Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society

This volume is part of the series ‘Pragmatics, Philosophy and Psychology’, edited for Springer by Alessandro Capone. It is intended for an audience of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postgraduate and advanced researchers. This volume focuses on societal pragmatics.

One of the main concerns of societal pragmatics is the world of language users. We are interested in the investigation of  linguistic practices in the context of societal practices (‘praxis’, to use a term used in the Wittgensteinian and other traditions).

It is clear that the world of users, including their practices, their culture, and their social aims has to be taken into account and seriously investigated when we deal with the pragmatics of language. It is not enough to discuss principles of language use solely in the guise of abstract theoretical tools. Consequently, the present volume focuses explicitly on the interplay of abstract, theoretical principles and the necessities imposed by societal contexts often requiring a more flexible use of such theoretical tools.

The volume includes articles on pragmemes, politeness and anti-politeness,  dialogue, joint utterances, discourse markers, pragmatics and the law, institutional discourse, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics and culture, cultural scripts, argumentation theory, connectives  and argumentation, language games and psychotherapy, slurs,  the analysis of funerary rites, as well as an authoritative chapter by Jacob L. Mey on societal pragmatics.

Introduction.- PART I. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS. Pragmatics through the Prism of Society.- How can Intercultural Pragmatics bring in some new Insight into Pragmatics Theories?.- Critical Discourse Analysis: Definition, Approaches, Relation to Pragmatics, Critique and Trends.- Pronouns and Pragmatics.- Pragmatic Disorders and Social Functioning: a Lifespan  Perspective.- The Dialogic Principle Revisited, Speech Acts and Mental States.- Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein, on «language-games» and Ethics.- The Individual and the Social Path of Interpretation:  The Case of Incomplete Disjunctive Questions.- Discourse and Racism.- Discourse Markers in Oral Narratives.- Propositional Attitudes and Cultural Scripts.- Modular, Cellular, Integral: A Pragmatic Elephant?.- What can Pragmatics Learn from the Law?.- PART II. LINGUISTICS AND PRAGMATICS. A Benchmark for Politeness.- Impoliteness Strategies.- Reconstructing ArgumentativeDiscourse with the Help of Speech Act Conditions.- Presupposition as Argumentative Reasoning.- Adpositions, Deixis, and Anti-Deixis.- Transparency and Context in Legal Communication: Pragmatics and Legal Interpretation.-Conversational Implicatures in Normative Texts.- PART III. DISCOURSE. Cultural Analysis of Discourse.- Transcription as Second-order Entextualizations: The Challenge of Heteroglossia.- Institutional Metadiscourse.- “Porque  in  Spanish  Oral  Narratives: Semantic porque, (meta) Pragmatic porque or Both?”.- Argumentation and Connectives.- The Origin of Reason through an Outline of the Genealogy of Language in the Light of Homonymity, Analogy and Metaphor.- PART IV. THE PRAGMATICS OF UTTERANCE. Joint Utterances and the (Split-) Turn Taking Puzzle.- The Metapragmatics of Direct Utterances.- Exclamatives, Embedding and Grounded Belief.- An Assessment of the Negative and Positive Aspects of Stereotypes and the Derogatory and Non-Derogatory Uses of Slurs.- PART V. CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES. A Critical Look at the Description of Speech Acts.-  The Pragmatics of ‘can’ in Singapore Mandarin.- Collectivism and Coercion: The Social Practice of ‘sharing’ and Distinctive uses of the Verb ‘share’ in Contemporary Singapore.- Emotional Feelings as a Form of Evidence: A Case Study of Visceral Evidentiality in Mormon Culture.- Rituals of Death as Staged Communicative Acts and Pragmemes.- Twenty-seven Views of Language Socialization.