This book elucidates the nature of the semantics / pragmatics distinction in both synchrony and diachrony and proposes a definition of semantics and pragmatics that is orthogonal to the question of truth-conditionality. A corollary aim of the study is to propose an account of how and why erstwhile pragmatically-determined elements of meaning may, in the course of time, become semanticized.

Pragmatics has grown considerably in its relatively short history, from its original disciplinary influences in philosophy and linguistics, into a multidisciplinary field that encompasses a range of theoretical and empirical concerns. The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia captures the diversity of these intellectual interests in a comprehensive, single-volume edition. The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia covers concepts and theories that have traditionally been associated with pragmatics, but also recent areas of development within the field, scholars who have had a significant influence on pragmatics, interdisciplinary exchanges between pragmatics and other areas of enquiry and all major research trends. Extensive cross-references between entries, along with suggestions for further reading at the end of entries, ensure that the interested reader can pursue additional study of chosen topics. With over 200 entries, written by leading academics from around the world, The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia captures the rich complexity of pragmatics in an accessible manner. This reference will be relevant to students of pragmatics as well as to established scholars in the field.

This book summarizes the works and new research results presented at the First International Symposium on Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services (KES-IIMSS 2008), organized by the University of Piraeus and its Depa- ment of Informatics in conjunction with KES International (Piraeus, Greece, July 9–11, 2008). The aim of the symposium was to provide an internationally respected forum for scientific research into the technologies and applications of intelligent int- active multimedia systems and services. Besides the Preface, the book contains sixty four (64) chapters. The first four (4) chapters in the book are printed versions of the keynote addresses of the invited speakers of KES-IIMSS 2008. Besides the invited speaker chapters, the book contains fifteen (15) chapters on recent Advances in Multimedia Data Analysis, eleven (11) chapters on Reasoning Approaches, nine (9) chapters on Infrastructure of Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services, fourteen (14) chapters on Multimedia Applications, and eleven (11) chapters on Quality of Interactive Multimedia Services.

Mouton Series in Pragmatics (MSP) is a timely response to the growing demand for innovative and authoritative monographs and edited volumes from all angles of pragmatics. Recent theoretical work on the semantics/pragmatics interface, applications of evolutionary biology to the study of language, and empirical work within cognitive and developmental psychology and intercultural communication has directed attention to issues that warrant reexamination, as well as revision of some of the central tenets and claims of the field of pragmatics. The series welcomes proposals that reflect this endeavour and exploration within the discipline and neighboring fields such as language philosophy, communication, information science, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition and cognitive science. MSP will provide a forum for authors who represent different subfields of pragmatics including the linguistic, cognitive, social, and intercultural paradigms, and have important and intriguing ideas and research findings to share with scholars who are interested in linguistics in general and pragmatics in particular.

4.1 Predicative construction -- 4.2 Emphatic construction -- 5 Summary -- 7 The cleft construction -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Previous analyses -- 3 A dynamic analysis -- 4 Summary -- 8 Semantic underspecification: Cases of personal pronouns -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Previous analysis of expletive ta -- 3 A dynamic analysis -- 3.1 A dynamic analysis of the typical and non-typical referential construal of ta -- 3.2 A dynamic analysis of the expletive construal of ta -- 3.3 Scope interpretation and expletive ta -- 3.4 Some implications -- 4 Summary -- 9 Conclusion -- 1 Contributions to Chinese linguistics -- 2 Reflections on linguistic theorizing -- Bibliography -- Index

Prosody is the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, which encodes information that is not encoded by the syntax or words of an utterance. Prosody is critical for parsing speech, constructing syntactic structure, and building a representation of the conversational discourse model, among other linguistic functions. In 2008, researchers from linguistics, psychology and computer science gathered at the inaugural meeting of the conference on Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody at Cornell University. The papers in this volume represent the cutting edge of the prosody work presented at that conference. The articles in this special issue tackle a number of key questions: What type of information about syntax, semantics, and context is reflected in prosody and intonation? How much of that information can a listener retrieve from the signal? How does this information facilitate language processing in online conversations? How can this information be used to parse corpora, and how can corpora be used to test theories on prosody?

This handbook is the first to explore the growing field of experimental semantics and pragmatics. In the past 20 years, experimental data has become a major source of evidence for building theories of language meaning and use, encompassing a wide range of topics and methods. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters in this volume offer an up-to-date account of research in the field spanning 31 different topics, including scalar implicatures, presuppositions, counterfactuals, quantification, metaphor, prosody, and politeness, as well as exploring how and why a particular experimental method is suitable for addressing a given theoretical debate. The volume's forward-looking approach also seeks to actively identify questions and methods that could be fruitfully combined in future experimental research. Written in a clear and accessible style, this handbook will appeal to students and scholars from advanced undergraduate level upwards in a range of fields, including semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive science, and neuroscience.