This book provides an account of the speech acts of modern Irish (assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, declarative, and indirect speech acts), and their various significant clausal / sentential constructions. The study is strongly descriptive in the first instance while delivering an analysis of these diverse speech acts of Irish in a way that is intended to strike a balance between depiction, explanation, and technical characterisation. The choice of topics, the characterisation of speech and illocutionary acts, covered in this study is guided primarily by speech act theory. It relates the speech acts of Irish to each other, and looks to define each, in terms of their relationship to the situation of the utterance reflecting real-time language-in-use, with context and common ground, to identify their important properties.
This book is intended for a broad and diverse scholarly audience. Primarily, it is intended to be of value to linguists interested in the pragmatics of Irish. Linguists studying the interaction of syntax, semantics and pragmatics are likely to find many of the descriptions and analyses of the speech act language phenomena interesting and useful.

This is the first such collection of essays presenting a critical multi-author examination of language and power relations in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The post-Soviet period in Ukraine and Kazakhstan has been characterized not only by changes in the economic marketplace in the transition from communism to capitalism, but also in the linguistic marketplace. During the Soviet period, Russian was the primary language of schooling, media, and government administration in both countries, leading to widespread language shift away from their titular languages, especially among the educated urban elites. Since independence, Ukrainian and Kazakh, which occupied relatively peripheral positions in the Soviet-era marketplace, have been elevated to the status of national languages and institutionalized in government and schools, thus increasing their symbolic power. Nevertheless, the years since independence have also seen contentious debates around language.
Employing various methodological tools ranging from surveys to critical discourse analysis of legislation, literary texts and social media products, the authors in this volume seek to demonstrate and explain how political relations and hegemonic ideologies have been reproduced and negotiated at both the macro-level in legislation on language and state-sponsored media channels and embodiments of political and linguistic ideologies in translations, as well as at the micro-level of everyday language practices, school choice, and discourses on social media platforms. Among the authors are Elise S. Ahn, Igor Danylenko, Bridget Goodman, Lada Kolomiyets, Natalia Kudriavtseva, Svitlana Melnyk, Juldyz Smagulova, Yuliia Soroka, and Maryna Vardanian.

Patrice Robitaille, docteur de 3e cycle en linguistique (phonologie) de l'Université Laval à Québec, est directeur dans un collège privé de Montréal. En 1994, sous la direction de Pierre Martin, il a soutenu une thèse de doctorat qui porte sur les fluctuations et les flottements phonologiques de l'anglais de la Géorgie aux États-Unis. Au cours de sa carrière, il a élaboré et enseigné les cours Observation et dépistage en difficulté du langage et Intervention: clientèles avec difficultés de langage dans le programme de Techniques d'éducation spécialisée. Il est l'auteur de comptes rendus et d'articles dans le domaine de la linguistique. Il est l'auteur de romans dont Le chenil, finaliste aux Prix littéraires de Gouverneur général du Canada. La méthode qu'il préconise dans les Éléments de phonologie fonctionnelle pour l'intervention et l'orthophonie pour l'identification, l'analyse et la compréhension des processus phonologiques a permis de former plus de 500 intervenants sur l'île de Montréal. Le présent ouvrage se veut une initiation à la phonétique générale française et à la phonologie fonctionnelle. La maîtrise de ces deux disciplines demeure essentielle pour tous ceux qui oeuvrent dans l'identification des processus phonologiques observés chez les enfants dont la parole est en plein développement. Étudiants, intervenants, orthophonistes, enseignants et professeurs y trouveront la base théorique, les exercices pratiques et le lexique leur permettant de mieux comprendre les phénomènes qu'ils observent sur le terrain.

This volume transcends boundaries, captivating multimodality scholars worldwide while offering invaluable non-Anglo perspectives through its main focus on Lithuanian public discourse. Discover the interaction between multimodal communication and (sub)cultural influences in political, advertising, and film discourse. This volume is a vade mecum for scholars and students of visual and multimodal stylistics, rhetoric, and creativity across diverse media, professionals specialising in advertisements, commercials, films etc. Discover original insights that encourage intercultural comparative research, emphasising the role of cultural context in multimodality.

What is a live performance? And why is semiotics the best approach for the analysis and interpretation of the performing arts?

Drawing on semiotic developments of the past five decades, this book introduces students to the semiotic analysis of live performances and provides them with a clear method for untangling the multimodal complexity of performance from the spectator's point of view.

Presenting live performances as two-way communication processes, social events, and cognitive and affective experiences, each chapter of this highly accessible book begins first with an overview of the basics. This is followed by a case study, and moves through to a more advanced discussion, accompanied by suggestions for exercises and further reading. Diagrams and flow charts help to clearly illustrate the conceptual tools used in the analytical process, and a companion website contains recorded extracts from the live performances discussed in the book, which students can use to put their knowledge into practice. The book explores a broad range of performance types from across different cultures, including music, opera, ballet, theatre, circus, mime, improvisation, and immersion. It offers a guide for understanding the way in which a performance is produced, from an initial idea through to the final presentation in front of a live audience, and provides the reader with the tools and understanding they need for a successful semiotic analysis of live performance.

This volume presents a comparative approach to textual glossing practices in both the West and East Asia, looking for evidence of historical and cultural continuity in this wide-spread practice.

This book offers a consistent, theoretically grounded, accessible account of adaptation across a range of instances, employing Relevance Theory as its explanatory framework and arguing that every adaptation is an independent communicative act. The author establishes the principles of the study in the first part, introducing and contextualising the theory developed by Sperber and Wilson, before going on in the second part to demonstrate the strength of the approach, and its relevance and utility within adaptation studies and beyond through a wide array of examples. The volume will open up discussion in areas previously underserved by adaptation studies and consider broader implications, such as where we draw the line when we think about 'adaptation'. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of fields including adaptation studies, relevance theory, linguistic pragmatics, stylistics, narratology, intertextuality, literature and film studies.

In legal interpretation, where does meaning come from? Law is made from language, yet law, unlike other language-related disciplines, has not so far experienced its pragmatic turn towards inference and the construction of meaning. This book investigates to what extent a pragmatically based view of l linguistic and legal interpretation can lead to new theoretical views for law and, in addition, to practical consequences in legal decision-making.
With its traditional emphasis on the letter of the law and the immutable stability of a text as legal foundation, law has been slow to take the pragmatic perspective: namely, the language-user's experience and activity in making meaning. More accustomed to literal than to pragmatic notions of meaning, that is, in the text rather than constructed by speakers and hearers the disciplines of law may be culturally resistant to the pragmatic turn. By bringing together the different but complementary perspectives of pragmaticians and lawyers, this book addresses the issue of to what extent legal meaning can be productively analysed as deriving from resources beyond the text, beyond the letter of the law.
This collection re-visits the feasibility of the notion of literal meaning for legal interpretation and, at the same time, the feasibility of pragmatic meaning for law. Can explications of pragmatic meaning support court actions in the same way concepts of literal meaning have traditionally supported statutory interpretations and court judgements? What are the consequences of a user-based view of language for the law, in both its practices of interpretation and its definition of itself as a field? Readers will find in this collection means of approaching such questions, and promising routes for inquiry into the genre- and field-specific characteristics of inference in law.
In many respects, the problem of literal vs. pragmatic meaning confined to the text vs. reaching beyond it will appear to parallel the dichotomy in law between textualism and intentionalism. There are indeed illuminating connections between the pair of linguistic terms and the more publicly controversial legal ones. But the parallel is not exact, and the linguistic dichotomy is in any case anterior to the legal one. Even as linguistic-pragmatic investigation may serve legal domains, the legal questions themselves point back to central conditions of all linguistic meaning.

Introducing Arabic Rhetoric is a book that aims to introduce students to the unique discipline of rhetorical studies as understood and formulated by Medieval Muslim rhetoricians drawing on materials from classical Qur'anic commentary and Arabic linguistics. The book comprises of eleven broad chapters outlining preliminary areas and a general exploration of traditional sub-fields within Arabic rhetoric applied to the Qur'an. The book contains primary Arabic source material with all key technical terms translated with extensive notes and a helpful glossary at the end. There is also an appendix at the end that includes an Arabic edition and translation of the primer on rhetoric composed by the 18th century jurist, Mystic and philologist Ahmad al-Dardir focusing specifically on 'Ilm al-Bayan ('Figures of Speech') for a small representative text for further study and exploration.

Exploring speeches by public figures such as Emma Watson, Tony Blair, Donald Trump, Julia Gillard and Lady Gaga, this engaging textbook explains the ways in which political speeches can be analysed. It examines the role of language in speeches and how it can be used to challenge or reinforce prevailing social, cultural and political attitudes. Each chapter introduces a particular discourse approach and then applies this in a model analysis of a passage of text. The chosen texts concern issues of social, cultural and political importance that address topics of significant importance to the audience to which they were delivered. Students are encouraged to engage with the text and consider how approaches to text analysis, such as cohesion, context analysis and metaphor analysis, may be adapted to provide a more critical perspective.

This text will be essential reading for students of English language, linguistics, communication studies and politics on critical discourse and discourse analysis modules.

In the research literature on interactional competence in talk among second language speakers and their coparticipants, this volume of Pragmatics & Interaction is the first to focus on interaction in Japanese. The chapters examine the use and development of interactional practices in a wide range of social settings, from everyday talk among friends to service encounters, workplace interaction, and a rakugo performance to various activities in Japanese language classrooms and oral language assessment. Conducted from the shared perspective of conversation analysis, the studies show in detail how the activities are accomplished through the generic methods of interactional organization, multimodal practices, and the specific linguistic resources of Japanese.

This book is the first comprehensive and systematic introduction to the linguistics of humor. Salvatore Attardo takes a broad approach to the topic, exploring not only theoretical linguistic analyses, but also pragmatic and semantic aspects, conversation and discourse analysis, ethnomethodology, and interactionist and variationist sociolinguistics. The volume begins with chapters that introduce the terminology and conceptual and methodological apparatus, as well as outlining the major theories in the field and examining incongruity and resolution and the semiotics of humor. The second part of the book explores humor competence, with chapters that cover semantic and pragmatic topics, the General Theory of Verbal Humor, and puns and their interpretation. The third part provides an in-depth discussion of the applied linguistics of humor, and examines social context, discourse and conversation analysis, and sociolinguistic aspects. In the final part of the book, the discussion is extended beyond the central field of linguistics, with chapters discussing humor in literature, in translation, and in the classroom.

The volume brings together the multiple strands of current knowledge about humor and linguistics, both theoretical and applied; it assumes no prior background in humor studies, and will be a valuable resource for students from advanced undergraduate level upwards, particularly those coming to linguistics from related disciplines.

Current debates on intercultural communication often align with critical approaches. However, in the fields of cultural linguistics and intercultural pragmatics, significant strides have been made towards a dynamic and sociocognitive framework for understanding intercultures. Drawing from these concepts, this book proposes a fine-grained analysis to elucidate the active co-construction of intercultural space in situ, encompassing verbal, corporal-gestural, and prosodic dimensions. This empirical contribution fills a notable gap in the burgeoning interface between cognition, interaction, and embodiment, shedding light on a critical intercultural facet that has hitherto remained underexplored.

Pragmatics represents the study of language use in socially grounded contexts and it is thus a central discipline in Linguistics. Due to its focus on language use, it has been referred to as a transdiscipline that interacts with a broad variety of disciplines that are concerned with social action and, as such, pragmatics overlaps with many other linguistic and non-linguistic disciplines.

Irish English is one of the earliest varieties of English to have attracted the interest of scholars working on pragmatic variation. From a sociolinguistic and a pragmatics perspective, it represents one of the best studied varieties of English and can thus be argued to offer important impulses to the study of variationist pragmatics in general. Ulster Scots, though in close contact with Irish English, has received less attention.

Given this important position of Irish English in pragmatics research and the paucity of such research on (Ulster) Scots, this volume explicitly focuses on socio-pragmatics and deals with the way speakers in and around Ireland use language in a way so that it assists them in the construction of their social identities or helps them navigate socio-cultural spaces.

This volume offers an in-depth analysis of the social phenomenon of migration from various legal-linguistic perspectives. Migration has become a global phenomenon and a burning issue provoking social conflict and political instability in modern societies all over the world. The question of dealing with migrants and asylum seekers has dominated political discourse. It has given rise to national and international legislation on emigration and immigration, some of them including discriminatory provisions, pressed laws against immigration (Acts of exclusion) and prompted anti-migration rhetoric and hate speech against migrants. Important efforts have been made in both common law and civil law jurisdictions to protect migrants' fundamental rights to dignity and equality.

Marking 30 years of contrastive corpus linguistics, this volume provides a state-of-the-art of the field, charting its development over time and expanding the boundaries of the discipline.

Focusing on a diversity of methods and approaches to language comparison, it uses both comparable and translation corpora, and explores a broad range of language registers from newspaper reporting and spoken political discourse to film scripts and football match reports. Using English as the pivot language for each chapter, the volume offers contrastive bilingual and trilingual perspectives on a number of languages, including Czech, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish, covering a typologically diverse field. By exploring the application of complex multi-genre multilingual data sets and expanding the horizons of contrastive studies, it demonstrates how a juxtaposition of cross-linguistic and register variation can deepen our insight into language variation and use.

The volume is dedicated to two prominent contrastive corpus linguists: Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg, who have decisively shaped the discipline from its very beginnings. The book opens with a chapter by Aijmer, reflecting on the current breadth and future prospects of research in the area while pointing to emergent trends with an insight that only she can offer.

This Open Access book examines the link between intercultural competence (IC) and pragmatics by asking frontline modern foreign language teachers in higher education teaching a variety of languages (e.g., Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish) how they conceptualise intercultural competence and which skills, competences and knowledge they consider important in their teaching contexts. The data were collected with an online survey that focused on the relationship between intercultural competence and pragmatics.

While international organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) or the Council of Europe (CoE) agree that intercultural competence should play an important role in education, it is not always clear what IC may encompass in specific teaching contexts and subject areas. Examining how modern foreign language teachers in higher education conceptualise intercultural competence and the value they attach as well as the attention they give to various areas of pragmatics in their teaching is highly important, since those language professionals may be the final teachers learners encounter during their formal foreign language education. They are therefore in a unique position to shape modern foreign language learners' intercultural and pragmatic awareness, competence and skills.

This book will be of interest to language professionals, modern foreign language teachers and teacher trainers, as well as students and scholars of applied linguistics, pragmatics, and language education.

This book explores the extent to which self-praise is acceptable in both offline and online contexts, across different genres, platforms, and cultural backgrounds. The data analyzed encompass both naturally occurring (daily conversation as well as institutional talk) and elicited (experiments and interviews) types, and are explored at both quantitative and qualitative levels to offer a relatively systematic and comprehensive inquiry into self-praise as social (inter)action.

Contributors to this book not only draw on traditional politeness theories but are also informed by social psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, CMC, and (multimodal) discourse analysis. They are inspired by pragmatics but also go beyond to ground their studies within locally situated cultural contexts, most of which are under-presented in the current academic world. Their efforts substantiate the fact that self-praise is most worthy of intensive analytic attention. This book appeals to students and researchers in the field and contributes to the way communication is facilitated through different ways of deploying linguistic and interactional resources.

Repetitive sequences play a major role as a pattern-building device and are a basic syntagmatic linguistic means on all language levels in spoken and signed languages. Little attention has been paid to investigating them in multimodal language use. Do gestures exhibit different types of repetitive sequences? Do they build complex units based on these types and if so, how is the pattern building to be described? How is the interrelation of gestural and spoken units in such complex units? Is it possible to identify repetitive patterns that are comparable to spoken and signed languages and/or patterns specific to the gestural modality? Based on a corpus-analysis of multimodal usage-events, 7 chapters explore gestural repetitions with regard to their structure, semantic and syntactic relevance for multimodal utterances, and cognitive saliency. Fine-grained cognitive-linguistic analyses of multimodal usage events reveal that gestural repetitions are not only a basic principle of building patterns in spoken and signed languages, but also in gestures. By addressing questions of mediality and multimodality of language-in-use, the book contributes to the investigation of repetition as a fundamental means of sign and meaning construction (crosscutting modalities) and enhances the understanding of the multimodal character of language in use.