Huang Yan

Pragmatics is one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing fields in linguistics and the philosophy of language. It is a particularly complex subject with all kinds of disciplinary influences and few, if any, clear boundaries. This chapter provides an authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date overview of the contemporary landscape of pragmatics. It starts with the question of what is pragmatics. It then surveys the two main schools of thought in pragmatics: the Anglo-American and European Continental traditions. This is followed by a review of macro-pragmatics, which covers cognitively oriented macro-pragmatics, such as experimental, computational, and clinical pragmatics; socially and/or culturally oriented macro-pragmatics, such as politeness and impoliteness studies, cultural, cross- and intercultural, and interpersonal pragmatics; and those branches of macro-pragmatics that are not easily and/or neatly placed in the first two categories, such as historical, corpus, and literary pragmatics. The final section addresses the organization and content of this handbook.

The concept of implicature has its origin in the work of the late English philosopher H. P. Grice, though some proto-Gricean ideas can be traced back to classical times. Since its inception, the notion of conversational implicature has become one of the single most important pragmatic ideas in linguistics and the philosophy of language. It has spurred numerous new concepts such as explicature, the ‘pragmatically enriched said’, and impliciture in various neo- and post-Gricean enterprises. This chapter provides a critical overview of the current state of play in implicature and its related concepts in linguistics and the philosophy of language.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a state-of-the-art survey of classical and especially neo-Gricean pragmatics, focusing on the bipartite model put forward by Horn and the trinitarian model advanced by Levinson. It assesses the role neo-Gricean pragmatics plays in effecting a radical simplification of the lexicon, semantics, and formal syntax in linguistic theory respectively, covering lexical narrowing, lexical cloning, lexical blocking, and lexicalization asymmetry in logical operators, and concentrating on pragmatic intrusion into what is said, Grice’s circle, and the pragmatics–semantics interface, and anaphora and binding.

This volume brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world to present an authoritative, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current issues in pragmatics. Following an introduction by the editor, the volume is divided into five thematic parts. Chapters in Part I are concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories, while Part II deals with central topics in pragmatics, including implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, reference, and context. In Part III, the focus is on cognitively-oriented pragmatics, covering topics such as computational, experimental, and neuropragmatics. Part IV takes a look at socially and culturally-oriented pragmatics such as politeness/impoliteness studies, cross- and intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics. Finally, the chapters in Part V explore the interfaces of pragmatics with semantics, grammar, morphology, the lexicon, prosody, language change, and information structure.

With the development of industrialization and urbanization, cities have become the main carriers of economic activities. However, the long-term development of cities has also caused damage to resources and the environment. Hence, objective and scientific evaluation of urban low-carbon sustainable development capacity is very important. An index system of urban low-carbon sustainable development capability is constructed in this paper, and a TOPSIS-BP neural network model is established to evaluate the low-carbon sustainable development capability of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou in China. At the same time, the difference degree of low-carbon sustainable development level in these four cities is analyzed by standard deviation and coefficient of variation, and the influencing factors of urban low-carbon sustainable development ability are extracted by grey correlation analysis. The results show that the capability of low-carbon sustainable development in four cities is rising and the difference of low-carbon sustainable development capability is decreasing; the general view that the higher the general investment in low-carbon sustainable development, the higher the level of low-carbon sustainable development in cities has not been verified; with the change of time series, the factors affecting the capability of low-carbon sustainable development in the same city are different and the influence of the same factor on the capability of low-carbon sustainable development in different cities is different.

Reading presents an unsolved difficulty for children with hearing loss and research on factors influencing their literacy development is very limited. This work aimed to study the influence of home literacy environment on literacy development of children with hearing loss and explore possible mediating effects of reading interest and parent-child relationship. 112 Chinese children with hearing loss were surveyed for scales of HLE, literacy development, reading interest, and parent-child relationship. Result analysis showed that HLE significantly predicted literacy development of children with hearing loss and this effect was no longer significant after including reading interest and parent-child relationship as variables. Further, HLE significantly predicted reading interest and parent-child relationship, each of which predicted literacy development and played a significant mediating role in HLE’s influence on literacy development. These findings provide educational tips for families of children with hearing loss.

Gender plays an important role in various aspects of second language acquisition, including lexicon learning. Many studies have suggested that compared to males, females are less likely to experience boredom, one of the frequently experienced deactivating negative emotions that may impair language learning. However, the contribution of boredom to gender-related differences in lexicon learning remains unclear. To address this question, here we conducted two experiments with a large sample of over 1,000 college students to explore the relationships between gender differences in boredom and lexicon learning. In Experiment 1, a cohort of 527 participants completed the trait and state boredom scales as well as a novel lexicon learning task without awareness of the testing process. In Experiment 2, an independent cohort of 506 participants completed the same novel lexicon learning task with prior knowledge of the testing procedure. Results from both experiments consistently showed significant differences between female and male participants in the rate of forgetting words and the state boredom scores, with female participants performing better than male participants. Furthermore, differences in state boredom scores partially explained differences in the rate of forgetting words between female and male participants. These findings demonstrate a novel contribution of state boredom to gender differences in lexicon learning, which provides new insights into better language-learning ability in females.

A scalar implicature is a Quantity-based conversational implicature that is derived from a set of salient contrastive alternatives usually linearly ordered in semantic or informational strength such as a Horn scale. It is dependent on the non-use of the semantically or informationally stronger alternatives that could have been used in the same set. A typical example is that the use of the semantically weak existential quantifier some implicates ‘not the semantically stronger universal quantifier all’. But this is not always the case. In this article, I discuss three ‘marked’ cases of scalar implicature in a number of different languages: the use of ‘I like you’ to implicate ‘I love you’ in Chinese, the use of a general noun such as olona ‘person’ to refer to the speaker’s husband or her boy’s father in Malagasy, and the use of a semantically weak scalar expression to imply the meaning of its stronger alternatives in a face-threatening context in Chinese, Japanese, and English. Following Huang : 25–39, 2020), I call this type of marked scalar implicature, which has received very little attention in the literature ‘non-canonical scalar implicature’. I point out that the use of ‘non-canonical’ scalar implicature is implicated in a classical way, with maximum theoretical parsimony, from Grice’s co-operative principle and its component maxims of conversation. Finally, I provide a novel neo-Gricean pragmatic analysis of non-canonical scalar implicatures, combining both Horn’s and Levinson’s Q- and R/I-principles. In my account, two aspects of non-canonical scalar implicature are distinguished: epistemic and non-epistemic. For generating the non-epistemic aspects of non-canonical scalar implicature ‘from weak to not stronger’, Horn scales and the Q-principle are invoked. On the other hand, for engendering the epistemic aspects of non-canonical scalar implicatures ‘from weak to stronger‘, a scale such as is treated as forming an Atlas-Levinson rather than a Horn scale and the computation of it is subject to the R/I-principle. Therefore, a more accurate term for a non-canonical scalar implicature may be ‘Q-scalar/I-implicature’.