Beyond Words : : Content, Context, and Inference / / ed. by Frank Liedtke, Cornelia Schulze.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DGBA Backlist Complete English Language 2000-2014 PART1
• MitwirkendeR: Amaral, Patricia,; Blutner, Reinhard,; Clark, Billy,; Cummins, Chris,; Diedrichsen, Elke,; Gese, Helga,; Grassmann, Susanne,; Katsos, Napoleon,; Keller, Rudi,; Liedtke, Frank,; Mazzone, Marco,; Meibauer, Jörg,; Pouscoulous, Nausicaa,; Schulze, Cornelia,; Schumacher, Petra B.,
• HerausgeberIn: Liedtke, Frank,; Schulze, Cornelia,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2013]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Language: English
• Series: Mouton Series in Pragmatics [MSP] , 15
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (340 p.)

In pragmatics, it is widely accepted that the overall meaning of an utterance performed as part of a verbal interchange is basically underdetermined by the meaning of the sentence uttered. What counts as having been said for most contemporary authors goes far beyond sentence meaning. Rather, it has to be considered as a complex utterance level combining semantic knowledge and context-driven, pragmatic information as an integrated whole. The focus of the present book lies on central questions about the nature, the function and the acquisition of pragmatic inferencing strategies. The question of the relation between the explicit and the implicit side of verbal communication and its mutual delimitation is addressed. What is the character of pragmatic inferences, wherever they may be situated in a descriptive model? Are they nonce inferences arising anew in each act of communication, or do we have to conceive of them as based on regularities and conventions? What is an adequate model of the acquisition of the skills which are relevant for mastering the inferential processes leading to an adequate interpretation of utterances? And what is the relation between a theory of pragmatic enrichment and optimality theory with an OT pragmatics as a possible result?

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Beyond Words -- Section I. General Concepts -- Short introduction: General concepts -- Communication in the narrower and broader sense -- Pragmatics in Optimality Theory -- Section II. Acquiring inferential abilities -- Short introduction: Acquiring inferential abilities -- Word learning by exclusion – pragmatics, logic and processing -- Children’s knowledge of scales in the acquisition of almost -- Relevance inferences in young children: 3-year-olds’ understand a speaker’s indirectly expressed social intention -- Early pragmatics with words -- Section III. Grammar, meaning, and enrichment -- Short introduction: Grammar, meaning, and enrichment -- Procedures and prosody: Weak encoding and weak communication -- Pragmatic templates and free enrichment -- Pragmatic enrichment in adjectival passives: the case of the post state reading -- Pragmatic inferencing and expert knowledge -- Section IV. Constraints, memes, and constructions -- Short introduction: Constraints, memes, and constructions -- Empirical and theoretical evidence for a model of quantifier production -- Constructions as memes – Interactional function as cultural convention beyond the words -- A pragmatic Pandora’s box: Regularities and defaults in pragmatics -- Contributors to the volume -- Index