Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use [Paperback]

This volume offers recent developments in pragmatics and adjacent territories of investigation, including important new concepts such as the pragmatic act and the pragmeme, and combines developments in neighboring disciplines in an integrative holistic pragmatic approach. The young science of pragmatics has, from its inception, differentiated itself from neighboring fields in the humanities, especially the disciplines dealing with language and those focusing on the social and anthropological aspects of human behavior, by focusing on the language user in his or her societal environment.

This collection of papers continues that emphasis on language use, and pragmatic acts in their context. The editors and contributors share a perspective that essentially considers language as a system for communication and wants to look at language from a societal perspective, and accept the view that acts of interpretation are essentially embedded in culture. In an interdisciplinary approach, some authors explore connections with social theory, in particular sociology or socio-linguistics, some offer a political stance (critical discourse analysis), others explore connections with philosophy and philosophy of language, and several papers address problems in theoretical pragmatics.

Ante Festum by Jacob L. Mey.- Introduction to the Notion of Pragmeme by Alessandro Capone.- Part I: Pragmemes: Theoretical Perspectives.- Deliberate Creativity and Formulaic Language use by Istvan Kecskes.- Aspects of Anaphora in Chinese and in some Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, the syntactic versus pragmatic Language Typology, and Neo-Gricean Pragmatics by Yan Huang.- Presuppositions as Cancellable Inferences by Fabrizio Macagno, Alessandro Capone.- The Pragmeme of Insult and some Allopracts by  Keith Allan.- Benveniste and the Periperformative Structure of the Pragmeme by  Douglas Robinson.- Pragmatics through the PrlӍ