Experimental Pragmatics

Experimental Pragmatics
Author: Ira Noveck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2018-10-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1107084903

Explains the phenomena, theoretical debates, experiments and historical development of experimental pragmatics, which investigates how utterances communicate a speaker's intended meaning.

The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics

The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics
Author: M. Gareth Gaskell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 880
Release: 2007
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198568975

The ability to communicate through spoken and written language is one of the defining characteristics of the human race, yet it remains a deeply mysterious process. The young science of psycholinguistics attempts to uncover the mechanisms and representations underlying human language. This interdisciplinary field has seen massive developments over the past decade, with a broad expansion of the research base, and the incorporation of new experimental techniques such as brain imaging and computational modelling. The result is that real progress is being made in the understanding of the key components of language in the mind. The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics brings together the views of 75 leading researchers in psycholinguistics to provide a comprehensive and authoritative review of the current state of the art in psycholinguistics. With almost 50 chapters written by experts in the field, the range and depth of coverage is unequalled. The contributors are eminent in a wide range of fields, including psychology, linguistics, human memory, cognitive neuroscience, bilingualism, genetics, development and neuropsychology. Their contributions are organised into six themed sections, covering word recognition, the mental lexicon, comprehension and discourse, language production, language development, and perspectives on psycholinguistics. The breadth of coverage, coupled with the accessibility of the short chapter format should make the handbook essential reading for both students and researchers in the fields of psychology, linguistics and neuroscience.

The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics

The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics
Author: Chris Cummins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1125
Release: 2019-03-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0192509551

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.

Meaning and Relevance

Meaning and Relevance
Author: Deirdre Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2012-03-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 052176677X

When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.

Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions

Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions
Author: Florian Schwarz
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2014-09-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3319079808

This volume brings together some of the most recent developments in the field of experimental pragmatics, specifically empirical approaches to theoretical issues in presupposition theory. It includes studies of the online processing of presupposed content; investigations of the interpretive properties of presuppositions in various linguistic contexts; comparative perspectives relative to other aspects of meaning, such as asserted content and implicatures; cross-linguistic comparisons of presupposition triggers; and perspectives from language acquisition. Taken together, these novel contributions provide a snapshot of state-of-the art developments in this area and will serve as a point of reference for numerous emerging avenues of future work. It makes for an ideal set of readings for advanced university courses on experimental studies of meaning and is a must-read for anyone interested in experimental research on meaning in natural language.

Contrastive Pragmatics

Contrastive Pragmatics
Author: Karin Aijmer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2011-06-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027286647

We have recently seen a broadening of pragmatics to new areas and to the study of more than one language. This is illustrated by the present volume on Contrastive Pragmatics which brings together a number of articles originally presented at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference in Göteborg in 2007. The contributions deal with pragmatic phenomena such as speech acts, discourse markers and modality in different language pairs using theoretical approaches such as politeness theory, Conversation Analysis, Appraisal Theory, grammaticalization and cultural textology. Also discourse practices and genres may differ across cultures as illustrated by the study of TV news shows in different countries. Contrastive pragmatics also includes the comparative study of pragmatic phenomena from a foreign language perspective, a new area with implications for language teaching and intercultural communication. The contributions to this volume were originally published in Languages in Contrast 9:1 (2009).

Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives

Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives
Author: Pierre Larrivée
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2015-07-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3319174649

This volume offers insights on experimental and empirical research in theoretical linguistic issues of negation and polarity, focusing on how negation is marked and how negative polarity is emphatic and how it interacts with double negation. Metalinguistic negation and neg-raising are also explored in the volume. Leading specialists in the field present novel ideas by employing various experimental methods in felicity judgments, eye tracking, self-paced readings, prosody and ERP. Particular attention is given to extensive crosslinguistc data from French, Catalan and Korean along with analyses using semantic and pragmatic methods, corpus linguistics, diachronic perspectives and longitudinal acquisitional studies as well as signed and gestural negation. Each contribution is situated with regards to major previous studies, thereby offering readers insights on the current state of the art in research on negation and negative polarity, highlighting how theory and data together contributes to the understanding of cognition and mind.

Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research

Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research
Author: Elma Blom
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2010-10-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027287953

Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research provides students and researchers interested in language acquisition with comprehensible and practical information on the most frequently used methods in language acquisition research. It includes contributions on first and child/adult second language learners, language-impaired children, and on the acquisition of both spoken and signed language. Part I discusses specific experimental methods, explaining the rationale behind each one, and providing an overview of potential participants, the procedure and data-analysis, as well as advantages and disadvantages and dos and don’ts. Part II focuses on comparisons across groups, addressing the theoretical, applied and methodological issues involved in such comparative work. This book will not only be of use to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, but also to any scholars wishing to learn more about a particular research method. It is suitable as a textbook in postgraduate programs in the fields of linguistics, education and psychology.

Task-Based Approaches to Teaching and Assessing Pragmatics

Task-Based Approaches to Teaching and Assessing Pragmatics
Author: Naoko Taguchi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2018-08-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027263957

This volume is the first book-length attempt to bring together the fields of task-based language teaching (TBLT) and second language pragmatics by exploring how the teaching and assessment of pragmatics can be integrated into TBLT. The TBLT-pragmatics connection is illustrated in a variety of constructs (e.g., speech acts, honorifics, genres, interactional features), methods (e.g., quantitative, quasi-experimental, conversation analysis), and topics (e.g., instructed SLA, heritage language learning, technology-enhanced teaching, assessment, and discursive pragmatics). Chapters in this volume collectively demonstrate how the two fields can together advance the current practice of teaching language for socially-situated, real-world communicative needs.