explored. The remaining chapters extend the analysis to more complex and controversial cases. Chapter 3 looks at previous accounts of metalinguistic negation, and develops a relevance-theoretic account whose linguistic-semantic and pragmatic properties are investigated and compared with previous relevance-theoretic accounts. Chapter 4 looks at previous treatments of echo questions, both inside and outside relevance theory and extends the relevance-theoretic analysis to deal with some standard and non-standard types of echoic question. Chapter 5 deals with a variety of metarepresentational conditionals, and develops a relevance-theoretic account, comparing it with previous accounts. My conclusion is that the relevance-theoretic approach can yield analyses that are better justified than previous accounts on both descriptive and explanatory grounds.

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15

Tanaka, Noriko. "The pragmatics of uncertainty : its realisation and interpretation in English and Japanese." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1993. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.334067.

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16

Gorayska, Barbara Maria. "The semantics and pragmatics of English and Polish with reference to aspect." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.262556.

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17

Tzanidaki, Dimitra Irini. "The syntax and pragmatics of subject and object position in modern Greek." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.338813.

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18

Tran, Hau. "Syntax and pragmatics : the Japanese particles ga and wa, and their relationship." Thesis, University of Ulster, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.241683.

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19

Thomas, J. "The dynamics of discourse : A pragmatic analysis of confrontational interaction." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.372937.

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20

Andueza, Patricia L. "Rhetorical Exclamative in Spanish." The Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1315414519.

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21

Cummins, Chris. "The interpretation and use of numerically-quantified expressions." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/241034.

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This thesis presents a novel pragmatic account of the meaning and use of numerically-quantified expressions. It can readily be seen that quantities can typically be described by many semantically truthful expressions - for instance, if 'more than 12' is true of a quantity, so is 'more than 11', 'more than 10', and so on. It is also intuitively clear that some of these expressions are more suitable than others in a given situation, a preference which is not captured by the semantics but appears to rely upon on wider-ranging considerations of communicative effectiveness. Motivated by these observations, I lay out a set of criteria that are demonstrably relevant to the speaker's choice of utterance in such cases. Observing further that it is typically impossible to satisfy all these criteria with a single utterance, I suggest that the speaker's choice of utterance can be construed as a problem of multiple constraint satisfaction. Using the formalism of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), I proceed to specify a model of speaker behaviour for this domain of usage. The model I propose can be used to draw predictions both about the speaker's choice of utterance and the hearer's interpretation of utterances. I discuss the relation between these two aspects of the model, showing how constraints on the speaker's choice of utterance are predicted to make pragmatic enrichments available to the hearer. I then consider applications of this idea to specific issues that have been discussed in the literature. Firstly, with respect to superlative quantifiers, I show how this model provides an alternative account to that of Geurts and Nouwen (2007), building upon that offered by Cummins and Katsos (2010), and I present empirical evidence in its favour. Secondly, I show how this model yields the novel prediction that comparative quantifiers give rise to implicatures that are conditioned both by granularity and by prior mention of the numeral, and demonstrate these implicatures empirically. Finally I discuss the predictions that the model makes about the frequency of quantifiers in corpora, and investigate their validity. I conclude that the model presented here proves its worth as a source of hypotheses about speaker and hearer behaviour in the numerical domain. In particular, it serves as a way to integrate insights from distinct domains of enquiry including psycholinguistics, theoretical semantics and numerical cognition. I discuss the claim of this model to psychological plausibility, its relation to existing approaches, and its potential utility when applied to broader domains of language use.

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22

Kawamura, Akihiko. "How a compromise can be reached between theoretical pragmatics and practical lexicography, and, An empirical study towards the better treatment of pragmatics in EFL lexicography: comparing the appreciation of pragmatic failures in Japanese learners of English and English native speakers, and, Pragmatics and lexicography, with particular reference to politeness and Japanese learners of English." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2014. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4795/.

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The topic of my three-part thesis is pragmatic information in EFL dictionaries. The thesis started with literature review and theoretical explorations of pragmatic information for EFL dictionaries (Module 1). Based on the findings from this first Module, I approached pragmatics focusing on lexical items and their pragmatic behaviours in context, seeking to collect empirical data for describing pragmatics in EFL and lexicographical contexts (Module 2). However, it is important to raise the question of whether pragmatics and lexicography can ever be made compatible at all, since they have different goals, approaches and methods in dealing with different types of meaning. Their units of descriptions are also different; while dictionaries are in principle concerned with words and phrases, pragmatics deals with utterances and discourses. More importantly, dictionaries are basically concerned with decontextualised meanings, and are expected to set out relatively fixed meanings, perhaps prescriptively, in the form of a dictionary definition or explanation. In contrast, descriptive pragmatics treats meaning in context. In this third module, I will be working towards my conclusion that they are indeed compatible, with particular emphasis on politeness.

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23

Scott-Phillips, Thomas C. "Social evolution of pragmatic behaviour." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/3385.

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Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that addresses the relationship between language and its external environment – in particular the communicative context. Social evolution (or sociobiology) is the branch of the biological sciences that studies the social behaviour of organisms, particularly with respect to the ecological and evolutionary forces with which it must interact. These two disciplines thus share a natural epistemic link, one that is concerned with the relationship between behaviour and the environment. There has, however, historically been no dialogue between them. This thesis attempts to fill that void: it examines pragmatics from the perspective of social evolution theory. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the two fields and their key ideas, and also discusses why an evolutionary understanding of pragmatics is crucial to the study of language origins. In chapter 2 the vexed question of the biological function of language is discussed. Responses are given to the claims, common in the evolutionary linguistics literature, that the processes of exaptation, self‑organisation and cultural transmission provide alternatives to natural selection as a source of design in nature. The intuitive conclusion that the function of language is communication is provisionally supported, subject to a proper definition of communication. Chapter 3 reviews previous definitions and consequently argues for an account predicated on the designedness of signals and responses. This definition is then used to argue that an evolutionarily coherent model of language should recognise the pragmatic realities of ostension and inference and reject the code‑like idealisation that is often used in its place. Chapter 4 observes that this fits the argument that the biological function of language is communication and then addresses the key question faced by all evolved communication systems – that of evolutionary stability. The human capacity to record and remember the past behaviour of others is seen to be critical. Chapter 5 uses the definition of communication from chapter 3 to describe a very general model of evolved communication, and then uses the constraints of that model to argue that Relevance Theory, or at least some theory of pragmatics with a very similar logical structure, must be correct. Chapter 6 then applies the theoretical apparatus constructed in chapters 2 to 5 to a crucial and topical issue in evolutionary linguistics: the emergence of learnt, symbolic communication. It introduces the Embodied Communication Game, an experimental tool whose basic structure is significantly informed by both social evolutionary and, in particular, pragmatic theory. The novelty of the game is that participants must find a way to communicate not just the content that they wish to convey, but also the very fact that a given behaviour is communicative in nature, and this constraint is found to fundamentally influence the type of system that emerges. Chapter 7, which concludes the thesis, recounts and clarifies what it tells us about the origins and evolution of language, and suggests a number of possible avenues for future research.

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Bailes, Rachael Louise. "An evolutionary psycholinguistic approach to the pragmatics of reference." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/22978.

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Pragmatics concerns the material function of language use in the world, and thus touches on profound questions about the relationship between our cognition and the environments in which we operate. Both psycholinguistics and evolutionary linguistics have afforded greater attention to pragmatics in recent years. Though the potential of evolutionary psycholinguistics has been noted for over twenty-five years (e.g. Tooby & Cosmides, 1990; Scott-Phillips, 2010a), there has arguably been little dialogue between these two fields of study. This thesis explicitly acknowledges and investigates the adaptationist nature of functional claims in psycholinguistics, and attempts to demonstrate that psycholinguistic inquiry can provide evidence that is relevant to theories of how the cognitive architecture of linguistic communication evolved. Chapter two reviews a broad polarisation in the pragmatic and psycholinguistic literature concerning the relative roles of linguistic convention and contextual information in comprehension. It makes explicit the theoretical approaches that reliably give rise to these polar positions across scholarly domains. It goes on to map each model of comprehension to the adaptationist particulars it may entail, and in doing so illustrates two different pictures of how linguistic cognition has developed over phylogeny. The Social Adaptation Hypothesis (SAH) holds that linguistic comprehension is performed by relevance-oriented inferential mechanisms that have been selected for by a social environment (i.e. inference-using conspecifics). In particular, the SAH holds that linguistic conventions are attended to in the same way as other ostensive stimuli and contextual information, and because of their relevance to communicative interactions. The Linguistic Adaptation Hypothesis (LAH) holds that linguistic comprehension is performed by specialised cognition that has been selected for by a linguistic environment (i.e. language-using conspecifics) that was established subsequent to, and as a consequence of, the emergence of inferential communication. In particular, the LAH holds that linguistic conventions are a privileged domain of input for the comprehension system. The plausibility and congruence of both accounts with the current state of knowledge about the evolutionary picture necessitates empirical psycholinguistic evidence. The remainder of the thesis presents a series of experiments investigating referential expressions relevant to the contrastive predictions of these two adaptationist accounts. The broad question that covers all of these experiments is: how sensitive is the comprehension process to linguistic input qua linguistic input, relative to various other grades of relevant contextual information? Chapter three presents a reaction time experiment that uses speaker-specific facts about referents as referring expressions, in a conversational precedent paradigm. The experiment measures the relative sensitivity of comprehension processing to the knowledge states of speakers and the consistent use of linguistic labels, and finds greater sensitivity to linguistic labels. Chapter four introduces a further contextual variable into this paradigm, in the form of culturally copresent associations between labels and referents. The experiment presented in this chapter compares the relative sensitivity of processing to culturally copresent common ground, the privileged knowledge state of speakers, and the consistent use of linguistic labels. The results indicated greater sensitivity to linguistic labels overall, and were consistent with the LAH. Chapter five turns to visual context as a constraint on reference, and presents two pairs of experiments. Experiments 3 and 4 investigate the comprehension of referring expressions across congruous, incongruous, and abstract visual contexts. The experiments measured reaction time as subjects were prompted to identify constituent parts of tangram pictures. The results indicated a sensitivity to the visual context and the linguistic labels, and are broadly consistent with the SAH. If comprehension is characterised by particular sensitivities, we may expect speakers to produce utterances that lend themselves well to how hearers process them. Experiments 5 and 6 use a similar tangram paradigm to elicit referring expressions from speakers for component parts of tangrams. The experiments measure the consistency of produced labels for the same referents across visual contexts of varied congruity. The results indicated some methodological limitations of the tangram paradigm for the study of repeated reference across contexts. Lastly, the thesis concludes by considering the SAH and LAH in light of the empirical evidence presented and its accompanying limitations, and argues that the evidence is generally consistent with the assumptions of the LAH.

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25

Rouchota, Vassiliki. "The semantics and pragmatics of the subjunctive in modern Greek : a relevance-theoretic approach." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1994. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317935/.

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The aim of this thesis is to propose a semantic analysis of the subjunctive mood in Modem Greek and to show how the various interpretations subjunctive clauses may have can be accounted for in terms of independently motivated communicative principles. My analysis is based on relevance-theoretic assumptions about semantics and pragmatics (Sperber and Wilson 1986, Wilson and Sperber 1988a, 1993). In chapter 1 some of the existing accounts of the subjunctive are considered and found inadequate. A new semantic account, based on the relevance-theoretic approach to semantics, is put forward and discussed, with special reference to the subjunctive in Modern Greek. It is argued that the subjunctive encodes procedural meaning about propositional attitude, which is non-truth- conditional. In particular, it constrains the interpretation of an utterance by indicating that the proposition expressed is entertained as a description of a state of affairs in a possible world. In chapters 2 and 3 the issue addressed is how we can account for the various interpretations of subjunctive clauses. Imperative-like subjunctive clauses, and subjunctive clauses expressing wishes, potentiality and possibility are discussed in chapter 2; expressive, narrative and interrogative subjunctive clauses are dealt with in chapter 3. It is shown that the way subjunctive clauses are interpreted in a particular context is a function of their semantically encoded meaning and considerations of optimal relevance. Chapter 4 prepares the ground for chapter 5. It is argued that definite and indefinite descriptions are not semantically ambiguous; their various interpretations are accounted for by a univocal semantics interacting with context and relevance considerations, i.e. pragmatically. In chapter 5 the interpretation of Modern Greek restrictive relatives in the indicative and subjunctive is discussed. It is shown that the restrictions on the possible interpretations of the description which the relative clause accompanies fall out from the semantic contrast between the indicative and the subjunctive as defined in chapter 1.

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26

Guerzoni, Elena. "Why even ask? : on the pragmatics of questions and the semantics of answers." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17646.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2003.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-245).
This work investigates the semantics-pragmatics and syntax-pragmatics interface of interrogatives, focusing on the effect of presupposition-triggering expressions like even and Negative Polarity Items (NPIs). In exploring these cases, I aim is to contribute new empirical evidence and theoretical insight pertinent to the general issue of how presuppositions project in interrogative environments. Although the phenomenon of presuppositions has received considerable attention in previous work, very little is understood about how precisely presuppositions project in the domain of questions. My main goal is to establish what processes generate presuppositions in questions, starting from what we know about the semantics of questions and about the contribution of expressions introducing presuppositions in declaratives. The strategy I pursue in this investigation consists in looking at cases where presuppositional material affects the interpretation of a question in ways that go beyond the mere introduction of a presupposition. Even and certain NPIs (so called 'minimizers') provide a rich and constrained testing ground in this sense, as they can be exploited to signal that a questioning act is meant to be biased towards a negative answer. This thesis argues that this otherwise puzzling property of questions with minimizers and even can be understood as a product of (i) the way the presuppositions of even project in a question and affect the question denotation; and (ii) the way general pragmatic principles governing what it means to ask a question regulate how the resulting denotation can be used by speakers in a given context.
(cont.) More specifically I show that the anomalous properties of biased questions with even are the product of the presuppositions even introduces in their possible answers and the felicity of these answers in a given context. The general conclusion this result allows me to draw is that a theory of projection in questions must reduce their presuppositions to answerability conditions of a question in a context. The theory of bias and presuppositions of questions developed in this thesis leads to a number of interesting implications regarding on the one hand even and its variants across languages and, on the other hand, the semantics and syntax of constituent questions.
by Elena Guerzoni.
Ph.D.

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Wright, Elizabeth M. "PRAGMATIC FUNCTIONALITY OF PUNCTUATION ON TWITTER." UKnowledge, 2018. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/ltt_etds/29.

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This work presents an analysis of punctuation use in computer-mediated communication (CMC); in particular, the present study aims to describe the pragmatic functions of nonstandard punctuation on Twitter, providing a corpus-driven overview of the distribution and frequency of nonstandard punctuation use, and an analysis of sampled tweets at the individual tweet level to estimate noise levels in the overall corpus. A survey was also conducted which aimed to identify user understanding of the affective content of nonstandard punctuation strings and to identify any possible effects of character repetition. Survey results indicate that linguistic content was the strongest indicator of affective understanding, type of punctuation (i.e., ?, !, and combinations thereof) was a weaker indicator of some affective content, and repetition was not found to be significant. The study argues that certain string types, possibly defined by punctuation type and not count, have large indexical fields of pragmatic meaning available to them, which are bounded by context. In light of these observations, the study also proposes distinctions/categories of punctuation strings and their associated pragmatic meanings.

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Glover, Kelly D. "Pragmatics and the consequentiality of talk : a study of members' methods at a planning application meeting." Thesis, Durham University, 1995. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/5424/.

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This study explores how talk is consequential by examining the sequential and pragmatic phenomena in talk-in-interaction. Reflecting the work of conversation analysis (CA), the approach assumes that the consequentiality of a 'context' must be demonstrated by the informants' sequential practices (cf. Schegloff 1987, Boden and Zimmerman 1991). However, in this study a model of consequentiality is proposed, in which not only sequential phenomena but also pragmatic categories are included within the repertoire of members' methods. In this way, the indexicality of language as explained by pragmatic theory is seen to contribute to the account of talk as consequential. The data represent a meeting between an urban planning department and a national development company in which a planning application is discussed. As such, members' methods are seen to invoke the institutional nature of the encounter, in which the formality of the setting and the work-related membership of the interactants is systematically oriented to. The talk consists of a series of negotiated issues in which the developers and the planners propose different candidate outcomes reflecting each party’s professional aims and the constraints they consider themselves to operate under. In particular, the analysis shows that candidate outcomes are largely managed by sequential preference systems and pragmatically characterized face-address (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987).The notion of reflexivity is also seen as a significant component in the study of consequentiality. While the concept is a basic assumption in a CA framework (Garfinkel and Sacks 1969) and is also recognized as fundamental in pragmatic inquiry (Lucy 1993), few studies provide a detailed analysis of members' reflexive awareness of the contexts they create. In this study, the interactants' metalinguistic and metapragmatic orientation, invoked by both pragmatic and sequential methods, is shown to be a prevalent members' resource for indicating awareness of consequentiality. Finally, observations of the kind made in this thesis, wherein pragmatic categories both work together and are systematically related to the sequential environment, contribute to a general re-analysis of pragmatic meaning. At the same time, the interaction of pragmatic and sequential features also represents a dynamic starting point for developing new methodological categories for investigating talk-in-interaction.

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Hayes, Elizabeth R. "The pragmatics of perception and cognition in MT Jeremiah 1.1-6.30 : a cognitive linguistics approach." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.432143.

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Yu, Shengming. "The pragmatic development of hedging in EFL learners /." access full-text access abstract and table of contents, 2009. http://libweb.cityu.edu.hk/cgi-bin/ezdb/thesis.pl?phd-en-b23749398f.pdf.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2009.
"Submitted to Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 235-245)

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Saeed, Aziz T. "The pragmatics of codeswitching from Fusha Arabic to Aammiyyah Arabic in religious-oriented discourse." Virtual Press, 1997. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1063206.

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This study investigated the pragmatics of codeswitching from FuSHa Arabic, the high variety of Arabic (FA), to Aammiyyah Arabic, the low variety or vernacular (AmA), in the most formal type of discourse, namely religious-oriented discourse.The study posited the following five hypotheses:1) CS occurs with considerable frequency in religious discourse; 2) these switches are communicatively purposeful; 3) frequency of CS is related to the linguistic make-up of the audience addressed, 4) to the AmA of the speaker, and 5) to the section of the discourse delivered.To carry out the investigation, the researcher analyzed 18 audio and videotapes of religious discourse, delivered by 13 Arabic religious scholars from different Arab countries. Ten of these tapes were used exclusively to show that CS occurs in religious discourse. The other eight tapes were used to investigate the other hypotheses. The eight tapes involved presentations by three of the most famous religious scholars (from Egypt, Kuwait, and Yemen) delivered 1) within their home countries and 2) outside their home countries.Three of the five hypotheses were supported. It was found that: CS from FA to AmA occurred in religious discourse with considerable frequency; these switches served pragmatic purposes; and the frequency of the switches higher in the question/answer sections than in the lecture sections.Analysis showed that codeswitches fell into three categories: iconic/rhetorical, structural, and other. The switches served numerous communicative functions, some of which resemble the functions found in CS in conversational discourse.One finding was the relationship between the content of the message and the attitude of the speaker toward or its source. Generally, what the speakers perceived as [+positive] was expressed by the H code, and whatever they perceived as [-positive] was expressed by the L code. Scrutiny of this exploitation of the two codes indicated that FA tended to be utilized as a means of upgrading, whereas AmA was used as a means of downgrading.
Department of English

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Gibson, Kimberly Dawn. "Lines by Someone Else: the Pragmatics of Apprompted Poems." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2015. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc804948/.

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Over the last sixty years, overtly intertextual poems with titles such as “Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery” and “Poem Ending with a Line by George W. Bush” have been appearing at an increasing rate in magazines and collections. These poems wed themselves to other texts and authors in distinct ways, inviting readers to engage with poems which are, themselves, in conversation with lines from elsewhere. These poems, which I refer to as “apprompted” poems, explicitly challenge readers to investigate the intertextual conversation, and in doing so, they adopt inherent risks. My thesis will chart the various effects these poems can have for readers and the consequences they may hold for the texts from which they borrow. Literary critics such as Harold Bloom and J. H. Miller have described the act of borrowing as competitive and parasitic—“agon” is Bloom’s term for what he sees as the oedipal anxiety of poets and poets’ texts to their antecedents, but an investigation of this emerging genre in terms of linguistic pragmatics shows that apprompted poems are performing a wider range of acts in relation to their predecessors. Unlike Bloom’s theory, which interprets the impulse of poetic creation through psychoanalysis, I employ linguistic terms from Brown and Levinson’s linguistic Politeness theory to analyze apprompted poems as conversational speech events. Politeness theory provides a useful analysis of these poems by documenting the weight of threats to the positive and negative “faces” of the participants in each poetic conversation. I have documented these “face-threatening-acts” and used them to divide apprompted poems into five major speech events: satire, revision, promotion, pastiche, and ecclesiastic. Ultimately, this paper serves at the intersection of literary criticism and linguistics, as I suggest a theoretical approach to the interpretation and criticism of apprompted poems by way of linguistic pragmatics.

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Lee, Nga-yee Ada. "The use of request forms by preschool children." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 1995. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B36209156.

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Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1995.
"A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 28, 1995." Also available in print.

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34

Ranalter, Kurt. "Reasoning about assertions, obligations and causality on a categorical semantics for a logic for pragmatics." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2008. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/28169.

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The aim of the logic for pragmatics considered in this work is to provide a logical framework that formalises reasoning about the pragmatic forces with which a sentence may be uttered. The concept of pragmatic or illocutionary force comes from speech act theory and plays a crucial role also in certain branches of artificial intelligence, in particular in the development of communication protocols for software agents. Instead of considering the full-blown theory of speech acts, we focus on speech acts that either have the pragmatic force of an assertion or the pragmatic force of an obligation, and on how these speech acts may be related to each other. In particular, we are interested in a principle proposed by Bellin and Dalla Pozza that allows one to promote acts of obligations through causal chains of acts of assertions. The main achievement of this thesis is a sound and complete categorical semantics for a logic for pragmatics incorporating the aforementioned principle. One of the benefits of the proposed semantics is that it allows one to deal with conditional obligations as well, thus extending the framework in a very interesting way. Although the logical framework considered in this work incorporates only two types of speech acts, we hope to be able to show that we have a well-behaved core fragment that can serve as a fruitful basis for further investigations.

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35

McClure, Bruce David. "Between the seen and the said : Deleuze-Guattari's pragmatics of the order-word." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2001. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4497/.

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This thesis investigates Deleuze-Guattari's notion of stratification through a series of investigations into their material on language. Stratification is their term for the process by which matter-energy comes to assume the relatively stable historical formations of our social world, and in particular the relationship between subjects, objects and words. The complex notion of the order-word/password is proposed as key to this process, with its role in the articulations of the strata (as order-word) and in movements of creation and escape (as password). I explore this apparatus from a variety of angles, in order to present an account of Deleuze-Guattari's pragmatics that demonstrates both its basis in philosophy and its connections with the world. I begin by introducing the notion of 'difference in itself', through Deleuze/Deleuze-Guattari's critique of representation and their account of subjectification, the creation of the subject in space and time (in relation to Bergson and Kant) - and then feed this material through an encounter with Judge Schreber, in the process filling out our account of the subject. The resulting diagram of stratification is further explored through a dialogue with two other key thinkers of language - Wittgenstein, in relation to his social conception of meaning as use, and Derrida, in relation to his critique of Austin and Searle's Speech Act theory - in either case, demonstrating important connections and contrasts with Deleuze-Guattari. I then examine the specifics of stratoanalysis through an examination of the related zones of the formal, the abstract and the incorporeal, bringing this to bear on Deleuze- Guattari's appropriation of the linguist Hjelmslev, and to the criticisms of Ruthrof. The final step is to relate this apparatus both to linguistic and everyday understandings of language, connecting this pragmatics of the order-word with the notion of an 'art of living' through a consideration of standardised language and 'verbal hygiene'.

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Slembrouck, Stefaan G. G. "The study of language use in its societal context : pragmatics and the representation of Parliamentary debates in newspaper discourse." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.357003.

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37

Sinnott, Sarah T. "Address Forms in Castilian Spanish: Convention and Implicature." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1275449503.

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38

Nkurikiye, Sylvestre. "The pragmatics of Kirundi marriage discourse : speech acts and discourse strategies." Virtual Press, 1991. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/833004.

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This dissertation is a descriptive study of speech acts encoded in Kirundi marriage transactional discourse and the strategies used by the participants to encode them and attempts to understand the interrelationships between the speech acts and the strategies.Chapter 1 states the objectives and describes the data to be studied and the approach to go about it. Chapter 2 provides the reader with some background information on Burundian society and culture in the area of matrimony.Chapter 3 explores the conversation activities and the management of the interactions between the interactants in the sociocultural context of marriage transactions. Formality participation status are discussed and shown to be crucial factors for the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of the participants' verbal contributions. Chapter 4 investigates the nature and the function of the speech acts performed by the interactants. The speech act identification and categorization are based on the social aspects of linguistic action and on the conventionality and contextuality of discourse. Chapter 5 inquires into the strategies applied by the interactants to encode and decode them. Chapter 6 is a summary and conclusion.
Department of English

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39

Johnson, Cynthia Amy. "Deconstructing and Reconstructing Semantic Agreement: A Case Study of Multiple Antecedent Agreement in Indo-European." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1417714779.

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40

Hayes, Elizabeth R. "The pragmatics of perception and cognition in MT Jeremiah 1:1-6:30 a cognitive linguistics approach." Berlin New York de Gruyter, 2008. http://d-nb.info/988076853/04.

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41

Gonzalez-Perez, Maria Alejandra. "Dependencia Contextual e Interpretación: Demostrativos y Pronombres en Español." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1276893199.

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42

Armstrong, Meghan Elizabeth. "The development of yes-no question intonation in Puerto Rican Spanish." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1345565869.

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43

Karasawa, Sachie. "Relevance theory and redundancy phenomena in second language learners' written English discourse: An interlanguage pragmatics perspective." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280519.

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The purpose of this study was to contribute to a better understanding of nonnative English speaking students' interlanguage pragmatics in written discourse. It examined whether the types of redundancy found in second language (L2) learners' written English discourse may be explained by a lack of pragmatic knowledge, and used the theoretical framework of Sperber and Wilson's (1986) Relevance Theory. The particular type of pragmatic knowledge examined was the appropriate use of contextual information assumed to be manifest between the writer (i.e. the student) and the reader (i.e. the instructor). The subjects were 40 nonnative (NNS) and 34 native (NS) English speaking college students enrolled in freshman composition courses. They wrote essays on two topics that were selected carefully to manipulate the degrees of mutually manifest contextual information. The introduction section of each essay was submitted to an initial quantitative analysis. The results indicated that: (1) The mean length of the NNS essays was greater than that of the NS essays on both topics, and the difference on topic one reached a statistically significant level (p < 0.05), (2) The difference between the mean length of the NS essays on topics one and two was statistically significant (topic one

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Shelton, Abigail Leigh. "Japanese native perceptions of the facial expressions of American learners of L2 Japanese in specified contexts." The Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1543450226217818.

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45

Walsh, Yuliya. "FORMS OF ADDRESS IN CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN NEWSPAPERS: Morphology, Gender and Pragmatics." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1397785889.

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46

Schuster, Peter. "Relevance theory meets markedness considerations on cognitive effort as a criterion for markedness in pragmatics /." Frankfurt am Main : Lang, 2003. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/51984646.html.

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47

Mak, Kit Ling Agatha. "Cross-cultural pragmatics : a study of Chinese and Western children's use of requests and apologies." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2007. http://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/852.

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48

Tryzna, Marta Maria. "Acquisition of object clitics in child Polish: a deficiency at the syntax-pragmatics interface or evidence for D-linking." Diss., University of Iowa, 2009. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/323.

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The goal of the following project is to probe into the early knowledge of the syntactic and the pragmatic components of language at the syntax-pragmatics interface, as exemplified by discourse-related elements such as object clitics. Object clitics, in addition to allowing for cross-linguistic generalizations, provide an insight into the early clause structure and the mechanisms which constrain the syntax-pragmatics interface. Cross linguistic variation has been found to be limited and well-governed, and has been attributed to the underlying syntactic mechanism, such as the Unique Checking Constrain or a number of pragmatic constraints operative in the child's grammar such as inability to mark referentiality. In addition, this study explores a theory which attempts to integrate the acquisition of syntax and pragmatics by attributing early non-finite structures in child grammar to a maturational discourse linking mechanism. The present project seeks to validate the claims of the above theories by offering new data and a novel perspective. The empirical part presents the results of one pilot study based on naturalistic language production by a monolingual Polish child age 2;1 - 2;9, and three data elicitation experiments conducted with 53 monolingual Polish children age 2;9 - 5;10. the clitic production experiment composed of two types of data. The pilot study establishes the relative age of clitic production. The data elicitation experiments focus on clitic production, clitic comprehension and knowledge of Principle B, as well as clitic referentiality resolution in pragmatically infelicitous contexts. It is shown that Polish children do not produce clitics from the beginning. It is concluded based on group and individual results that comprehension of objects clitic precedes production and that production is unlikely without comprehension. It is shown that age is a significant factor in clitic comprehension, production and referentiality resolution. It is demonstrated that Polish children exhibit early knowledge of Principle B. Also, it is suggested that children who produce object clitics are more likely to resolve clitic referentiality in pragmatically infelicitous contexts.

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Fortin, Antonio. "The morphology and semantics of expressive affixes." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:88a23d7c-c229-49af-9fc9-2cb35fce9d54.

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This dissertation focuses on two aspects of expressive affixes: their morphological/typological properties and their semantics. With regard to the former, it shows that the expressive morphology of many languages (including Bantu, West Atlantic, Walman, Sanskrit, English, Romance, Slavic, and others), has the following properties: 1) it is systematically anomalous when compared to plain morphology, or the ordinary processes of word-formation and inflection. From this, it follows that many familiar morphological arguments that adduce the data of expressive morphology ought to be reconsidered; and 2) it is far more pervasive than has been traditionally thought. For example, the Sanskrit preverb, and the Indo-European aspectual prefix/particle generally, are shown to have systematically expressive functions. With respect to the semantics of expressive affixes, it develops a novel multidimensional account, in the sense of Potts (2005, 2007), of Spanish "connotative affixes," which can simultaneously convey descriptive and expressive meaning. It shows that their descriptive meaning is that of a gradable adjective, viewed as a degree relation which includes a measure function, in the sense of Kennedy (1997). The expressive meanings of connotative affixes, and expressives generally, arise as they manipulate the middle coordinate, I, of expressive indices which, it is proposed, is inherently specified on all lexical items and canonically set to "neutral." It introduces a new mechanism, AFF, which is an algebraic operation for manipulating I, and which accounts for the well-known, and seemingly "contradictory," range of meanings that expressive affixes can express. Whereas prior work assumes that expressive affixes are inherently polysemous, this approach derives their many attested meanings and functions (e.g., "small," "young," "bad," deprecation, appreciation, hypocorism, intensification/exactness, and attenuation/approximation, as well as pragmatic effects like illocutionary mitigation) compositionally, from the interactions of their multidimensionality with the meanings of the roots to which they attach.

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Taranto, Gina Christine. "Discourse Adjectives /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3099909.

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