Pragmatic Mechanisms Research Articles

Implicating fictional truth

Some things that we take to be the case in a fictional work are never made explicit by the work itself. For instance, we assume that Sherlock Holmes does not have a third nostril, that he wears underpants and that he has never solved a case with a purple gnome, even though neither of these things is ever mentioned in the narration. This article argues that examples like these can be accounted for through the same content-enriching reasoning that we employ when confronted with non-fictional discourse, with the important difference that fictional discourse essentially involves pretence. Fictional discourse works in much the same way as non-fictional discourse, and what is conveyed without being stated can accordingly be explained through familiar pragmatic mechanisms. It is argued that this account carries some distinct advantages over competing views.

A Study on the Lexical Evolution of Yuzhong Dialect Based on Cognitive Mapping and Its Pragmatic Mechanisms

Abstract Based on the method of cognitive mapping, this paper systematically organizes the evolution of Yuzhong dialect vocabulary in different historical stages, revealing its important role in the evolution of the Chinese language. The global statistical information of the corpus is utilized to train the word vectors, which are input into the recurrent neural network as feature vectors to enhance the model’s ability to learn long-distance information. Perplexity is defined as a metric for evaluating the performance of a language model, the inverse of the geometric mean probability assigned to each word by the model given a known sequence of words in the test set. Subsequently, based on this metric, a corresponding model was built to comprehensively evaluate the performance of the language model, which provides insights into the functions and expressions of Yuzhong dialect words in communication. Among them, the number of unsubstituted nouns, such as weather, is 41, and the color of the sky is 67, showing the rhyme and stability of Yuzhong dialect vocabulary in specific domains.

The Social Construction of the Rebo Wekasan Ritual in Building Collective Trust in the Karundang Tengah Community to Increase Social Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Rebo Wekasan ritual which has become a tradition in various regions of the archipelago aims to seek safety from the arrival of danger and is a form of guarding or rejecting reinforcements and asking to be protected from harm. The purpose of this study was to investigate how Rebo Wekasan as a ritual in building the collective trust of the Karundang community as an effort to grow social resilience in a pandemic. This study uses social construction theory. The approach used is qualitative by interviewing the leader of the neighborhood association, a religious leader, the daughter of a traditional leader, and one citizen. The main results of this research, obtained through thematic analysis, are first, while most people construct the Rebo Wekasan ritual as an effort to reject reinforcements and maintain tradition, some see it as simply an attempt to reduce stress due to the pandemic; second, while these constructions are different, the three of them together can encourage collective resilience in the form of stress reduction; third, related to mechanisms, three ways allow construction to lead to collective resilience, namely through traditional mechanisms, functional mechanisms, and pragmatic mechanisms. Based on these results, it can be concluded that the community's construction of the Rebo Wekasan ritual led to several mechanisms, resulting in community resilience in facing the pandemic.

Hóteis Pestana - Atos de fala e outros mecanismos de persuasão: análise de 50 posts de facebook da página da cadeia de Hotéis Pestana

This work, within the scope of Pragmatics, focuses on the analysis of postspublished on the Facebook page of the hotel chain “Pestana”hotels, with the aim of identifying the most frequent illocutionary acts and verifying the mechanisms most frequently used to intensify their illocutionary force.Based on the selected corpus, we performed the following tasks: i) identification ofthe type of recipient to whom the postsare addressed to and ii) study of a few linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms that work together to contribute to the persuasiveness of the discourse.

СЕМАНТИЧЕСКОЕ ПОЛЕ “АLIMENTO” КАК ОТРАЖЕНИЕ ИСПАНСКОЙ НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ

The article is devoted to the study of the semantic field “Alimento” in the thesaurus of the Spanish language and the reflection of national culture in pragmatics, the constituent units of this semantic field. The specificity of this field is determined by the significant role that the corresponding denotative area plays in the life of the Spaniards: the biological and civilizational components are inseparably linked in it - they largely form the way of life of the people, which acquires a unique ethical and aesthetic content in national cultures. The vocabulary of this semantic field is characterized by specific patterns of constant-semantic organization, pragmatic mechanisms that contribute to the enrichment of the linguistic picture of the world, the development of areas of human experience, and the building of the symbolic foundations of ethnocultural semiotics. A comprehensive analysis of the pragmatic properties of the studied semantic units of the Spanish language allows us to apply the information obtained to the tasks of improving the methodology for translating texts that contain vocabulary related to nutrition as a special area of human experience and culture. As the study showed, the lexical units of the field “Alimento” are actively involved as a component of phraseological units (PU) of the Spanish language and are often anthropocentric.

Language aggression in virtual professional communities

The study focuses on language aggression as it is enacted in virtual professional communities. With the aim to reveal the dominant forms and mechanisms of aggression in the virtual environment, the authors explore data retrieved from Russian social media. Theoretically, the paper is informed by social identity theory and linguistic pragmatics. Adopting a methodology that draws on an inferential model of communication, the study analyses aggressive utterances and their meanings in situational contexts. The findings distinguish between two principal forms of aggression: insulting aggression and aggression of exclusion. Although both perform the function of social control, they differ in terms of triggering situations, pragmatic mechanisms as well as linguistic resources employed. Insulting aggression makes use of dehumanising, negative evaluation, blaming, social deixis, ‘reductio ad absurdum’ and references to one’s emotional involvement in the situation of conflict. Such mechanisms are enacted through the linguistic tools that convey the semantics of aggression more or less directly. These include pejoratives, depreciative epithets, colloquialisms, informal expressions, lexemes with semantics of emotional state, imperatives, means of deontic modality and a shift in using polite/impolite forms of address. On the contrary, aggression of exclusion involves meanings that require inferential efforts of the recipient. The interplay between literal meanings of speech acts and the underlying intentions results in conversational implicatures. Exclusion is manifested through drawing a boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, terminating a conversation, talking about somebody present in the third person. Its linguistic forms comprise lexemes with semantics of exclusion, lexis with negative connotation, interjections, and irony.

Inner speech as a cognitive tool—or what is the point of talking to oneself?

ABSTRACT Many higher cognitive tasks, such as problem-solving and deliberation are accompanied by the experience of an inner voice in our heads. In this paper, we develop the idea that our own inner speech supports these tasks. We approach the phenomenon of inner speech through a comparison with overt speech – a comparison that is suggested by a Vygotskian approach that focuses on how inner speech develops from overt speech during ontogeny. We argue for the cognitive potency of inner speech by hypothesizing that condensed inner speech may help reduce cognitive load; yet by being pragmatically expanded upon, inner speech may scaffold further cognitive accomplishments. More specifically, as we adopt a Vygotskian perspective, we begin by introducing his notion of internalization and examine in what way inner speech might be condensed. Then the question of whether inner speech is governed by the same pragmatic mechanisms that govern overt speech is posed and answered in the affirmative. We advocate the idea that inner speech aids deliberation due, to some degree, to the manner in which pragmatic principles governing overt speech are re-purposed in inner speech. We close by addressing two objections.

Metalinguistic effects

We can communicate linguistic information by asserting sentences that are not explicitly about linguistic matters. Stalnaker offers a pragmatic account of this phenomenon. It is not clear that such an account is correct. In this article I offer an alternative account that does not rely on pragmatic mechanisms and which captures many of the insights in Stalnaker's theory of linguistic communication. The view is inspired by Barker's semantics of vague adjectives.

Pragmatic mechanisms of manipulation in Russian online media: How clickbait works (or does not)

Our study investigates clickbait – ambiguous misleading headlines, aimed at exploiting readers’ curiosity gap. Clickbait has two unequally conspicuous interpretations, where the first interpretation is false with respect to the article content, while the second interpretation is correct content-wise, but considerably less obvious. We aim at identifying linguistic structures and pragmatic mechanisms employed in creating Russian clickbait, as well as testing the effectiveness of clickbait headlines experimentally. To answer our research questions, we compiled, annotated and analyzed a corpus of Russian clickbait headlines, as well as designed and ran an online experiment. We demonstrate that the main device employed in creating clickbait is a false generalized conversational implicature (GCI), created by flouting Gricean maxims of Quantity, Manner, or Relevance, which is subsequently canceled by the content of the article. We identify language-specific contexts conducive to their occurrence, and show how journalists explore semantic, syntactic, and referential peculiarities of the Russian language to create GCIs inherent in clickbait. Finally, we demonstrate that not all clickbait headlines are effective: in order to attract clicks, clickbait must not be obviously false and must increase the potential appeal and importance of insufficiently engaging news pieces on topics that do not require specialized knowledge.

Taboo ritual in Spanish: A study of pragmatic strategies

"The aim of the present paper is to analyse the pragmatic structures that constitute the taboo ritual in Spanish colloquial conversations. The analysis is based on the assumption that, in the modern Spanish society, some of the topics are considered taboo and while speaking about them, a special ritual is required. I claim that this ritual is based on some pragmatic strategies that present important meanings and interactive functions. In order to confirm my hypothesis, a number of Spanish colloquial conversations are examined. By identifying the taboo topics and observing how they are introduced to the conversation, I present the pragmatic mechanisms that create the taboo ritual in modern Spanish."

Fictional names, their use and pragmatic interpretations

Abstract The aim of the paper is to defend the view according to which all simple fictional sentences are meaningless. If their assertions seem to convey some truth evaluable information, and fictional sentences themselves seem to be true or false, it is because some pragmatic mechanisms are operative, enabling the expression of propositions not encoded in the semantic content of these sentences. According to some theorists, the mechanisms responsible for that process are the same as those responsible for generating conversational implicatures. I argue against that claim and maintain that to comprehend the information conveyed by a fictional assertion, one must determine what kind of fictional assertion it is and only then apply the relevant interpretative rule adjusted to the fictional sentence used in that act.

Semantic and Pragmatic Mechanisms of Humour in Animal Jokes

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to take a close look at the interplay of semantic and pragmatic components of animal jokes. Rather than insisting on the priority of one particular theoretical tradition and selecting a few illustrative examples, 30 animal jokes – most of them translated into English from Hungarian – are presented to help identify the different mechanisms that make them amusing. Adopting a theory-by-theory approach, it becomes clear that some jokes fit well the explanation of frame or script semantics, while others are best captured by one or another pragmatic framework and classification. This leads to the related question of whether it is possible, at this stage of research, to integrate the diverse lines of thought or whether the semantic and pragmatic study of verbal humour will have to remain relatively fragmented. It is argued that certain basic elements of major pragmatic theories are important complements to frame/script semantics, the humour of animal jokes is reliant on the same meaning-generating processes as observed in other jokes, and that the attraction of animal jokes lies in their psychological and cultural-anthropological characteristics. Finally, their cross-cultural investigation is encouraged.

Pragmatic Mechanisms for the Implementation of Stimulus and Response in the Blogs

Pragmatic Mechanisms for the Implementation of Stimulus and Response in the Blogs

Pragmatic Mechanisms for the Implementation of Stimulus and Response in the Blogs

Pragmatic Mechanisms for the Implementation of Stimulus and Response in the Blogs

Gender in educational and public discourse of the Church. Analysis of the Pastoral Letter on the Feast of the Holy Family

Kasiak Mateusz, Gender in educational and public discourse of the Church. Analysis of the Pastoral Letter on the Sunday of the Holy Family. Culture – Society – Education no 2(16) 2019, Poznań 2019, pp. 289–312, Adam Mickiewicz University Press. ISSN 2300-0422. DOI 10.14746/kse.2019.16.19.
 Gender as a category of cultural gender and gender identity appears not only in scientific discourse as a topic of research, but also in public discourse, as a subject of various debates and disputes. This concept was also included into the discourse of the Catholic Church. Its creators – church leaders – embarked upon a public reinterpretation of the concept of gender, thus inserting their point of view into the broader political and ideological dispute. The aim of this paper is to review the postulates of the church concerning gender in the Pastoral Letter on the Feast of the Holy Family, which seems to be a leading programme paper concerning this issue. In this paper, gender as a research and scientific category is isolated from the scientific discourse and appropriatedby the educational discourse of the church, where it functions as a scare tactic. Structural modifications in the text and style of the letter, stylistic and rhetorical tricks, as well as pragmatic mechanisms, make the text of the pastoral letter a persuasive political argument.

FACTORS AND CONDITIONS THAT INFLUENCE THE PERCEPTION OF OFFENSIVE HUMOR

The study is derived from a larger study, namely the author’s PhD dissertation, and it gives an overview of and illustrates the most essential factors that maneuver utterances into being perceived as humorous and/or offensive in the context of performed, edgy stand-up comedy. The paper introduces basic humor and offensive humor theories as well as certain pragmatic mechanisms that lie beneath the process which starts with the utterance and ends with the perlocutionary effect on the audience. The study elaborates on offensive humor theories, conventions of stand-up comedy, pragmatic concepts, the contrast between offensiveness and immorality, which is all complemented by a brief psychological perspective, linking people’s reactions to the notion of harm and one’s level of self-esteem. The pragmatic insight into the factors that make offensive humor function points at the necessity of strong, non-conventional, and complex stimuli, perceived and comprehended by the audience, based on which the offensive layer can be constructed.

Time out of tense: Russian aspect in the imperative

This article analyzes Russian aspectual usage in the imperative by combining Šatunovskij’s (2009) approach with Dickey’s (2018) cognitive linguistic theory of Russian aspect. It argues that the contrasting use of perfective and imperfective imperatives in mands for the completion of a single action can be explained in terms of the pragmatic mechanisms proposed by Šatunovskij (2009): perfective imperatives signal a request on the part of the speaker for the listener to make the decision to carry out the action, whereas imperfective imperatives make no such signal, because the decision has already been made. The latter occurs when the speaker knows or infers that the listener has already made the decision (or will do so if given the chance), or when the speaker has suspended the listener’s decision-making role and has gone ahead and made the decision. Various contextual uses of affirmative and negated imperatives and analyzes them in terms of the request or lack thereof for the listener to make the decision to carry out the action. The functions of the perfective and imperfective aspects in imperatives are argued to be instantiations of temporal definiteness and temporal indefiniteness (respectively). Inasmuch as this is true, Russian aspect codes alternative construals of time in non-finite usage as well as finite usage.

Fakty i mity o „faktach”. W związku z artykułem M. Danielewiczowej „Niepodważalne fakty. Jak o nich mówimy?” (Poradnik Językowy 2017/9)

The article refers to discussions on the semantics of Polish expressions with the word fakt (‘fact’), and it is polemical towards “objective” interpretations, in which “facts” are “fulfilled states of affairs”, independent of how they are conceptualized by speaking subjects; it refers especially to the article of M. Danielewiczowa ( PJ 2017/9) on that subject. Both attitudes are rooted in the tradition of structuralistic semantics and both discuss the contemporary meaning of fakt (in various linguistic variants). It is argued that the interpretation of “fact” as an object of speaking (according to the speaker’s knowledge) is better testified in language usage, as well as it is more effective as far as lexical analysis is concerned. That is because it is a convenient starting point both for the “strictly objective” meaning ( fakt ≈ what is happening or what happened), typically mentioned in dictionaries, and for popular nowadays uses of that word, in which it introduces hypotheses or subjective judgments of the speaker. The latter can be accounted for by pragmatic mechanisms of speaking, whereas the “objective” meaning is interpreted as an effect of metonymy (pointing in speaking to a particular state of affairs → the state of affairs itself).

Análisis argumentativo de los debates electorales en la campaña 28-A: la construcción del enemigo

Introducción: La agresividad verbal y la estrategia de ataque han caracterizado los discursos políticos de la campaña electoral para las elecciones generales en España, celebradas el 28 de abril de 2019. Metodología: En este trabajo analizamos los dos debates electorales, celebrados el 22 de abril (RTVE) y el 23 de abril (Atresmedia), desde un punto de vista lingüístico y pragmático. El objetivo es identificar, a través de análisis de discurso, las estrategias argumentativas que utilizan los cuatro líderes de los partidos invitados a los debates para definir y construir al enemigo. Resultados y conclusiones: El análisis de sus intervenciones demuestra que Pedro Sánchez (PSOE), Pablo Casado (PP), Albert Rivera (Ciudadanos) y Pablo Iglesias (Unidas Podemos) coinciden en crear marcos conceptuales y elaborar su argumentación para reforzar la imagen del adversario como enemigo de España. Los candidatos utilizan numerosos recursos lingüísticos y retóricos, y mecanismos pragmáticos de la (des)cortesía lingüística.

«PROPRIA↔APPELLATIVA» AMBIGUITY: RECOGNISING PROPER NAMES IN TEXT

The paper deals with the conflict of properties «to be a proper name» and «not to be a proper name» in the same context, which leads to «propria↔appellativa» ambiguity, designated as onymic amphibology. Pragmatic and textual mechanisms of different interpretations as well as examples of non-resolving ambiguity situations in text are considered.