Bøker i Elements in Pragmatics-serien

Sociability is friendly behavior that is performed by a variety of positive social acts that are aimed to establish, promote, or restore relationships. However, attempts to achieve these interactional goals can fail or backfire; moreover, interactants may abuse these strategies. A pragmatic focus on positive social acts illuminates the ways they succeed in promoting sociability and why they sometimes fail to enhance social relations. This Element analyzes positive social actions receiving positive and negative meta-pragmatic labels, such as firgun and flattery, in the Hebrew speaking community in Israel. Adopting a meta-pragmatic methodology enables a differentiation between positive communication and its evaluation as (in)appropriate in context. The conclusion discusses the fuzzy line between acceptable and unacceptable positive behavior and the benefits and perils of deploying positive social acts in interaction. It also suggests a conceptualization of the darker and brighter sides of sociability as intrinsically connected, rather than polar ends.

"This Element addresses translation within an interpersonal pragmatics frame. The aims of this Element are twofold: first, the authors survey the current state of the field of pragmatics in translation; second, they present the current and methodologically innovative avenues of research in the field. They focus on three pragmatics issues - mediality, participation structure and relational work - that they foreground as promising loci of research on translational data. By reviewing the trajectory of pragmatics research on translation/interpreting over time and then outlining their understanding of pragmatics in translation as a field, they arrive at a set of potential research questions which represent desiderata for future research. These questions identify the paths that can be productively explored through synergies between the linguistic pragmatics framework and translation data. In two case study sections, the authors offer two example studies addressing some of the questions identified as suggestions for future research"--

"This Element outlines current issues in the study of the pragmatics of fiction. It starts from the premise that fictional texts are complex and multilayered communicative acts which deserve attention in pragmatic research in their own right, and it highlights the need to understand them as cultural artefacts rich in possibilities to explore pragmatic effects and pragmatic theorising. The issues covered are (1) the participation structure of fictional texts, (2) the performance aspect of fictional texts, (3) the interaction between readers and viewers and the fictional texts, and (4) the pragmatic effects of drawing on indexical linguistic features for evoking ideologies in characterisation"--

This Element is a contribution to a new generation of corpus pragmatics research by taking as its starting point the multifaceted nature of speech acts in conversation, and by adopting a mixed-methods approach. Through a unique combination of theoretical, qualitative, quantitative, and statistical approaches, it provides a detailed investigation of advice-giving and advice uptake in relation to (i) the range of constructions used to give advice in different discourse contexts and at different points in time, and (ii) their interaction with dialogic and social factors of advice uptake as key components of frames of advice exchanges in natural conversation. Using data from the London-Lund Corpora of spoken British English, the Element shows, firstly, that there are systematic differences in advising between discourse contexts over the past half a century, and, secondly, that who gave the advice and how they did it are the strongest predictors of the advisee's response. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.