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Contents of Volume 3
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A Note from the Editors
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A Web of Deceit: A Neo-Gricean View on Types of Verbal Deception
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This paper differentiates between several types of verbal deception and related notions: lying, bald-faced lies, bullshit, and deception without lying, inclusive of half-truths/lies of omission and withholding information. This is done in the light of the Gricean work on speaker meaning materialised by what is said and implicature, both being dependent on maxims, which can be observed or nonfulfilled (flouted or violated). To meet this objective, both Grice's and neo-Gricean postulates on truthfulness, lying and deception are revisited. Defining distinct types of deception with Grice's concepts, the paper teases out the complex interdependence between the two levels of speaker meaning: (un)truthful implicature and (un)truthful what is said.
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Performativity as Tense and Aspect
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Almost all verbs in Slovene have two aspectually different forms, the perfective (PF) and the imperfective (IPF). But in institutional settings or settings strongly marked with social hierarchy only the first, the imperfective form, is used by Slovene speakers in a performative sense.
Why is that? And what, in fact, has a Slovene speaker said if (s)he used the imperfective verb in "performative circumstances"? No doubt that (s)he may be in the process of accomplishing such an act. But at the same time, having the possibility of choosing between the PF and the IPF form, (s)he may have also indicated that this act hasn't been accomplished (yet): as long as we are only promising (IPF), we have not really promised anything yet, and if we are only promising (IPF), we cannot take anything as having been really promised. That was how Stanislav Škrabec, the 19th century Slovene linguist and the central figure of this paper, saw the role of verbal aspect within language use.
Being caught in such a dilemma, a question inevitably arises: how to accomplish an act of promise (or any other performative act) in Slovene? at dilemma may seem more than artificial at first, but it was very much alive among Slovene linguists at the end of the 19 th century. And it was that very dilemma – how to use aspects in Slovene – that quite unexpectedly gave rise to the foundations of performativity in Slovene, half a century before Austin!
In the present paper, the author tries to shed some light on this controversy that involved different Slovene scholars for about thirty years, and proposes a delocutive hypothesis as a solution for the performative dilemma this controversy unveiled.
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Indefinite Determiners and the Pragmatics of Referential Anchoring
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In this paper we propose a unified framework for the representation of different types of indefinite pronouns and determiners in terms of referential anchoring. Referential anchoring is a pragmatic operation that establishes a functional dependency between the referent of an indefinite DP and some other discourse item. As such, the idea of referential anchoring is not new (cf. Kratzer, 1998; von Heusinger, 2002; Kamp and Bende-Farkas, 2010, etc.), however there is some confusion in the discussion of referential anchoring regarding exceptional scope readings. We claim that referential anchoring is independent of scope, even though referentially anchored functional readings often entail exceptional scope readings. We make a transparent formal proposal for referential anchoring that draws on the idea of domain narrowing in the sense of Schwarzschild (2002). Finally, we present the advantage of our analysis by applying it to the Russian indefinite determiners kakoj-to, koe-kakoj and kakoj-nibud'.
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Adaptive Context: The Fourth Element of Meaning
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The present article explores the notion of communication from the point of view of the traditions that have considered context as the essential element for the optimal understanding of a message. The article describes the historical evolution of context with special emphasis on the discussion between context-free and context-bound descriptions of interaction, and chooses the Dynamic Model of Meaning as the unifier of these diverging traditions through theoretical synergy. Our approach describes a further step in the understanding of context by incorporating a fourth element in context, i.e., Adaptive Context, that we deem essential to understand cognitive dynamism. In this article we describe the role of Adaptive Management and show how this fourth element of context is basic to describe cognition in communication and to create social rapport.
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Accessing Identity through Face Work: A Case Study of Historical Courtroom Discourse
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There are certain areas of study where present-day pragmatics can benefit from history. This study investigates the processes of identity construction and negotiation through face work, using as a case study the historical courtroom in 18th century America. Adopting a social constructionist perspective to identity, the paper proposes that face is inextricably intertwined with identity, as it involves the process in which interlocutors position themselves, through discourse, in social interaction. Drawing upon the framework of self-politeness (Chen 2001), the paper reveals the ways in which an expert identity is constructed and negotiated during a trial where two medical professionals testified as expert witnesses and, at the same time, were challenged by the hostile interrogators. It is found that the experts resorted to two main discursive strategies which enhanced and restored their self-face, namely redressive and off-record, in their struggle for an expert identity, primarily because in the context of cross-examination, such strategies enabled the experts to directly or indirectly voice their response to previous face damaging utterances, instead of being silent on an issue (i.e. the withhold self-face threatening act strategy) or admitting that there was inconsistency in their testimony (i.e. the bald, on-record strategy). Such strategies helped the experts to construct and renew their identity or even resist others' identity ascriptions, enabling them to present themselves in a favourable light as their identity was under constant face threats from the adversarial interlocutors.
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A Corpus-Based Study of SARS in English News Reporting in Malaysia and in the United Kingdom
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This paper analyses English news reporting in Malaysia (New Straits Times) and in the United Kingdom (The Times) over several consecutive months during the SARS epidemic in 2003. While the physical features (word counts, standardised type/token ratio, number of sentences, etc.) of both corpora were consistent (and the two newspapers used mostly the same metaphorical lexis), differing features of the two newspapers were found in the rhetoric meaning. A corpus-based investigation of the presentation of news, selection of lexis, and the foci of reporting during the SARS epidemic is thus proposed. The results show that news from Malaysia focused on patriotism along with an emotional hopeful attitude, while news reporting in The Times seemed to be emotionally detached and less personal, reporting mainly on the fall of the stock markets and cancellations of cultural and sports events. In addition, The Times was found to have often considered manifestations of global economic status and power.
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Dissimilarities in Perspective: a Reply to Kjøll
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Relevance theorists have claimed that successful communication need result only in similarity, not identity, of mental representations across communicator and addressee. Cappelen and Lepore have criticised this stance, partly on the basis that any definition of similarity must make reference to identity. Accepting this point, Kjøll (2010) argued in this journal that Relevance Theory has an appropriate notion of identical "shared content", in the shape of relevant contextual implications. While this is convincing on a technical level, Relevance Theory owes no such concessions to Cappelen and Lepore, and Kjøll's observations would in any case fail to meet their theoretical requirements. This relates to an important but under-appreciated distinction in analytical perspective that is instantiated in the difference between the cognitive pragmatics of Relevance Theory and the philosophical-semantic approach of Cappelen and Lepore – a distinction that is worthy of further reflection, having significant implications for linguistic theory, within and beyond pragmatics.
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Notes on Contributors
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