1 What is pragmatics? 2 Speech acts 3 Conversational implicature 4 Approaches to pragmatics 5 Pragmatics and indirectness 6 Theories of politeness 7 The construction of meaning.

Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics is a comprehensive introductory text which discusses the development of pragmatics - its aims and methodology - and also introduces themes that are not generally covered in other texts. Jenny Thomas focuses on the dynamic nature of speaker meaning, considering the central roles of both speaker and hearer, and takes into account the social and psychological factors involved in the generation and interpretation of utterances. The book includes a detailed examination of the development of Pragmatics as a discipline, drawing attention to problems encountered in earlier work, and brings the reader up to date with recent discussion in the field. The book is written principally for students with no previous knowledge of pragmatics, and the basic concepts are covered in considerable detail. Theoretical and more complicated information is highlighted with examples that have been drawn from the media, fiction and real-life interaction, and makes the study more accessible to newcomers. It is an ideal introductory textbook for students of linguistics and for all who are interested in analysing problems in communication.

This book offers a semantic and metasemantic inquiry into the representation of meaning in linguistic interaction. Kasia Jaszczolt's view represents the most radical stance on meaning to be found in the contextualist tradition and thereby the most radical take on the semantics/pragmatics boundary. It allows for the selection of the cognitively plausible object of enquiry without being constrained by such distinctions as what is said/what is implicated or what is linguistic and what is extralinguistic. She argues that this is the only promising stance on meaning. The analysis transcends the traditional distinctions drawn, and traditional questions posed, in post-Gricean pragmatics and philosophy of language. It heavily relies on the dynamic construction of meaning in discourse, using truth conditions as a tool but at the same time conforming to pragmatic compositionality ? whereby aspects of meaning that enter this composition have very different provenance. Meaning in Linguistic Interaction builds on the author's earlier work on Default Semantics and adds new arguments in favour of radical contextualism as well as novel applications, focusing on the role of salience, the flexibility of word meaning, the literal/nonliteral distinction, and the dynamic nature of a character, as well as offering an entirely new perspective on the indexical/nonindexical distinction. It contains a state-of-the-art discussion of the semantics/pragmatics boundary disputes, focusing on varieties of semantic minimalism and contextualism and on the limitations of an indexicalism. Jaszczolt's work is illustrated with examples from a variety of languages and offers some formal representations of meaning in the metalanguage of Default Semantics.

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Drawing on cutting-edge research, this book shows how tools from formal semantics can be used to formalize theories from sociolinguistics.

This book offers a semantic and metasemantic inquiry into the representation of meaning in linguistic interaction. Kasia Jaszczolt's view represents the most radical stance on meaning to be found in the contextualist tradition and thereby the most radical take on the semantics/pragmatics boundary. It allows for the selection of the cognitively plausible object of enquiry without being constrained by such distinctions as what is said/what is implicated or what is linguistic and what is extralinguistic. She argues that this is the only promising stance on meaning. The analysis transcends the traditional distinctions drawn, and traditional questions posed, in post-Gricean pragmatics and philosophy of language. It heavily relies on the dynamic construction of meaning in discourse, using truth conditions as a tool but at the same time conforming to pragmatic compositionality ? whereby aspects of meaning that enter this composition have very different provenance. Meaning in Linguistic Interaction builds on the author's earlier work on Default Semantics and adds new arguments in favour of radical contextualism as well as novel applications, focusing on the role of salience, the flexibility of word meaning, the literal/nonliteral distinction, and the dynamic nature of a character, as well as offering an entirely new perspective on the indexical/nonindexical distinction. It contains a state-of-the-art discussion of the semantics/pragmatics boundary disputes, focusing on varieties of semantic minimalism and contextualism and on the limitations of an indexicalism. Jaszczolt's work is illustrated with examples from a variety of languages and offers some formal representations of meaning in the metalanguage of Default Semantics.

Clinical Interaction and the Analysis of Meaning evinces a therapeutic vitality all too rare in works of theory. Rather than fleeing from the insights of other disciplines, Dorpat and Miller discover in recent research confirmation of the possibilities of psychoanalytic treatment. In Section I, "Critique of Classical Theory," Dorpat proposes a radical revision of the notion of primary process consonant with contemporary cognitive science. Such a revised conception not only enlarges our understanding of the analytic process; it also provides analysis with a conceptual language that can articulate meaningful connections with a growing body of empirical research about the development and nature of human cognition. In Section II, "Interactional Theory," Miller reverses the direction of inquiry. He begins with the literature on cognitive development and functioning, and proceeds to mine it for concepts relevant to the clinical process. He shows how a revised understanding of the operation of cognition and affect can impart new meaning to basic clinical concepts such as resistance, transference, and level of psychopathology. In Section III, "Applications and Exemplifications," Dorpat concludes this exemplary collaboration by exploring select topics from the standpoint of his and Miller's new psychoanalytic theory. At the heart of the authors' endeavor it "meaning analysis," a concept that integrates an up-to-date model of human information processing with the traditional goals of psychoanalysis. The patient approaches the clinical encounter, they argue, with cognitive-affective schemas that are the accumulatice product of his life experience to date; the manifold meanings ascribed to the clinical interaction must be understood as the product of these schemas rather than as distortions deriving from unconscious, drive-related fantasies. The therapist's goal is to make the patient's meaning-making conscious and thus available for introspection.

This book provides a good overview of philosophical and cognitive approaches to language use and meaning. A synthesis of such approaches leads to a dynamic concept of pragmatic meaning which is on the one hand grounded in cognition and motivated by linguistic and cultural convention and, on the other, creates a framework for studying the interactive and social dimensions of the development of meaning in linguistic communication. Through an experientialist approach based on connectionist models, the author shows that by internalizing pragmatic meaning people become social agents who reproduce, challenge or change their social parameters during interaction.Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition is suitable as a course book in Pragmatics and Semantics and of interest to those concerned with cognitive models and dynamic and social aspects of linguistic communication.