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75On quasi-namesCa' Foscari Submission. forthcoming.Abstract 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’ …Read more
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7On the Distinction Between Reference and Referential PresuppositionsIn Alessandro Capone, Pietro Perconti & Roberto Graci (eds.), Philosophy, Cognition and Pragmatics, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 23-44. 2024.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 …Read more
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26Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 1 From Theory to Practice (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2018.This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more em…Read more
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258Pragmemes revisited. A theoretical framework.Frontiers in Psychology 31 (15): 1-28. 2024.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 Wo…Read more
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830A pragmatic view of the poetic function of languageSemiotica 2023 (250): 1-25. 2023.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 ana…Read more
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13Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society (edited book)Springer. 2015.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, …Read more
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11Indirect reports and pragmatics: interdisciplinary studies (edited book)Springer International Publishing. 2015.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 issu…Read more
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13Pragmatics and Law: Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)Springer. 2016.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 r…Read more
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16Pragmemes and theories of language use (edited book)Springer International Publishing. 2016.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 asp…Read more
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7The Pragmeme of Accommodation: The Case of Interaction around the Event of Death (edited book)Springer. 2017.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…Read more
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272Perspectives on the semantics/pragmatics debate: insights from aphasia researchFrontiers in Psychology 2023 (14): 1-20. 2023.n the philosophy of language, there are many ongoing controversies that stem from relying too heavily on an utterance-based framework. The traditional approach of rigidly partitioning the utterance’s meaning into what is grammatically determined from what is not may not fully capture the complexity of human language in real-world communicative contexts. To address this issue, we suggest shifting focus toward a broader analysis level encompassing conversations and discourses. From this broader pe…Read more
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207Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics: Issues in Linguistics (edited book)Springer. 2021.Together with the first volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments,” this book collects contributions that represent the state of the art on the interconnection between pragmatics and philosophy. While the first volume presents the philosophical dimension of pragmatics, showing the path from theoretical advances to practical uses and approaches, this second volume offers a specular view on this discipline. Instead of adopting the top-down view of the first volume, th…Read more
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10Pragmatics and Philosophy. Connections and RamificationsSpringer Verlag. 2019.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 …Read more
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6La verità vi farà liberiAugustinianum 58 (2): 343-359. 2018.This contribution traces the interpretations of Jn 8: 32 in the first centuries up to Origen, who represents in this case, as in general for ancient patristic literature, a fundamental watershed. Each passage is illuminated by setting it in the context of exegesis and controversy. Passages which at first glance may seem unconnected are grouped together in this perspective to reveal interesting points of contact.
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52Indirect Reports and Pragmatics in the World Languages (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2018.This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on th…Read more
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16Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 1 From Theory to Practice (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2018.This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more em…Read more
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17Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2019.The two sections of this volume present theoretical developments and practical applicative papers respectively. Theoretical papers cover topics such as intercultural pragmatics, evolutionism, argumentation theory, pragmatics and law, the semantics/pragmatics debate, slurs, and more. The applied papers focus on topics such as pragmatic disorders, mapping places of origin, stance-taking, societal pragmatics, and cultural linguistics. This is the second volume of invited papers that were presented …Read more
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4Reference in ContextIn Alessandro Capone & Assunta Penna (eds.), Exploring Contextualism and Performativity: The Environment Matters, Springer Verlag. pp. 3-23. 2023.In this paper, I offer some considerations on the contextual dimension of reference and, then, I expatiate on the possibility that referential NPs refer to objects but at the same time they are linked with a conceptual presupposition, that explains why reference only does not work and is not an efficient way to represent certain NPs. I compare this issue of a conceptual presuppositions with the considerations on pragmatic or conversational presuppositions in papers by Capone or Macagno and Capon…Read more
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9First Person Implicit Indirect Reports in DisguiseIn Fabrizio Macagno & Alessandro Capone (eds.), Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics. Theoretical developments, Springer. pp. 133-147. 2021.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. Then I draw analogies with implicit indirect reports involving the third person. I establish some similarities at the level of the free enrichment through which the explicature is obtained and I propose that the explicature is syntactically active give…Read more
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5Introduction: Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics – Theoretical DevelopmentsIn Fabrizio Macagno & Alessandro Capone (eds.), Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics. Theoretical developments, Springer. pp. 1-7. 2021.Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. This first volume intends to contribute to the dialogue between philosophers and linguists, trying to broaden the boundaries of this discipline defined by the crucial notions of context and verbal action. To this purpose, the contributions are collected in an order that reflects the core and the fr…Read more
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10“I Hope You Will Let Flynn Go”: Trump, Comey, Pragmemes and Socio-pragmaticsIn Alessandro Capone, Marco Carapezza & Franco Lo Piparo (eds.), Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications, Springer Verlag. pp. 561-576. 2019.In this paper, we discuss an utterance/pragmeme/pract by Donald Trump addressed to FBI Director Comey: ‘I hope you will let Flynn go’ ). We consider the explicature of this utterance and its illocutionary and perlocutionary effects. We argue that while Republicans opt for an Austinian or Searlian analysis, in the attempt to deny that this utterance constitutes an attempt to influence Comey, there are reasons for adopting a Strawsonian analysis, casting it in the framework of pragmemes, worked ou…Read more
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12Exploring Contextualism and Performativity: The Environment Matters (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2023.This edited volume on contextualism and pragmatics is interdisciplinary in character and contains contributions from linguistics, cognitive science and socio-pragmatics. Going beyond conventional contextual matters of truth-conditions and pragmatic intrusion, this text deals with a variety of issues including hyperbole, synonymy, reference, argumentation, schizophrenia, rationality, morality, silence and clinical pragmatics. Contributions also address the semantics/pragmatics debate and show to …Read more
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8Introduction. Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics: Linguistic and Theoretical IssuesIn Fabrizio Macagno & Alessandro Capone (eds.), Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics: Issues in Linguistics, Springer. pp. 1-6. 2021.Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. The eleven essays of this volume focus on how a linguistic structure or expression manifests a pragmatic phenomenon, and are ordered considering their relationship with the specificity of the context. The first three papers, devoted to the topics of prototype-based generalizations, scalar implicatures, and …Read more
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9Pragmemes at the Market PlaceIn Fabrizio Macagno & Alessandro Capone (eds.), Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics: Issues in Linguistics, Springer. pp. 133-154. 2021.In this paper, I deal with socio-pragmatics and pragmemes, and propose that we need to take into account societal and cultural considerations in order to develop a persuasive theory about utterance meaning and language use. In particular, I deal with pragmemes and propose that they depart considerably from speech act theory, which is more or less a kind of armchair linguistics, as they can be combined with the notion of language games Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell) and with the…Read more
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10Indirect Reports and Pragmatics (edited book)Imprint: Springer. 2015.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 iss…Read more
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261Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics. Theoretical developments (edited book)Springer. 2021.Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. This first volume intends to contribute to the dialogue between philosophers and linguists, trying to broaden the boundaries of this discipline defined by the crucial notions of context and verbal action. To this purpose, the contributions are collected in an order that reflects the core and the fr…Read more
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267Uncommon groundIntercultural Pragmatics 2 (13). 2016.The purpose of this paper is to show how micro-argumentation mechanisms of presumptive reasoning and reasoning from best explanation can be used for explaining some cases of presupposition cancellation. It will be shown how the relationship between presupposition triggers and pragmatic presuppositions can be analyzed in terms of presumptive and non-presumptive polyphonic articulation of an utterance, resulting in different types of commitments for the interlocutors. This approach is grounded on…Read more
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424Interpretative Disputes, Explicatures, and Argumentative ReasoningArgumentation 30 (4): 399-422. 2016.The problem of establishing the best interpretation of a speech act is of fundamental importance in argumentation and communication in general. A party in a dialogue can interpret another’s or his own speech acts in the most convenient ways to achieve his dialogical goals. In defamation law this phenomenon becomes particularly important, as the dialogical effects of a communicative move may result in legal consequences. The purpose of this paper is to combine the instruments provided by argument…Read more
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |