Alessandro Capone

This book shows how pragmatics and philosophy are interconnected, and explores the consequences and ramifications of this innovative idea, especially in addressing and solving the problem of breaking Grice's circle. The author applies philosophy in order to get to a better understanding of pragmatics, and pragmatics in order to get a better understanding of philosophy. The book starts with a chapter on the non-cancellability of explicatures and the role that this idea plays in the resolution of Grice’s circle, and proceeds with the discussion of other topics in which explicatures or cancellability play an important and decisive role. While the reader proceeds in the reading of this book, they accumulate notions and pieces of knowledge which will be of invaluable use when arriving at the chapter on conversational presuppositions, where the author expresses his most radical views: namely that presuppositions are indeed cancellable, contrary to what many believe.

In this paper, I discuss expressions such as ‘Dad’, ‘Mum’, ‘Grandpa’, etc., which are called ‘quasi-proper names’. These expressions can be used both to refer to a thing or person in an assertion in which a predicate is assigned to the referent expressed by the quasi-proper-name and to call somebody in particular (John!). In so far as they are indexical expressions, they are even more directly referential than proper names and guarantee discourse continuity to a greater extent than proper names (even if this appears to some to be controversial). To understand the working of quasi-proper names, I introduce a semantic rule that transforms nouns or definite descriptions into proper names and quasi-proper names, making the conceptual elements present in those expressions inactive and introducing a direct route from the proper name to the referent. Such a rule is synchronic, although it has diachronic consequences. Quasi-proper names can stimulate a debate about the function and role of proper names across cultures. I consider a number of expressions similar to quasi-proper names and I add the class of quasi-quasi-proper names (cases in which a term similar to a quasi-proper name can be used in vocatives but not in a subject-predicate structure, or, vice-versa, it can be used in a subject-predicate structure but not for vocatives).

In this paper, after outlining the general problem of the pragmatics of indirect reports, we dwell on two notoriously thorny problems: a) how do we interpret the pronominals contained in that-clauses of indirect reports; b) how do we interpret the presuppositions of that-clauses of indirect reports?. Theoretical considerations lead us in the direction of the idea that if two pragmatic principles clash, one should give way, but since we do not know which one has to give way, we should be prepared to accept that the strongest or highest-ranking principle will defeat the other. Here we encounter a Principle, which Capone brought our attention to, that is not usually discussed in pragmatic theories, but which seems to play a crucial role, at least sometimes:Do not expect the hearers and the speakers to do what is not possible for them to do. In this paper, we recognize that the problem of opacity is connected with the problem of voices: who is responsible for a given section of the utterance. Given the presence of polyphony, this problem can be resolved either through contextual clues or through pragmatic principles. We prefer to see the interplay of principles and contextual clues as one in which the interpretation process is pretty orderly, with general principles providing the defaults, while contextual clues occasionally defeat the defaults in certain problematic cases. However, the issue of responsibility, which we try to regiment through the Paraphrasis/Form-style principle, does not only concern the issue of opacity but also the issue of how to find a referent for indexical expressions contained in the that-clause of a report and and how to satisfy the presuppositions of the that-clause. In this case the Paraphrasis/Form-style Principle makes wrong predictions, which have to be rectified thanks to a different principle. The pragmatic theory we apply certainly needs some flexibility, but a flexibility which is not injected into the theory by a mechanical ordering of the rules, but by explaining why a certain principle takes precedence over another in terms of considerations of rationality.

This monograph on indirect reports offers insights on the semantics/pragmatics interface and a refinement of the notion of explicature. The volume is written in an engaging style and guides the reader through the theoretical problems and their ramifications. The thorniest problem in the study of indirect reports is their polyphonic nature, and how the listener distinguishes between the reporter’s voice and the original speaker’s voice, either by contextual clues or, in the absence of such clues, by resorting to pragmatic principles. The introductory chapter discusses the main issues that will be addressed in the volume. The next chapters focus on the various aspects of indirect reports, covering both theory and practical applications.

In this paper, I deal with implicit indirect reports. First of all, I discuss implicit indirect reports involving the first person. Then, I prove that in some cases second person reports are implicit indirect reports involving a de se attribution. Next, I draw analogies with implicit indirect reports involving the third person. I establish some similarities at the level of free enrichment through which the explicature is obtained and I propose that the explicature is syntactically active, given that it sanctions anaphora.

Indirect reports are segments of speech which involve a dialogic dimension (clearly constituting a case of polyphony) and, thus, studying them offers a chance for linguistics to again appropriate its original status as a theory that deals with linguistic signs and communication. The practice of indirect reporting intersects with a theory of knowledge because, through an indirect report, knowledge is imparted on the basis of which the hearer will decide whether or not to act and how he should take action. In this chapter, I discuss the issue of opacity and try to defend a pragmatic view of opacity in connection with indirect reports (on the other hand, I believe that opacity in direct quotation is mainly a semantic issue). I try to explain opacity pragmatically, although I accept that there are numerous exceptions that one has to account for (namely, the replacement of NPs with the aim of facilitating the establishment of reference). In this chapter, I also consider the issue of slurs in terms of the opacity of a pragmatic form, and I then accept that we have to consider the societal constraints on the use/mention of slurs (more or less as exceptions to the application of pragmatic opacity).

This chapter presents a purely pragmatic account of quotation and argues that it is able to accommodate all relevant linguistic phenomena. Given that it is more parsimonious to explain the data only by reference to pragmatic principles than to explain them by reference to both pragmatic and semantic principles, as is common in the literature, I conclude that the account of quotation I present is preferrable to the more standard accounts. Alternative theories of quotation are treated in an intellectually honest way.

In this chapter I propose, unlike Maier (Semant Pragmat 7, 2014), that quoted fragments in so called ‘mixed quotations’ (what I prefer to call ‘mixed indirect reports’) are opaque. This view of opacity is required, we propose, to preserve the difference between direct and indirect reports, direct reports involving possibly high levels of literality, accuracy and granularity, even if we concede, in keeping with Maier, that verbatim quotations are also susceptible to contextual standards of ‘verbatimness’, as Maier terms it. Maier’s considerations against opacity and in favour of transparency are based on a shifted interpretation of indexicals, anaphoric reference, morphological adjustments (in Italian) and grammatical adjustments (transformations involving a different word order with respect to the original utterance in Dutch). Claim by claim, we are made aware that we should see regard things differently and that, after all, it makes sense to adhere to the conservative and classical Fregean claim that mixed quotations (and indeed quotations) are cases involving opacity. In fact, where would we be if we abandoned the idea that quotation in mixed quotation requires reference to an utterance understood to be verbatim, rather than through mere paraphrase? Is this not similar to arguing that quotation is also not an opaque context? Yet Frege, as highlighted by Evans (The varieties of reference, OUP, Oxford, 1982), insisted that intensional contexts were contexts providing evidence in favour of opacity and were at a level of meaning which was different from denotation (the other level of meaning which is constituted by senses or modes of presentation).

The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the necessity of the pragmatic development of propositional forms and to reach a better understanding of the level of meaning that Sperber and Wilson and Carston famously call ‘explicatures’ (or ‘explicature’) and to support the claim that (the pragmatically conveyed elements of) explicatures are not cancellable – unlike conversational implicatures (Someone alleged that my claim is not original; however, I have to modestly assert that I put forward this claim in my 2003 paper, which was revised and reprinted in 2006.). While Capone (RASK: Int J Lang Commun 19:3–32, 2003) (A paper that antecedes Burton-Roberts claim that explicatures are non-cancellable.) addressed the issue of the cancellability of explicatures from the point of view of Grice’s circle, a number of important theoretical questions are raised and discussed here. In particular, I propose that the analysis of the notion of intentionality and of the nature of pragmatic intrusion will settle the question concerning the non-cancellability of explicatures. An explicature can be considered to be a two-level entity, in that it consists of a logical form and a pragmatic increment which this logical form gives rise to (in the context of utterance). However, both the initial logical form and the pragmatic increment are the target of pragmatic processes, in that we need a pragmatic process to promote the initial logical form to a serious intended interpretation and another pragmatic process to derive further increments starting from this initial logical form and being promoted to serious utterance interpretations.

In this chapter, I offer my reflections on the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. I argue that semantics – the relatively stable and context-invariant meanings of language – is necessarily amplified by pragmatics, which is a way of transcending the possibilities of semantics. Pragmatic layers, especially if they meet the cognitive needs of language users and represent culturally salient concepts, tend to become semanticized. The situation is complicated by the postulation of explicatures which, I argue, are not cancellable and mimic the semantic resources of a language. Like entailments, they are not cancellable, but they share the features of all types of pragmatic inferences in that they are calculable. I propose that explicatures are loci of the tension between semantics and pragmatics, and given the lack of cancellability, they are strong candidates for inferences that tend to become semanticized. In this chapter, I see the tension between pragmatics and semantics exemplified by situations where an excessive weight is placed on semantics (legal documents, such as laws), and situations where an excessive burden is placed on pragmatics (pidgins like Tok Pisin). In this chapter, I also argue that the principles of language use tend to become semanticised in the form of discourse rules and I consider the praxis of language games, arguing that discourse rules, unlike principles, have the advantage of being teachable and of also favoring the involvement of speakers in the communicative praxis (Lo Piparo 2010).

In this chapter I expatiate on what happens when one has to indirectly report ungrammatical utterances. How can the issue of grammatical, lexical and morphological errors affect our understanding of the practice of indirect reporting? What kind of problems are generated by such issues? The general practice seems to be to ignore or edit errors, when indirectly reporting them, concentrating on content. However, there are cases in which this practice is unsatisfactory and in which reporting has to resort to mixed quotation. Grammatical and morphological errors lead us to some paradoxes about indirect reporting (one of these being that sometimes it is impossible to provide an indirect report without resorting to mixed quotation) and, furthermore, lead us to revise the general considerations concerning the praxis of indirect reporting.

In this chapter I have used pronominal clitics in Italian in combination with verbs of propositional attitude to shed light on the opacity effects caused by intrusive pragmatics (at the level of free enrichments/explicatures). Certain problems, as discussed by Schiffer (Propositional attitudes in direct-reference semantics. In: Jaszczolt, Katarzyna (ed) The pragmatics of propositional attitude reports. Elsevier, Oxford, pp 14–30, 2000), completely disappear when the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of propositional clitics are discussed and such considerations are extended to propositional attitudes in general. In this chapter, I will add that a propositional clause must be in an appositional relationship (resulting from free enrichment and, thus, not actually present in the syntax) with the that-clause embedded in verbs of propositional attitude. I consider the consequences of this position. One of the most cogent results of this chapter is that pronominal clitics refer back to full propositions (if they refer to propositions at all) and not to minimal propositions. I take my own considerations on clitics to give support to the interesting and important considerations on emergent presuppositions by Kecskes and Zhang (Pragmat Cogn 17/2:331–355, 2009).

In this book, I shall argue that there is a close relationship between pragmalinguistics and philosophy and that pragmalinguistics not only takes into account empirical investigations based on language use, but also takes advantage of a more philosophical approach to language, where a number of a priori considerations can be applied to the formation of a theory of language. While there is no reason to deny (and there is every reason to assume) that abstract structures of language are operative in selecting meanings, pragmatics usually provides additional theoretical baggage and allows language users to expand on their limited resources, thus allowing them to be open to new uses which then, eventually, become part of the semantic/syntactic heritage. These expansion processes can be seen both at the semantic and at the syntactic level (see Huang 1994, 2000, 2014; Levinson 2000; Ariel 2008 on the syntax/pragmatics debate). Surely there are a number of controversial points in pragmatics. Are the conversational maxims a priori principles? Are they innate or are they learned? Are they derived from innate predispositions, where, ultimately, they are propagated, transmitted and inherited at the level of language use? These are important theoretical questions, on which a philosophical approach has some bearing. However, in this book I will not concentrate on these questions, but I will broach more modest topics. One of the topics I will confront is whether explicatures (or at least the pragmatic components of explicatures) are cancellable or not. This topic is concatenated with the more heavily theoretical topic of Grice’s circle, a theoretical difficulty noted by Levinson (2000) which basically amounts to the claim that pragmatics takes input from semantics. However, the camp of contextualists has shown that (propositional) semantics cannot be independent of pragmatics, given that it is accepted that, in numerous cases, we must assume pragmatic intrusion into truth-conditional meaning. Thus, it follows that not only is it the case that pragmatics takes input from semantics, but that semantics takes input from pragmatics. There may be two ways of breaking out of this circle. One is to argue, as I have done so in the past, that the circle is not pernicious given that explicatures (that is, the engine of the semantics/pragmatics debate) are after all, in principle and de facto, not cancellable. Thus, the pragmatic contributions that intrude into semantics acquire some of the features of semantics (like entailments, they cannot be cancelled on pain of contradiction or logical absurdity). The other is to reduce the circle and to state that there are indeed (many) cases of pragmatic intrusion; however, we should not be so pessimistic as to claim that in all cases semantics needs to be augmented by pragmatics. There are sentences which can be fairly well understood even independently of pragmatics and, furthermore, there are sentences where limited amounts of pragmatic intrusion can occur and where such intrusions can be somehow ignored, since the truth-conditional content of the sentence can be grasped by making abstract substitutions such as X did Y (for example, in the sentence ‘He did this’). Such abstract substitutions are compatible with the spirit of semantics and capture a minimally augmented truth-conditional meaning, while one does not need to state that such cases cannot be understood without recourse to drastic pragmatic intrusion (Take as an example what happens during a grammar lesson. The teacher writes the sentence ‘Mary is clever’ on the blackboard. The students will not try to anchor ‘Mary’ to a referent, as they are well aware that this is an example).

In this chapter, I reconsider the discussion of the semantics/pragmatics debate and rejuvenate it by means of two important ideas: Grice’s circle (discussed by Levinson (Presumptive meanings, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000)) is apparent and certainly not pernicious; the fact that explicatures are not cancellable means that the pragmatics we consider in pragmatic intrusion has some features in common with truth-conditional semantics.One of the topics I will be confronted with is whether explicatures (or at least the pragmatic components of explicatures) are cancellable or not. This topic is concatenated with the more heavily theoretical topic of Grice’s circle, a theoretical difficulty noted by Levinson (Presumptive meanings, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000), which can be summarized as follows. It is claimed that pragmatics takes input from semantics. However, the camp of contextualists have shown that (propositional) semantics cannot be independent of pragmatics, given that it is accepted that in numerous cases we must assume pragmatic intrusion into truth-conditional meaning. Thus, it follows that not only is it the case that pragmatics takes input from semantics, but that semantics takes input from pragmatics. There may be two ways of breaking out of this circle. One is to argue, as I have done, that the circle is not pernicious given that explicatures (which are the engine of the semantics/pragmatics debate) are, in principle and in fact, not cancellable after all. Thus, the pragmatic contributions that intrude into semantics acquire some of the features of semantics (like entailments, they cannot be cancelled on pain of contradiction). The other is to reduce the circle and to state that there are indeed (many) cases of pragmatic intrusion; however we should not be so pessimistic as to claim that in all cases semantics needs to be augmented by pragmatics. There are sentences which can be fairly well understood even independently of pragmatics and, furthermore, there are sentences where limited amounts of pragmatic intrusion can occur and where such intrusions can be somehow ignored since the truth-conditional content of the sentence can be grasped by making abstract substitutions such as X did Y (for example, in the sentence, ‘He did this’).

In this chapter I deal with the attributive/referential distinction. After reviewing the literature on the issue, I adopt Jaszczolt’s view based on default semantics. I relate her view to Sperber & Wilson’s Principle of Relevance. I argue in favour of the modularity hypothesis in connection with pragmatic interpretations. I also discuss the issue of modularization à la Karmiloff-Smith in connection with default inferences and, in particular, the referential readings of NPs. I then reply to some considerations by Cummings and use data from the referential/attributive uses of NPs to show that the modularity hypothesis is defensible.

This volume is written in memory of Sorin Stati. The authors of this volume mainly deal with perspectives on language use and pragmatics. Each of them has his/her own approach, so the volume should not be taken as representing a single school of thought. Of course, the ideas expressed in all of the articles are reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s position which privileged meaning as use. We use language to do many things, to give and to obtain, to persuade and to order, to interact and create human bonds. Words and sentences acquire meaning in context, thus a decontextualized approach must be delegitimized. What the authors in this collection do is to place emphasis on the power of context and cotext to create meaning through myriad relations among the constituents of sentences, and among utterances themselves, which are arranged in discourse following an argumentative logic.

This book contains essential contributions to enrich and broaden the application field of pragmatics. It provides an example of how the fruitful reflections and refined conceptual distinctions born in the philosophical field can find a practical application in addressing social, cognitive, clinical, and psychological problems. Its chapters address, from different points of view, the relationship between pragmatic linguistics and philosophy, and outline the possible application of pragmatic theories to different domains. Developed during the third Pragmasophia international conference, whose name is derived from the Greek terms πρᾶγμα (action, fact) and σοφία (knowledge, science), the book aligns itself with its aim to study human actions and activities and how they take shape through language. But ‘Pragma’ and ‘Sophia’ also signal another purpose: highlighting the importance of creating links between empirical investigations on language use, and more traditional philosophical approaches. In this reading, ‘Pragma’ represents the experimental goal devoted to analysing and interpreting language facts. In contrast, the term ‘Sophia’ recalls the original vocation of past philosophers to pursue an ideal of ‘pure knowledge’, disconnected from any practical-economic interest. While maintaining the conference's original purpose of encouraging productive comparisons between different approaches, the book consists of two sections: first, on philosophical approaches, recalls more theoretical aspects (closer to the term ‘Sophia’); the second, ‘Inferential and Cognitive Pragmatics,’ addresses more practical issues affecting domains such as Greek literature, pragmatic disorders, dictionary entries, and speech analysis. The reader, whether in linguists, philosophy or psychology, obtains a complete overview of the most advanced current research lines, both theoretical and empirical, and thus contributes to broadening the scope of pragmatics.

This book contains a comprehensive view of pragmalinguistic studies and their recent ramifications, boasting some of the most advanced recent research in pragmatics. Organised into three sections—pragmalinguistics, social pragmatics, and cognitive-inferential pragmatics, respectively—the chapters enable an understanding of the possible applications of linguistic and philosophical theories in practical fields. Covering topics such as polysemy across languages and lexical externalism, the role of literal meaning in the construction of metaphorical meaning, the pragmatics of truth, the roles of reflexivity in meaning negotiation, argumentation and discourse, the pragmatics of taboo, linguistic and cognitive aspects of formation of implicates, and reflections on neuropragmatics and clinical pragmatics in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Schizophrenia—to name but a few exciting areas of exploration—this book is of interest to scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of semantics, pragmatics and philosophy of language, cognitive science, and other areas of linguistics.

In this paper, I shall deal with quasi-(proper) names, that is expressions like ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’, ‘Grandpa’, ‘Grandma’ in English or ‘Papà’, ‘Mamma’, ‘Nonna’, ‘Nonno’ in Italian. I shall use examples both from English and Italian. Quasi-names are directly referential like proper names, even if they apparently exhibit some conceptual materials, which, however, are not active and are inert. They can be used as vocatives or as arguments of verbs. I called terms like ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’ ‘quasi-names’ because they have certain characteristics of names (but they could also be called ‘indexical names’). They confer significance to an individual. Quasi-names are indexical, although the word ‘I’ does not appear in the proposition expressed.

In this paper, I start with the notion of reference as speaker’s meaning and then move on to consider García-Carpintero’s (2000) idea that a conceptual dimension of referential expressions can be captured through a notion of presupposition. I argue that we need to distinguish between reference and referential presupposition. The reference has a perceptual dimension and offers the speaker and the hearer an anchor to the present. Even when a speaker uses an NP that does not denote the object s/he intends to refer to (e.g., for a perceptual mistake), the context and environmental information can help the hearer find a route to the referent intended by the speaker. On the other hand, presuppositions seem to be of a conversational nature and involve a mode of presentation that is linguistically expressed.

In this paper, we take up an old issue that of pragmemes, broached by Mey and further explored by Capone. It is not easy to define pragmemes and distinguish them sufficiently from speech acts (units of language use broached by Austin and Searle) or from Wittgensteinian language games or from macro speech acts (see van Dijk on macrostructures) or from Goffman’s scripts. The best idea we could develop about pragmemes is that they instantiate the triple articulation of language, proposed by Jock Wong; being essentially composed of phonological-syntactic units, that have a certain content relative to a social situation and to a certain culture, pragmemes express a certain function (or illocutionary force), like, e.g., modifying society or some aspect of it. They are part of a chapter that can be called either “societal pragmatics” or “emancipatory pragmatics,” to use the words by Mey. In fact, knowledge of how language is used to diminish the rights of people and to propagate the “status quo” may be instrumental to give rights and power to ordinary human beings who are oppressed by political and economical structures.

In this paper, I try to expatiate on the poetic function of language on the basis of considerations by Jakobson and Waugh. I try to bring in the consideration that pragmatics plays an important role in elucidating the poetic function of language. Contextualism allows us to interpret a poem: referents must be fixed or need not be fixed due to the requirements of the discourse; citations are brought in through pragmatic ways; polyphony is achieved by taking into account the context of previous analyses of a poetic text; the vicinity of a certain word, or concept or line is likely to affect the interpretation of a certain expression; the poetic text can take different forms, from graffiti to discourse at the market place, to discourse between lovers. All these forms of poetic text would not exist if the notion of poetry did not include the idea of semantic/pragmatic compression which is matched, in interpretation, by expansions.

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.

This volume offers the reader a singular overview of current thinking on indirect reports. The contributors are eminent researchers from the fields of philosophy of language, theoretical linguistics and communication theory, who answer questions on this important issue. This exciting area of controversy has until now mostly been treated from the viewpoint of philosophy. This volume adds the views from semantics, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics. Authors address matters such as the issue of semantic minimalism vs. radical contextualism, the attribution of responsibility for the modes of presentation associated with Noun Phrases and how to distinguish the indirect reporter’s responsibility from the original speaker’s responsibility. They also explore the connection between indirect reporting and direct quoting. Clearly indirect reporting has some bearing on the semantics/pragmatics debate, however, there is much controversy on “what is said”, whether this is a minimal semantic logical form or a much richer and fully contextualized logical form. This issue will be discussed from several angles. Many of the authors are contextualists and the discussion brings out the need to take context into account when one deals with indirect reports, both the context of the original utterance and the context of the report. It is interesting to see how rich cues and clues can radically transform the reported message, assigning illocutionary force and how they can be mobilized to distinguish several voices in the utterance. Decoupling the voice of the reporting speaker from that of the reported speaker on the basis of rich contextual clues is an important issue that pragmatic theory has to tackle. Articles on the issue of slurs will bring new light to the issue of decoupling responsibility in indirect reporting, while others are theoretically oriented and deal with deep problems in philosophy and epistemology.

This volume highlights important aspects of the complex relationship between common language and legal practice. It hosts an interdisciplinary discussion between cognitive science, philosophy of language and philosophy of law, in which an international group of authors aims to promote, enrich and refine this new debate. Philosophers of law have always shown a keen interest in cognitive science and philosophy of language in order to find tools to solve their problems: recently this interest was reciprocated and scholars from cognitive science and philosophy of language now look to the law as a testing ground for their theses. Using the most sophisticated tools available to pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cognitive sciences and legal theory, an interdisciplinary, international group of authors address questions like: Does legal interpretation differ from ordinary understanding? Is the common pragmatic apparatus appropriate to legal practice? What can pragmatics teach about the concept of law and pervasive legal phenomena such as testimony or legal disagreements?

This volume offers recent developments in pragmatics and adjacent territories of investigation, including important new concepts such as the pragmatic act and the pragmeme, and combines developments in neighboring disciplines in an integrative holistic pragmatic approach. The young science of pragmatics has, from its inception, differentiated itself from neighboring fields in the humanities, especially the disciplines dealing with language and those focusing on the social and anthropological aspects of human behavior, by focusing on the language user in his or her societal environment.This collection of papers continues that emphasis on language use, and pragmatic acts in their context. The editors and contributors share a perspective that essentially considers language as a system for communication and wants to look at language from a societal perspective, and accept the view that acts of interpretation are essentially embedded in culture. In an interdisciplinary approach, some authors explore connections with social theory, in particular sociology or socio-linguistics, some offer a political stance, others explore connections with philosophy and philosophy of language, and several papers address problems in theoretical pragmatics.

This volume brings together a wide array of papers which explore, among other things, to what extent languages and cultures are variable with respect to the interactions around the event of death. Motivated by J. L. Mey's idea of the pragmeme, a situated speech act, the volume has both theoretical and practical implications for scholars working in different fields of enquiry. As the papers in this volume reveal, despite the terminological differences between various disciplines, the interactions around the event of death serve to provide solace, not only to the dying, but also to the family and friends of the deceased, thus helping them to "accommodate" to the new state of affairs.