Metaphors and implicatures in Shakespeare’s "Much Ado about Nothing"

Metaphors and implicatures in Shakespeare’s
Author: Achim Binder
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 24
Release: 2008-08-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3640128923

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Tubingen (Neuphilologie), course: Understanding Utterances, language: English, abstract: For many people it seems that the application and analysis of metaphors only belongs to the field of literary studies. There are, however, such a large number of metaphorical expressions and lexicalized, so-called “frozen metaphors” in both German and English that the importance of metaphors exceeds by far their poetic usage. For Grice, metaphors result from the flouting of the first maxim (Quality) – that of not saying what one believes to be false. Metaphorical expressions hence provoke a search for the intended speaker meaning because of the obvious discrepancy between the proposition expressed by the utterance and the “falseness” of its content. This “falseness”, however, is not always clear to see. Take, for example, the metaphor “no man is an island”. It is obviously metaphorical in both content and meaning and one could deduce a whole range of weak implicatures from it but it is in no way “literally false”. Considering that Grice labelled tropes and figures of speech (such as tautology, irony and metaphor) as cases of “maxim exploitation” , it seems reasonable to analyse a text which allows for a maximum of maxim exploitation and whose author is responsible for a large number of frozen metaphors in English: What makes Shakespeare (to name just one example) extraordinary is the way he exploited this ordinary aspect of communication so that a single line or phrase triggers the discovery of a whole array of implicatures. The centre of this paper will thus be a linguistic analysis of metaphors and implicatures in Shakespeare’s play Much Ado about Nothing.

Metaphors and Implicatures in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing

Metaphors and Implicatures in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing
Author: Achim Binder
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 30
Release: 2008-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3640130332

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Tubingen (Neuphilologie), course: Understanding Utterances, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: For many people it seems that the application and analysis of metaphors only belongs to the field of literary studies. There are, however, such a large number of metaphorical expressions and lexicalized, so-called "frozen metaphors" in both German and English that the importance of metaphors exceeds by far their poetic usage. For Grice, metaphors result from the flouting of the first maxim (Quality) - that of not saying what one believes to be false. Metaphorical expressions hence provoke a search for the intended speaker meaning because of the obvious discrepancy between the proposition expressed by the utterance and the "falseness" of its content. This "falseness", however, is not always clear to see. Take, for example, the metaphor "no man is an island". It is obviously metaphorical in both content and meaning and one could deduce a whole range of weak implicatures from it but it is in no way "literally false". Considering that Grice labelled tropes and figures of speech (such as tautology, irony and metaphor) as cases of "maxim exploitation", it seems reasonable to analyse a text which allows for a maximum of maxim exploitation and whose author is responsible for a large number of frozen metaphors in English: What makes Shakespeare (to name just one example) extraordinary is the way he exploited this ordinary aspect of communication so that a single line or phrase triggers the discovery of a whole array of implicatures. The centre of this paper will thus be a linguistic analysis of metaphors and implicatures in Shakespeare's play Much Ado about Nothing.

Politeness in Shakespeare

Politeness in Shakespeare
Author: Abdelaziz Bouchara
Publisher: Diplomica Verlag
Total Pages: 127
Release: 2009-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3836677539

Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson have proposed that power (P), distance (D), and the ranked extremity (R) of a face-threatening act are the universal determinants of politeness levels in dyadic discourse. This claim is tested here for Shakespeare's use of Early Modern English in Much Ado about Nothing, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night. The comedies are used because: (1) dramatic texts provide the best information on colloquial speech of the period; (2) the psychological soliloquies in the comedies provide the access to inner life that is necessary for a proper test of politeness theory; and (3) the comedies represent the full range of society in a period of high relevance to politeness theory. The four plays are systematically searched for pairs of minimally contrasting dyads where the dimensions of contrast are power (P), distance (D), and intrinsic extremity (R). Whenever such a pair is found, there are two speeches to be scored for politeness and a prediction from theory as to which should be more polite. The results for P and for R are those predicted by theory, but the results for D are not. The two components of D, interactive closeness and affect, are not closely associated in the plays. Affect strongly influences politeness (increased liking increases politeness and decreased liking decreases politeness); interactive closeness has little or no effect on politeness. The uses of politeness for the delineation of character in the comedies are illustrated.

The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics

The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics
Author: Keith Allan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 967
Release: 2012-01-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1139501895

Pragmatics is the study of human communication: the choices speakers make to express their intended meaning and the kinds of inferences that hearers draw from an utterance in the context of its use. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions. It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.

The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics

The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics
Author: Michael Haugh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1009
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108957390

Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study. Bringing together an international team of leading editors and contributors, it provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge overview of the key concepts, topics, settings and methodologies involved in sociopragmatic research. The chapters are organised in a systematic fashion, and span a wide range of theoretical research on how language communicates multiple meanings in context, how it influences our daily interactions and relationships with others, and how it helps construct our social worlds. Providing insight into a fascinating array of phenomena and novel research directions, the Handbook is not only relevant to experts of pragmatics but to any reader with an interest in language and its use in different contexts, including researchers in sociology, anthropology and communication, and students of applied linguistics and related areas, as well as professional practitioners in communication research.

The Written Language Bias in Linguistics

The Written Language Bias in Linguistics
Author: Per Linell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2004-08-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134270526

Linguists routinely emphasise the primacy of speech over writing. Yet, most linguists have analysed spoken language, as well as language in general, applying theories and methods that are best suited for written language. Accordingly, there is an extensive 'written language bias' in traditional and present day linguistics and other language sciences. In this book, this point is argued with rich and convincing evidence from virtually all fields of linguistics.

Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science

Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science
Author: Keith Stenning
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2012-01-13
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0262293536

A new proposal for integrating the employment of formal and empirical methods in the study of human reasoning. In Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science, Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen—a cognitive scientist and a logician—argue for the indispensability of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning. Logic and cognition were once closely connected, they write, but were “divorced” in the past century; the psychology of deduction went from being central to the cognitive revolution to being the subject of widespread skepticism about whether human reasoning really happens outside the academy. Stenning and van Lambalgen argue that logic and reasoning have been separated because of a series of unwarranted assumptions about logic. Stenning and van Lambalgen contend that psychology cannot ignore processes of interpretation in which people, wittingly or unwittingly, frame problems for subsequent reasoning. The authors employ a neurally implementable defeasible logic for modeling part of this framing process, and show how it can be used to guide the design of experiments and interpret results.

Discomposition Redressed

Discomposition Redressed
Author: Patrick Brandt
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2019-12-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3823392433

Modern theoretical linguistics lives by the insight that the meanings of complex expressions derive from the meanings of their parts and the way these are composed. However, the currently dominating theories of the syntax-semantics interface hastily relegate important aspects of meaning which cannot readily be aligned with visible structure to empty projecting heads non-reductively (mainstream Generative Grammar) or to the syntactic construction holistically (Construction Grammar). This book develops an alternative, compositional analysis of the hidden aspectual-temporal, modal and comparative meanings of a range of productive constructions of which pseudorefl exive, excessive and directional complement constructions take center stage. Accordingly, a contradiction-inducing hence semantically problematic part of literally coded meaning is locally ignored and systematically realized "expatriately" with respect to parts of structure that achieve the indexical anchoring of propositional contents in terms of times, worlds and standards of comparison, thus yielding the observed hidden meanings.

Signs

Signs
Author: Thomas Albert Sebeok
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780802084729

In this regard, semiotics is of relevance to a wide spectrum of scholars and professionals, including social scientists, psychologists, artists, graphic designers, and students of literature.".

The Evolution of Grammar

The Evolution of Grammar
Author: Joan Bybee
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1994-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0226086658

Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states. The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.