Conference on the development of pragmatic abilities in children
In Oslo. I think this is going to be very interesting. (I'm one of the local organisers, which is a privilege, but expect to be mainly an interested spectator.) Here's the description:The last ten to...
View ArticleThought, interpretation and communication
My teaching this term. How do we communicate? How can we know whether to believe what someone tells us? Finally, how are these questions connected?An introduction to the Gricean programme in philosophy...
View ArticleWhat colour is a peach with a dark red skin?
Sometimes the answer is ‘white’, and sometimes ‘yellow’.What I have in mind is a real-life version of a well-known example from the literature on context-sensitivity. It's a recipe, and the ingredients...
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Pre-utterance utterance interpretation and the meaning of a ringing phone
In yesterday'sDilbert:This is an interesting case for Griceans and relevance theorists. Normally a ringing phone means (naturally and non-naturally?) that someone wants to speak to you, and Dilbert...
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Words uttered underdetermine speech act performed: comic
Another xkcd about pragmatics.
View ArticleThe cooperative listener?
In a comment on this post on Language Log, Spell Me Jeff wrote:I've been doing some admittedly shallow searching on topics like Grice and cooperative principle, and all I'm finding focuses on the role...
View ArticleNew list for pragmatics in Norway
nor-prag:A list fora) brief announcements of forthcoming events/activities/publicationsrelating to pragmatics in Norway, or otherwise likely to interest manymembers of the list, andb) substantive...
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The significance of dot dot dot
Young people have difficulty understanding the "coyly placed line of white space," according to (great sf author) Samuel Delaney. Michael Swanwick (also a writer of outstanding sf)...
View ArticlePragmatics wins at High Court
Paul Chambers' conviction for sending a message "of a menacing character" has been overturned on appeal.Rightly so – because it was always obvious (to everyone except, amazingly, the original judge in...
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Rhetorical questions to which the answer is 'No!' (#1)
Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense...
View Article“a parody parodying a parody”
... is an accurate summary of the following post by someone pretending to be Richie Benaud on Twitter: “These parody accounts are a nuisance and damaging the game I love. RB.”The post title is a...
View ArticleArticle 10
An example of ironic use of a single word: I married, let me see, about a month after you left France, and a few weeks before the gentle Germans roared into Paris. (from Nabokov's That in Aleppo...
View ArticleLinguistic underdeterminacy gags
From the 'clippings' (i.e. attested examples) sent in to last week's News Quiz: Heard on Radio Newcastle: In the news at six: the queen visits the north-east as part of her jubilee tour and road deaths...
View Article‘My PR people have been drafting ways to say this’
Nick Clegg's apology video with honest subtitles (via The Guardian).Why? Well, I think it's funny, but also it's interesting to consider what the criterion is for the substituted phrases. Sometimes the...
View ArticleClegg's unusual speech act (follow-up)
Severalpeople have pointed out that Clegg's apology is not for breaking his promise, but for making it in the first place. Rather an unusual speech act. Julia Hartley-Brewer's comparison seems apt:Nick...
View ArticleLooks like I might be one of those LINGUIST linguists after all
... because I may have come up with a property of contrastive reduplication that isn't already in the literature.Here's an example of contrastive reduplication:I don't drink that herbal stuff. Haven't...
View Article‘I will not vote (although I will)’
It’s a bit like finding a butterfly... I spent quite a bit of the afternoon discussing attributive use (in some sentences about reasons – a subject for a future blog post) and then relaxed with a cup...
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