Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use

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 Prism of Society by Jacob L. mey.- Why we need the Pragmeme, or: Speech Acting and its Peripeties by Jacob L. Mey.- On the Meaning of Questions by Ferenc Kiefer.- Narratives in Conversation as Pragmemes by Neal R. Norrick.- Prompting Social Action as a Higher-order Pragmatic act by Michael Haugh.- Metapragmatics, Hidden Assumptions, and MoralEconomy by Norman Fairclough.- Terms of Address in European Languages: A study in Cross-linguistic Semantics and Pragmatics by Anna Wierzbicka.- Practs and Facts by Jacob Mey.- Pragmemes in Discourse by Anita Fetzer.- “Tongue-tied”: Pragmemes and Practs of Silence in Literary Texts by Dennis Kurzon.- Towards a Pragmatic-semantic continuum. The process of Naming by Grazia Basile.- Towards a “Theory of Everything” in Human Communication by AndraVasilescu.- Austin’s Speech acts and Pragmemes by Etsuko Oishi.- Pragmemes in the Sociolinguistic Interview: a case study on Expanded Polar Answers by Andrea Pizarro Pedraza.- On Pragmemes in Artificial Languages by Alan Reed Libert.- Part II: Pragmemes and cultural analysis.- The Ethnopragmatic Representation of Positive and Negative Emotions in Irish Immigrants’ Letters by  J. Romero-Trillo, N. E. Avila-Ledesma.- Situatedeness and the Making of Meaning: Pragmatics, Pragmemes, and Modality by Leo Francis Hoye.- Pragmatic strategies when Reading (Problematic) Translated Texts by  Pedro J. Chamizo-Domínguez.- The Multimodal Marking of Evidentiality: Pragmemes of Circumstantial Inference and Mandarin Written news Report by Vittorio Tantucci.- Expectations in Interaction by Victoria Escandell-Vidal.- Cultural Pragmatic Schemas, Pragmemes, and Practs: A Cultural Linguistics Perspective by Farzad Sharifian.- Metapragmatic Pragmemes by Vahid Parvaresh.- The Culture of Language by Jock Wong.- The ‘memes’ of Linguistics by Jock Wong.- Tattooing as Memorial Pragmemes by Luna Bergh.- Part III: Theories of Language use.- Two Types of Semantic Presuppositions by Nathan Klinedinst.- Social Cognition and the Pragmatics of Ideology by Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and Sara Schatz.- Poor vs. Good Thought Experiments in Pragmatics: A Case Study by András Kertész.- What a Personal Pronoun can do for you: The case of a Southern Dutch Dialect by Jan Nuyts.- A Graded Strength for Privileged Interactional Interpretations by Merit Sternau, MiraAriel, Rachel Giora and Ofer Fein.- Implicits as Evolved Persuaders by Edoardo Lombardo Vallauri.-  Inferential Abilities and Pragmatic Deficits in Subjects with Autism Spectrum Disorders by Paola Pennisi.- On the Tension between Semantics and Pragmatics by Alessandro Capone.- An Epistemic Commitment in the very idea of “speaker’s intention” by Pietro Perconti.- Revisiting Metapragmatics: 'what are we talking about? by Claudia Caffi.- A Model of Categorization and Compositionality (sense determination) in the light of a Procedural Model of Language (based on selection and the communicative field) by Dorota Zielinska.- Reflections on Pragmemes: Towards the Development of Societal Neuropragmatics by Caterina Scianna.- The Asymmetric Multi-language Model: A Cognitive Pragmatic Pattern to Explain Codeswitching by Unbalanced Multilinguals by Elvira Assenza.- The Situatedness of Pragmatic Acts: Explaining a Lamp to a Robot by Kerstin Fischer.