Journal of Pragmatics最新文献

{"title":"Narrative cues to implicatures in classic novels: Explorations in Pride and Prejudice and The Age of Innocence","authors":"Attila L. Nemesi","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Understanding implicit meaning in face-to-face communication largely depends on background knowledge and context, including nonverbal and prosodic cues. Readers of novels, however, are confined to the written text, which requires authors and narrators to skillfully bridge informational gaps and compensate for missing modalities to facilitate comprehension. In doing so, they often integrate conversational implicatures to enhance the naturalness and authenticity of fictional dialogues. However, as Grice (1975, 1978) notes, conversational implicatures form only a certain subclass of nonconventional implicatures, raising the possibility that such phenomena might also emerge in the narrative passages and internal monologues of characters in novels. Through several examples drawn from two classic novels—Jane Austen's <em>Pride and Prejudice</em> and Edith Wharton's <em>The Age of Innocence</em>—this paper highlights various narrative techniques that guide the reader in recognizing nonconventional implicatures. While irony markers have been extensively studied, general discussions of implicatures tend to focus narrowly on the Cooperative Principle and its conversational maxims (or other principles, heuristics, etc.), often overlooking the multimodal cues that may aid inferential processing. By contrast, emphasis is placed here on the literary tools novelists employ to render implicatures accessible to readers, ranging from clarifying and elaborating background information to evoking verbal and nonverbal cues, paralinguistic signals, and expressive uses of punctuation and typography.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 193-212"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145362475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Relevance beyond the implicated proposition","authors":"Elly Ifantidou","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>What makes an input worth attending to from the mass of competing stimuli? In relevance-theoretic terms, perceivable experience (an utterance, a sight, a sound, a memory) is relevant to us when it connects with available assumptions to make a worthwhile difference to our representation of the world. For example, the news that “Cardiff orchestra cuts Russian composer from concert” (<em>The Guardian</em>) may make little worthwhile difference to my representation of the world, while “Russia invades Ukraine” (<em>The Guardian</em>) is far more likely to attract my attention, and lead me to compute the consequences (in the form of a range of inferences) that are likely to be most worthwhile for us.</div><div>Because all cognitive processing is effortful, an input becomes <em>maximally</em> relevant at the smallest possible processing effort, as predicted by Relevance Theory. The question is: What else, apart from a set of salient contextual assumptions, can impact on the expended processing by accelerating the interpretation process while expanding its rewarding effects?</div><div>I present evidence from neurolinguistics suggesting that pragmatic inference involves a series of steps that are not constrained by cognitive processes alone, and I argue that the maximum benefit from the most relevant stimulus available to an individual at a time is not exclusively propositional. The spontaneous formation of assumptions in the process of inference is often interspersed with spontaneous activation of emotions and images, those experiential resources which free up our limited cognitive resources. In defense of this view, I discuss examples of metaphor and mirative evidentials, and how non-propositional objects may be represented in an expanded notion of implicated content which would then be more open-ended and more nuanced than previously thought.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 84-98"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145109760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gender variability in the prosodic production of compliments in Italian: A pilot study","authors":"Patrizia Sorianello,&nbsp;Glenda Gurrado","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The aim of this research is to examine the prosody of Italian compliments. Previous research on compliments has devoted minimal attention to the prosodic aspect of these expressions, and little attention has been addressed to the question of compliments in Italian. However, issues regarding intonation and duration seem to be of pivotal importance in the construction of compliments and in the differentiation of compliment responses.</div><div>To this end, a corpus of oral Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT) was analysed to describe a contextual situation in which speakers were required to offer a compliment. Eight Italian participants (4 men and 4 women) were asked to read the DCTs and provide an appropriate response to the given scenario. The comparisons were made between male and female participants, without considering cross-gender compliments. There were notable differences in the lexical and intonation preferences of the female and male participants. Acoustic analysis revealed evidence of gender-based differences in the prosody of compliments, specifically in terms of pitch range and duration. In particular, male participants showed a wider pitch range and longer stressed nuclear vowels than their female counterparts. These findings suggest a correlation between the prosodic strategies observed and the lexical choices present in the compliments. The data indicated that men used longer compliments with low lexical density and a greater number of implicit expressions, whereas women produced shorter compliments with a higher semantic density than those produced by their male counterparts. This was due to the higher incidence of intensifiers and positive words used by women. These features increased the number of high-pitched accents in the intonation contours of women's utterances, as well as the global pitch range, resulting in more expressive and affective compliments compared to those of men. This study broadens our understanding of Italian compliments by examining them from both lexical and prosodic perspectives. By addressing the lack of research on the prosody of compliments—particularly within the underexplored context of Italian discourse—it makes a valuable contribution to the field of pragmatics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 154-168"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145269000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward a granular analysis of the discourse marker ti: in Tunisian Arabic","authors":"Mohamed Jlassi","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study offers a granular analysis of procedural relevance by challenging the traditional view of discourse markers as performing a fixed procedural function. The analysis draws on a corpus of Tunisian Arabic supported by a speaker survey to examine the pragmatic effects of <em>ti:</em> across diverse communicative contexts. Focusing on the understudied yet pervasive discourse marker <em>ti:</em> in Tunisian Arabic, the paper relies on corpus data and speaker insights to disambiguate its complex functional load. The findings reveal that the frequency of <em>ti:</em> stems from its high degree of multifunctionality: it serves diverse conversational roles, influences the trajectory of interaction, and reflects the dynamics between discourse participants. The paper argues that this multifunctionality is rooted in <em>ti:</em>’s multicategorial status, enabling it to perform multiple communicative tasks across different discourse domains. As such, <em>ti:</em> exemplifies a “multiperformative” discourse marker—an element that simultaneously encodes various pragmatic functions with minimal speech effort. This efficiency points to broader implications for the typology of discourse markers, both in Arabic and crosslinguistically. Ultimately, the study underscores the need for a more nuanced, crosslinguistically grounded model of procedural meaning—one that accounts for multifunctionality, categorical flexibility, and interactional economy. Such an approach, situated within pragmatics, opens the door to productive interfaces with other linguistic fields.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 139-153"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145221746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Not right now”: Children's resistance during online grooming interactions","authors":"Nuria Lorenzo-Dus ,&nbsp;Craig Evans","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.013","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.013","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, we examine children's resistance strategies during online grooming interactions, specifically the different ways they use facework to counter groomers' advances. The study identifies types of children's discursive resistance based on established politeness and impoliteness taxonomies (Brown and Levinson, 1987; and Culpeper, 2016; respectively), and quantifies the tendency for children to produce these based on evidence from a specialist corpus of 80 online grooming chatlogs, shared by UK law enforcement for research purposes. The study also examines how children perform resistance discursively as part of a dynamic interactional process. Our research finds that children produce resistance that is fairly evenly balanced between politeness and impoliteness-based types. The majority of politeness-based resistance is oriented to positive face needs, reflecting children's personal/romantic relationship goals, while children's negative politeness-based resistance is attributable to adult-child/manipulator-victim power imbalance in online grooming interactions. The majority of impoliteness-based resistance is also oriented to positive face needs, primarily acting against these through the strategy ‘Ignore, snub’, while children's negative impoliteness-based resistance tends to take the form of blocking. This is the first study to systematically identify resistance types and their discursive realization in a sizeable corpus of real online grooming chatlogs. Its findings help inform preventative technologies to counter the globally escalating problem of technology facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 44-56"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145098108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Interpreting verbal irony in Mandarin Chinese: The role of prosody and proficiency among L2 learners of Chinese","authors":"Fengming Liu","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the intersection of second language pragmatics and prosody, focusing on L2 Chinese learners' ability to interpret ironic intentions through prosody. Irony, as a form of non-literal language, relies on cues such as prosody for interpretation. For L2 learners, recognizing these prosodic cues is crucial to disambiguating meaning and avoiding communicative breakdowns. The study employs a cross-sectional design, including intermediate (n = 29) and advanced (n = 23) L1 American English speakers learning Mandarin as a second language, as well as native Chinese speakers (n = 60). Participants completed an experimental interpretation task designed to assess the impact of proficiency and prosody on interpreting speakers' intentions. Stimuli included utterances delivered in three prosodic tones: ironic, enthusiastic, and neutral. Results showed that proficiency enhanced learners' ability to interpret irony through prosody, with advanced learners outperforming intermediate learners. Advanced learners showed greater sensitivity to ironic tones, while intermediate learners relied more on literal meanings and overlooked prosodic cues. These findings highlight the developmental trajectory of L2 learners’ pragma-prosodic competence, and shed light on future pedagogical practice.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 120-138"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145156343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Negotiating truth and relevance: A new typology of English rising declaratives","authors":"Johannes M. Heim","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.010","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Rising declaratives have been a prolific test bed for investigating the contribution of sentence-final intonation to the interpretation of assertive speech acts. In the past, this contribution has almost exclusively been described as a qualification of the speaker's commitment to the truth of the proposition. In this paper, I argue that we can only incorporate the full variation in uses of English rising declaratives if we expand conversational negotiations to include negotiations of relevance. Returning to the established insight that qualified commitment grounds in the avoidance of the risk of losing face, I propose that speakers not only avoid commitment if uncertain about propositional truth; they also avoid it if the relation to the question under discussion is unclear. In addition to accounting for the traditional divide between inquisitive and assertive uses of rising declaratives, the proposed expansion can also incorporate incredulous and narrative uses, which are void of any uncertainty and still come with a sentence-final rise. The latter seeks to resolve an epistemic clash; the former suspends the negotiation to add further information pertaining to the question under discussion. The proposed typology rests on the analysis of rising declaratives elicited in a Map Task study. To illustrate the variation in use conventions, I draw on the analogy of the negotiation table and frame the notion of relevance by situating this negotiation in the question-under-discussion framework.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 23-43"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145097654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Speech prosody and pragmatic scalar inferences: Divergent cognitive strategies in adults with high and low levels of autistic traits","authors":"Yuhan Jiang ,&nbsp;Ting Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Background</h3><div>Given the communicative challenges associated with autistic traits (ATs), individuals with higher levels of ATs can sometimes make certain pragmatic inferences, such as quantifier scalar implicatures. However, it remains unclear whether they can effectively integrate prosodic cues when drawing these inferences.</div></div><div><h3>Methods</h3><div>This study examines scalar quantifier interpretations and reaction time (RT) among Mandarin-speaking adults using computer-based Picture-Sentence Judgment &amp; Selection Tasks, considering prosodic cues and cognitive abilities. Samples included 18 adults with lower (11F, 7M) and 27 with higher (19F, 8M) levels of ATs.</div></div><div><h3>Results</h3><div>Our study found that when prosodic cues were present, low AT individuals showed greater delays in response times but were less likely to change their interpretations. This suggests heightened sensitivity to prosodic cues and stronger conviction in their initial judgments. Additionally, while prosodic focus affected cognitive factors in both groups, low AT individuals relied more on Theory of Mind (ToM), whereas high AT individuals relied more on Executive Functions (EFs).</div></div><div><h3>Conclusions</h3><div>Higher levels of ATs are linked to greater difficulty with pragmatic scalar inferences, but compensatory cognitive strategies offset this. This study highlights the role of prosodic focus and the distinct cognitive strategies used by individuals with varying levels of ATs.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 70-83"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145098110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards first-order pragmatics: How lay people talk about speech (inter)actions","authors":"Klaus P. Schneider,&nbsp;Claudia Claridge","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.09.007","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this Virtual Special Issue we argue for the necessity of first-order pragmatics as a field of inquiry researching the ways language users communicate about language use and what the analysis reveals about underlying concepts, which are indispensable components of any person's pragmatic competence. The focus is on lay persons' conceptualisations of e.g. speech acts, rhetorical practices, and (im)politeness, and also on how they relate to second-order conceptualisations of these phenomena developed by professionals in linguistics, language philosophy, and further academic disciplines. The contributions to this issue demonstrate which research questions can be addressed in first-order pragmatics, which methods can be employed to answer them, and which contexts are useful in specific ways. The contributions also help to clarify the relationship between first-order pragmatics and related fields such as metapragmatics, folk pragmatics, and studies of speech act recognition and conversation processing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 169-174"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145325336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The palm-up open hand gesture across language modalities: A comparison of German and DGS (German Sign Language)","authors":"Sandra Debreslioska ,&nbsp;Anna Kuder ,&nbsp;Pamela Perniss","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.pragma.2025.08.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>It is a well-established fact that the use of gestures is a ubiquitous feature of communication with language. This is true for both spoken and signed languages. However, while in spoken languages, gestures are produced in a different modality than speech (visual versus vocal/auditory, respectively), gestural elements in sign languages are produced in the same modality as sign (both are visual). This study investigates whether this difference in the modality of language production influences the discourse-pragmatic functions that gestures fulfill. We focus on palm-up open hand (PUOH) gestures and examine their frequency and contexts of use in German and DGS (German Sign Language) narrative productions. We find that German speakers and DGS signers use PUOHs similarly often, but differently on the functional level. Speakers deploy PUOH gestures for information structural purposes (in particular, to signal new(er) information), while signers use PUOH gestures on a discourse management level (in particular, to signal the ending of narratives). We argue that this cross-linguistic and cross-modal difference reflects the differing affordances that spoken versus signed languages offer, thereby revealing new insights into the language-gesture relationship, and the multimodal nature of language more generally.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":"249 ","pages":"Pages 99-119"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145156256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}