Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics Issues in Linguistics

Together with the first volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments,” this book collects contributions that represent the state of the art on the interconnection between pragmatics and philosophy. While the first volume presents the philosophical dimension of pragmatics, showing the path from theoretical advances to practical uses and approaches, this second volume offers a specular view on this discipline. Instead of adopting the top-down view of the first volume, this collection of eleven chapters starts from the analysis of linguistic data – which include texts and discourses in different languages, different types of dialogues, different types of interactions, and different modes for expressing meaning – looking for the regularities that govern our production and processing. The chapters are ordered according to their relationship with the themes and methods that define the field of pragmatics. The more explored and classical linguistic issues such as prototype-based generalizations, scalar implicatures, and temporal ordering, lead gradually to the more recent and debated topic of slurs and pejorative language, and finally to the interdisciplinary and more pioneering works addressing specific context of language use, such as marketplace interactions, courtroom speeches, schizophrenic discourse, literary texts for children, and multimedia communication.

Chapter 12 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Fabrizio Macagno (Ph.D. UCSC, Milan, 2008) works as a researcher and invited auxiliary professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is author of more than eighty papers on definition, presupposition, argumentation schemes, and dialogue analysis published in major international peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Argumentation, and Philosophy and Rhetoric. His most important publications include the books Argumentation Schemes (CUP 2008), Emotive Language in Argumentation (CUP 2014), and Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation (Springer 2017).

Alessandro Capone is full professor of general linguistics at the University of Messina in the Department of Cognitive Science. He has a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he studied with James Higginbotham and Yan Huang, and one from the University of Palermo, where he studied with Franco Lo Piparo. He has two habilitations as full professor of linguistics and philosophy of language. He is chief editor of the Springer series Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy, Psychology. He is co-editor for the journal Pragmatics and Philosophy, Mouton De Gruyter.  He has published a monograph for Springer, entitled The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports: Socio-Philosophical Considerations. (2016). He has published papers in Lingua, Linguistics, Pragmatics and Cognition, Pragmatics and Society, Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Australian Journal of Linguistics, La Linguistique, Argumentation, RASK: International Journal of Language and Communication, International Journal of Language Studies, Oxford working papers in Linguistics, Reti Saperi Linguaggi, and Lingua e Stile. He has published sixteen volumes with CSLI, University of Chicago Press, Springer, Clueb (Bologna), and ETS (Pisa). He is a member of the editorial boards for Lingua, Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Society, International journal of Language Studies, and Brill Research Studies in Pragmatics.