Language and Theory of Mind come together in communication, but their relationship has been intensely contested. I hypothesize that pragmatic markers connect language and Theory of Mind and enable their co-development and co-evolution through a positive feedback loop, whereby the development of one skill boosts the development of the other. I propose to test this hypothesis by investigating two types of pragmatic markers: demonstratives and articles. Pragmatic markers are closed-class words that encode non-representational information (...) that is unavailable to consciousness, but accessed automatically in processing. These markers have been associated with implicit Theory of Mind because they are used to establish joint attention and mark shared knowledge. Here I develop a theoretical account of how joint attention is the basis for children’s later tracking of common ground. The developmental path from joint attention to common ground parallels language change, with demonstrative forms giving rise to definite articles. This parallel opens the possibility of modelling the emergence of Theory of Mind in human development in tandem with its routinization across language communities and generations of speakers. I therefore propose that, in order to understand the relationship between language and Theory of Mind, we should study pragmatics at three parallel timescales: during language acquisition, language use, and language change. (shrink)

This article explores the role that markers play in the pragmatic discourse structure of Catalan and English oral narratives. It is argued that their meaning is directly related to the sort of coherence relation that they establish with preceding and following propositions and discourse segments, centring the discussion on four discourse structures/components: ideational, rhetorical, sequential and inferential. The aim is to show the textual form-pragmatic function relationship by means of specific lexical units placed at specific parts of (...) the narrative. The hypothesis held in this article is that pragmatic markers help in the organization of narrative segments and that their semanticopragmatic traits make them appropriate for their use in specific segments. (shrink)

This study reports on the use of like in Aboriginal English teen talk. The analysis of a sub-corpus of 40 adolescent texts from a corpus of 100 narratives by speakers of Aboriginal English in Western Australia revealed that like is often employed by these speakers, and that it achieves a multitude of functions. In general it is observed that like may mark off a) a discrepancy between the intended conceptualization and the expressed concept, b) an attitude, feeling, or certain degree (...) of commitment towards a lexical item, and c) a shift in some element of discourse. The results of this study support and extend the analysis carried out by Andersen on London teen talk. (shrink)

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 pauses (FPs) serve several pragmatic functions in speech, mainly planning but also turn-holding (...) and emphasis, and their use is also highly determined by register and setting. This research explores the different pragmatic functions of FPs by analyzing their distribution in two different communication settings (conversation vs presentation setting), combining a quantitative and a qualitative methodology, following Kosmala & Crible’s (2021) study on the same data. Particular attention was paid to the co-occurring gestural activity of uh/ums and gaze behavior. Analyses show that the pragmatic functions of FPs are also embodied in kinetic activities which differ according to the setting: more pragmatic and referential ones were found during FPs in conversation than in the presentation setting, as well as more eye-contact, which reflects their potential communicative role during interactional sequences. (shrink)

This paper offers a politolinguistic analysis of four ‘state of the nation’ speeches delivered by the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán between 1999 and 2002. The analysis focuses on the ways in which Orbán’s self-representation, his discourse strategies and the tone of the speeches changed in response to changes in the ideological background over the four years in question. The findings demonstrate that Orbán’s voice was most active in the pre-election speech of 2002, that he had become increasingly interpellative (in (...) the Althusserian sense) over this period and that he increasingly tried to conversationalize the dominant ideology. (shrink)

Since the inception of modern approaches to grammar, Japanese ga has been treated as a marker indicating the grammatical relation `subject.' If this is an accurate characterization of ga, then we would expect ga to occur to mark a grammatical category consisting of `A' and `S'. Our examination of the contexts in which ga is actually used in everyday Japanese conversations shows that this expectation is not borne out. Our findings suggest that it is not appropriate to describe ga in (...) terms of a grammatical relation such as `subject', and that ga may be much less a grammatical marker than a discourse-pragmatic one. (shrink)

This study briefly describes the prosodic and pragmatic characteristics of the discourse marker ni zhidao in spoken Chinese. It mainly explores the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics using instrumental methods. It is the first attempt to use acoustic and statistical analysis to examine the prosodic parameters and prosody-pragmatics interaction of a Chinese discourse marker. The corpus includes 71 interview conversations totaling more than 30 h, in which 490 discourse marker tokens of ni zhidao were found. Ni zhidao mainly (...) fulfilled four broad pragmatic functions of initiating a topic when occurring sentence-initially, of holding the floor when appearing within clauses, of marking coherence when making its presence between clauses, and of projecting attitudes and feelings when showing up sentence-finally. Drawing on the algorithm of random forest in R, the acoustic and statistical analysis of the performance of ni zhidao in these four functions showed that its prosodic features, including duration, tempo, pre-pause, post-pause, F0, and intensity, significantly relate to and thus imply its pragmatic functions, that the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics can be modeled statistically, and that the established pragmatics classification model based on prosody can be utilized to predict the pragmatics of ni zhidao. These findings seem to strengthen the hypothesis that prosodic variables play a role in deciphering the different pragmatic functions of ni zhidao. This study uses prosodic evidence to more objectively reveal not only the part of ni zhidao in dynamically constructing and embodying specific contexts but also its communicative functions and the underlying meta-pragmatic awareness behind it. This study breaks through the limitations of traditional discourse marker research, which mainly relies on context and discourse characteristics for subjective reasoning. (shrink)

This paper presents the philosophical theory underpinning an empirical study that found changes in the semantic usage of first person pronouns by recovering psychotherapy patients. The philosophical theory provided semantic variables that could serve as markers of recovery. It derived from the semantic theory by Gottlob Frege and the logic of relations, and accounts for the meaning expressed by the first person pronouns as distinct from their syntax and pragmatic symbolization. This distinction is worthwhile because empirical evidence was (...) found for change in the meaning expressed by these pronouns during recovery, but not for change in their syntax or pragmatic symbolization. Philosophical work on the concepts of illness and recovery was used to deduce that the semantic variables are markers of recovery in general rather than in psychotherapy only. As with the empirical study, the semantic variables were shown to change as follows when someone recovers: occupancy of alpha positions is taken up and occupancy of omega positions is relinquished. Potential applications of these findings were examined by which the tracking of the semantic variables may serve to improve the clinician's understanding of a patient, monitor a patient's progress, and enhance recovery. (shrink)

This article suggests a model of uttering/énonciation as representational activity (Energeia) throughout the observable case of both impersonal injunctions and collaborative interaction. Being a dynamic relation at the intersection of notions, language and world, reference, this model integrates a new paradigm into the realm of discursive linguistics, the described morphodynamic language phenomenon instead of the described hypothesis emanating from “structuralized” grammars. We thus discuss one aspect of the interaction adjustment/distortion beyond mere projection (stasis of both virtual social markers and (...) uttered stable forms), considering distortion as a relevant marker of the described observable (an interaction from a translation course for instance). Henceforth, beyond the speech act frame, we present a mathematical attempt to study the variation of the pragmatic impact taking place between projection and result; this last implies two sources positions and praxical levels. As a conclusive note, we expose a brief insight into the phenomenon misunderstanding between both neurocognitive and linguistic studies. (shrink)

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence-internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however, points to ways in which each subsequent utterance provides new opportunities for listeners to infer speaker meaning. Such inferences allow the listener to build up a representation of the speakers' intended topic and more generally (...) to identify relationships, structures, and messages that extend across multiple utterances. We address this issue by analyzing a video corpus of child–caregiver interactions. We use topic continuity as an index of discourse structure, examining how caregivers introduce and discuss objects across utterances. For the analysis, utterances are grouped into topical discourse sequences using three annotation strategies: raw annotations of speakers' referents, the output of a model that groups utterances based on those annotations, and the judgments of human coders. We analyze how the lexical, syntactic, and social properties of caregiver–child interaction change over the course of a sequence of topically related utterances. Our findings suggest that many cues used to signal topicality in adult discourse are also available in child-directed speech. (shrink)

Stance is inherent in conversational interaction and is interactional in nature. When speakers take a stance, they pay attention to both prior stances and stance relations, as well as to the anticipated consequences of their stancetaking. They manage stance relations as a way of dealing with the “sociocognitive relations” of intersubjectivity (Du Bois 2007). Using the dialogic framework proposed by Du Bois, this paper shows that the discourse marker Well in American English works as a resource for the management of (...) relationships among stances. With its referential and grammatical flexibility, it is uniquely characterized as a meta-stance marker because, rather than indexing a specific stance, it negotiates and regulates stance relations. Well is analyzed in two contextual categories: first, at stance divergence among utterances, and second, at stance shifts embedded in topic shift. (shrink)

Stance is inherent in conversational interaction and is interactional in nature. When speakers take a stance, they pay attention to both prior stances and stance relations, as well as to the anticipated consequences of their stancetaking. They manage stance relations as a way of dealing with the “sociocognitive relations” of intersubjectivity. Using the dialogic framework proposed by Du Bois, this paper shows that the discourse marker well in American English works as a resource for the management of relationships among stances. (...) With its referential and grammatical flexibility, it is uniquely characterized as a meta-stance marker because, rather than indexing a specific stance, it negotiates and regulates stance relations. Well is analyzed in two contextual categories: first, at stance divergence among utterances, and second, at stance shifts embedded in topic shift. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the potential of systematically studying the linguistic surface of discourse for the purposes of identifying markers of argumentative moves and other related categories, such as types of arguments and argumentative strategies. Such a list of argumentative markers can prove useful for the (semi)automatic treatment of a large corpus of texts. After reviewing literature on the linguistic realization of argumentative moves as well as literature on the subject of discourse markers, it becomes clear (...) that the search for representative items of argumentative markers cannot be restricted to those elements marking relations but that it should also include elements that signal a certain function that is of pertinence to argumentative analysis. In this view, argumentative markers can be any single or complex lexical expression as well as a discursive configuration whose presence in a given utterance marks that utterance or the one preceding/following it, or a larger piece of discourse as having a certain argumentative function (as an argumentative move, a type of argument or an argumentative strategy). Examples taken from a French corpus on the controversy surrounding the development and applications of nanotechnology currently under study are used to illustrate the different types of argumentative markers proposed. (shrink)

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 confirm the propositional-first hypothesis but semantics and pragmatics appear to work together, rather than first one then the other, at least in this (...) case, and this runs counter to both diachronic theories and usage-based accounts of L1 acquisition. 88 occurrences of en fait and 174 of actually were extracted from the CHILDES database, and coded for two functions (adversative and elaborative) and three domains (propositional, textual, expressive). The results suggest that the pragmatic functions of actually are used by children as young as two years old, but the same is not true of en fait, which is almost exclusively propositional in the early years. By contrast, before age 5, French children start to use en fait for textual and elaborative functions to a greater extent than actually. The role of syntactic position and parental input are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, the pragmatic functions served by ḥāshāk and its variants in colloquial Algerian Arabic (CAA) are unravelled. Literally, ḥāshāk means “You’re exalted/exempt from X/I distance you from X,” where X is a bad thing or socially/religiously unacceptable act. Its variants include ḥāsha, ḥāshākem, ḥāshāh/ḥāshāha/ḥāshāhem, maḥashākesh, and the verb ḥāsha/ḥāshi. As far as the author is aware, this is the first study on the pragmatics of ḥāshāk and its variants in colloquial (Algerian) Arabic. Two complementary data sets were (...) collected and analyzed: an online survey administered to native speakers (N= 263) and a corpus of naturally occurring examples gained using an ethnographic method (N= 172). The findings indicated that the core semantic import (exaltative/excepting/exempting meaning) is retained in CAA and further extended to perform other pragmatic functions: apologetic, appreciative, requestive, concessive, critical, defensive, and sarcastic. These intertwined functions are expected in an array of highly conventionalized contexts. These findings were discussed from an eclectic perspective (e.g., pragmatic reversal, pragmatic markers, politeness theory, and rapport management). (shrink)

This paper discusses two possible formal approaches to the semantic/pragmatic characterisation of a subclass of the modal particles. It may well be that the approaches can be applied to other particles or that they can be applied to certain intonational patterns (e.g. contrastive stress), to morphemes (past tense, agreement) or to words (pronouns), constructions (some uses of definite descriptions, clefts), but I will not try to to show that here. The first approach is based on the optimality theoretic reconstruction (...) of Blutner & J¨ ager (2000) of the theory of presupposition that has become fairly standard, the Heim (1983) and van der Sandt (1992) view of presuppositions as anaphora (see Zeevat (1992) for an introduction and comparison). The first half of the paper critically reviews my earlier views on the treatment of particles in this setting, the second part introduces a novel view, again based on optimality theory, which takes as a starting point the marking constraints that are a necessary ingredient of my earlier treatment. (shrink)

This study examines the kinds of stance that but as a contrastive marker signals in Nigerian investigative public hearings, with a view to exploring the contexts in which the stances are made. The study examines forty purposively selected investigative public hearing sessions which involve interactions between complainants, defendants and a hearing panel. The data are analysed qualitatively utilising Du Bois’ interactional view of stance and Martin and White’s Appraisal system. Results indicate that but signals epistemic, evidential, emotive and evaluative stances (...) within the narrative, interrogative and closing contexts. These stances and their contextual patterns depend heavily on the roles, goals and knowledge of the participants as stancetakers who position themselves, and align with other participants and the wider discourse community in order to express evaluation and intersubjective positioning. (shrink)

Interpretation at the argumentative level, like action selection in response to environmental change, requires decision-making based on context construction. By boosting the efficiency of this process, discourse markers keep variations in the interlocutor's processing context within a certain range.

In the years since its twin publication in 2001 and 2003, Textures of Time has attracted a great deal more attention outside the United States than in the American academy. This, we suggest, is because its ideas and approach are rather at odds with the dominant trends in the area of “postcolonial studies.” In this response to three critical essays that engage with the book—by Rama Mantena, Sheldon Pollock, and Christopher Chekuri—we begin by setting out our principal hypotheses as well (...) as the evidentiary structure of the book, which draws mostly on vernacular materials from South India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The former includes the claim that South India between roughly 1600 and 1800 possessed considerable and diverse historiographical traditions, though these histories came couched in a variety of genres, rendering them difficult for the uninitiated to recognize at first; the latter requires us to develop the significance of the concepts of “texture” as well as of “subgeneric markers” that help distinguish texts with a historical intention from those that are nonhistorical but have the same generic location. Our response then goes on to discuss why theoretical or sastric texts in India do not themselves explicitly theorize the distinctions we make. Here, we posit a contrast between “embedded” and “explicated” concepts in the “emic” sphere, suggesting that “texture” belongs to the first category. We explicitly distinguish our views from the poststructuralist language adopted by Pollock in his critique of Textures, and the more predictable postcolonial vision of Chekuri. We once more emphasize the need to take the vernacular historiography seriously, and to refine our reading practices, rather than overly depending on normative materials in Sanskrit, or on a prefabricated theoretical schema that derives from a stylized view of the nature of the transformations produced by colonial rule. (shrink)

In recent work, Williamson has defended a suggestive account of assertion. Williamson claims that the following norm or rule (the knowledge rule) is constitutive of assertion, and individuates it: (KR) One must ((assert p) only if one knows p) Williamson is not directly concerned with the semantics of assertion-markers, although he assumes that his view has implications for such an undertaking; he says: “in natural languages, the default use of declarative sentences is to make assertions” (op. cit., 258). In (...) this paper I will explore Williamson’s view from this perspective, i.e., in the light of issues regarding the semantics of assertion-markers. I will end up propounding a slightly different account, on which, rather than KR, what is constitutive and individuating of assertion is an audience-involving transmission of knowledge rule: (TKR) One must ((assert p) only if one’s audience comes thereby to be in a position to know p) I will argue that TKR, of which KR is an illocutionary consequence (but not the other way around), has all the virtues that Williamson claims for his account and no new defect. (shrink)

This case study extends the findings of Pickering et al. 2009 to the domain of conversational humor. We find that, as was the case in humorous narratives, conversational humor is not marked by higher pitch or volume, increased speech rate, or significant pauses. Unlike narrative humor, conversational humor is not produced at a lower pitch and slower rate than non-humorous parts of the text. We find that smiling and laughter tend to occur with humor.

The paper investigates various definitions of the concept of opinion as opposed to factual or evidence-based statements and proposes a taxonomy of opinions expressed in English as identified in selected social media. A discussion situates opinions in the realm of pragmatics and reaches to philosophy of language and cognitive science. The research methodology combines a thorough linguistic analysis of opinions, proposing their multifaceted taxonomy with the automatically generated lexical embeddings of positive and negative lexicon acquired from the analysed opinionated texts. (...) As proposed, the definition of the concept of opinion is best apprehended when looked upon in terms of an opinion event, with a number of necessary conditions on the one hand, and those that are characteristic of an explicit opinion prototype on the other. Lists of opinion discourse markers show their preferential uses either in positive or negative opinionated texts; however, no sets of necessary and/or sufficient opinion markers properties have been acquired from the analysed texts. The conclusions indicate a polysemous understanding of naturally occurring social media opinionated texts and a definitional flexibility of the boundaries around lexical positive and negative types of opinion markers. (shrink)

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 with these markers and positive or negative marker perceptions. The present study presents the results (...) of a survey measuring British English L1 speakers’, English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners’, and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) speakers’ perceptions of the discourse markers so, like, well and you know and their reactions to either abundance or lack of DMs. The survey measured speaker attitudes by asking participants to evaluate the usage of other DMs. We found that L1, EFL, and ELF have varying attitudes about certain markers, and these markers are perceived differently for traits like politeness and friendliness. Generally speaking, L1 speakers were more positively disposed towards markers than either of the other groups, who in their turn rated the propositional functions of the markers as more acceptable than interactional functions. (shrink)

This volume is part of the series ‘Pragmatics, Philosophy and Psychology’, edited for Springer by Alessandro Capone. It is intended for an audience of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postgraduate and advanced researchers. This volume focuses on societal pragmatics. One of the main concerns of societal pragmatics is the world of language users. We are interested in the investigation of linguistic practices in the context of societal practices. It is clear that the world of users, including their practices, (...) their culture, and their social aims has to be taken into account and seriously investigated when we deal with the pragmatics of language. It is not enough to discuss principles of language use solely in the guise of abstract theoretical tools. Consequently, the present volume focuses explicitly on the interplay of abstract, theoretical principles and the necessities imposed by societal contexts often requiring a more flexible use of such theoretical tools. The volume includes articles on pragmemes, politeness and anti-politeness, dialogue, joint utterances, discourse markers, pragmatics and the law, institutional discourse, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics and culture, cultural scripts, argumentation theory, connectives and argumentation, language games and psychotherapy, slurs, the analysis of funerary rites, as well as an authoritative chapter by Jacob L. Mey on societal pragmatics. (shrink)

The Japanese marker _-te-i-_ can have progressive, resultative, and existential perfect readings and has often been regarded as ambiguous. This paper shows that there is no clear evidence that _-te-i-_ is ambiguous. It proposes a monosemous analysis of _-te-i-_ that unifies its multiple readings and shows how progressives and perfects can form a natural semantic class. Within the context of a Discourse Representation Theory, I propose that _-te-i-_ consists of an imperfective operator _-te-_ and a stativizer _-i-_. The imperfective operator (...) _-te-_ takes an eventuality as its argument and outputs a subpart of the eventuality, which precedes a reference time interval. Secondly, a stativizer _-i-_ maps the subpart of the eventuality, i.e. _-te-_'s output, onto a state which overlaps with reference time and whose category is semantically underspecified and is determined via pragmatic inferences. The vague output of the imperfective operator, i.e. whether it is a proper subpart or nonproper subpart of an eventuality, leads to the contrast between progressive readings and perfect readings of _-te-i-_. (shrink)

Discourse marker analysis has been widely studied, leading Fraser to call this subject `a growth market in linguistics'. In our present research, we extended the study of discourse markers to the Chinese marker meiyou, which has traditionally been treated as a negator. The corpus studied here contains 40 conversations, totaling 482'27”. The analytical framework adopted in the study was drawn from van Dijk's model, which mainly consists of a semantic/textual level and a pragmatic/interactional level. A total of 141 (...) occurrences of meiyou were identified as discourse markers in the corpus: 13 of them occur at the textual level and 128 of them at the interactional level. Thus, meiyou occurs more frequently at the interactional level than at the textual level. At the textual level, meiyou introduces an answer to a self-inquiry or self-correction. At the interactional level, meiyou mainly serves as a response to provide information, as a marker of correction/clarification or evasion, and as a response to praise or gratitude. In particular, with respect to meiyou's interactive functions, we use the concepts of preference structure and face-threatening acts to analyze the collected data. We further demonstrate that intersubjectification, a mechanism whereby meanings become more centered on the addressee, is involved in the development of the discourse marker meiyou. (shrink)

Examining discourse markers (Schiffrin, 1987) in two transcribed discussions of controversial issues in an undergraduate 'critical thinking' class, we note frequent uses of 'I'm just saying' and related metadiscursive expressions (I'm/we're saying, I'm/we're not saying, etc.). Our central claim is that these 'saying' expressions are pragmatic devices by which speakers claim 'all along' to have held a consistent argumentative standpoint, one that continues through the discussion unless changed for good reasons. Through close analysis of a series of discourse (...) examples, we show how these discourse markers are used to display continuity, deflect counterarguments, and acknowledge the force of counterarguments while preserving continuity. In a concluding section we reflect critically on the use of these continuity markers with regard to four pragmatic functions that they potentially serve: to specify and clarify argumentative standpoints, to acknowledge a presumption of standpoint continuity, to acknowledge a normative expectation that discussion participants should have standpoints, and to avoid overt disagreement while saving face. (shrink)

Ethnomethodology research has systematically investigated discursive practices of categorisation, looking at the various ways by which social actors ascribe both themselves and others to identity categories to accomplish various kinds of social actions. Drawing on a data corpus of oncological visits collected in an Italian hospital, involving both native and non-native patients, the present work analyses how participants in these intercultural medical encounters invoke and make relevant social identity categories by the marking of collective pronouns in their talk. Our results (...) showed that whilst institutional identities prevailed, categorial formulations related to cultural or linguistic identities were rarely displayed in interactions with non-native patients. Conversational participants made very little of their linguistical or cultural background and when they did so, their cultural and linguistic identities were deployed for rhetorical and pragmatical aims, such as testing and negotiating common knowledge and epistemic authority. This study shows how even speakers’ minimal lexical choices, such as marked pronouns, impact the negotiation of meanings and activities in life-saving sites such as oncological visits. (shrink)

This study draws upon the techniques of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and historical pragmatics to provide an account of the ways in which speakers recruit markers of epistemic stance to capture their construction of the attitudes of their interlocutors, addressees, or audience. It then examines the ways in which selected markers lose their subjective force over time, whether expressive of the speaker’s attitude or the speaker’s sense of the interlocutor’s attitude, to become interactive markers of the exchange (...) involved in an exchange. The article thus tracks the subtle shifts from speaker subjectivity to the speaker’s projection of subjectivity to the addressee, to the association of an expression with the dynamics of the interactive process itself. The article examines instances of semasiological change, that is, changes of meaning associated with the lexical expressions, you know, you see, and you say. (shrink)

The relationships between text or talk and the context are among the basic fields of pragmatic research and an insight into their nature may contribute to a better understanding of language use. In this article, we use the results of an analysis of discourse marker use in two different conversational genres in an attempt to examine the impact of context on the use of discourse markers, generalized for each analysed genre. In the first stage of the analysis, we (...) observe important differences between the two genres: discourse markers are far more frequently used in telephone conversations than in television interviews. In the second stage of the analysis, we identify several contextual factors which contribute to the differences in the use of discourse markers. In this way, we obtain insight into this particular aspect of genre context-talk relationships, and identify some of the characteristics of the genres in question. (shrink)

In the years since its twin publication in 2001 and 2003 , Textures of Time has attracted a great deal more attention outside the United States than in the American academy. This, we suggest, is because its ideas and approach are rather at odds with the dominant trends in the area of “postcolonial studies.” In this response to three critical essays that engage with the book—by Rama Mantena, Sheldon Pollock, and Christopher Chekuri—we begin by setting out our principal hypotheses as (...) well as the evidentiary structure of the book, which draws mostly on vernacular materials from South India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The former includes the claim that South India between roughly 1600 and 1800 possessed considerable and diverse historiographical traditions, though these histories came couched in a variety of genres, rendering them difficult for the uninitiated to recognize at first; the latter requires us to develop the significance of the concepts of “texture” as well as of “subgeneric markers” that help distinguish texts with a historical intention from those that are nonhistorical but have the same generic location. Our response then goes on to discuss why theoretical or sastric texts in India do not themselves explicitly theorize the distinctions we make. Here, we posit a contrast between “embedded” and “explicated” concepts in the “emic” sphere, suggesting that “texture” belongs to the first category. We explicitly distinguish our views from the poststructuralist language adopted by Pollock in his critique of Textures, and the more predictable postcolonial vision of Chekuri. We once more emphasize the need to take the vernacular historiography seriously, and to refine our reading practices, rather than overly depending on normative materials in Sanskrit, or on a prefabricated theoretical schema that derives from a stylized view of the nature of the transformations produced by colonial rule. (shrink)

This paper explores the pragmatic foundations of unreliable narration (UN), a narrative technique highly popular in western literary texts. It sets out by giving a critique of the competing theoretic frameworks of UN, namely the seminal Boothian concept and more recent constructivist approaches. It is argued that both frameworks neglect a pragmatic perspective as the most viable way for identifying and analysing UN. Such a pragmatic model is then developed on the basis of theories of cooperation, such (...) as the Gricean maxims, relevance theory, and politeness. The emerging definition of UN treats a narrator as unreliable if he or she violates the cooperative principle without intending an implicature. This model is tested against three prototypical UNs: Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. These sample analyses yield a typology of UN: while pragmatic deviation is shown to be the intrinsic feature of the phenomenon, unreliable narrators vary according to their degree of intentionality. Finally, two recurring issues in the UN debate are briefly discussed: the existence of textual clues of UN, and the role of the reader in constructing unreliability. (shrink)

This paper explores the pragmatic routines that occur in clause 2 chaining. It demonstrates that the tense-aspect dependency markers in Toposa texts not only combine chained clauses with an initial clause, but also guide the audience to understand information in texts as foregrounded. The understanding of which information is foregrounded is achieved through pragmatic routines that cut the comprehension process short because of frequently encountered inferential processes occurring in repeatedly accessed contextual environments. The pragmatic routines are (...) explained as part of the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic. It will also be shown how these routines apply to narratives, and procedural texts. (shrink)

During the Notre Dame workshop on Vaught's Conjecture, Hjorth and Kechris asked which Borel equivalence relations can arise as the isomorphism relation for countable models of a first-order theory. In particular, they asked if the isomorphism relation can be essentially countable but not tame. We show this is not possible if the theory has uncountably many types.

Data from academic seminars conducted through Skype textchat is analysed in this chapter, and the focus is on examples of how users mark community membership. Membership is marked explicitly by using pronominals and the metonymic use of the seminar group name. It is also marked implicitly by using reduced forms, which are stereotypical examples of a textchat speech style. I argue that these are markers of stance-taking, where community membership is recovered pragmatically as a weak implicature. Dis-alignment with the (...) community is also seen, as individuals can also implicate their independence as setters of linguistic norms. (shrink)

We outline the Hrushovsk-Sokolović proof of Vaught's Conjecture for differentially closed fields, focusing on the use of dimensions to code graphs.