Jacques Moeschler

Studying Meaning provides a comprehensive introduction to semantics and pragmatics, covering all key concepts and new developments in an accessible manner. By introducing semantics and pragmatics together, the book compares their contributions to meaning and provides a coherent view. It also highlights where the boundaries between these disciplines lie.The fourteen chapters trace the historical development of semantics and pragmatics and incorporate recent subfields such as cognitive semantics, embodiment theories, and intercultural pragmatics. The book offers an up-to-date overview of research methodologies, drawing on examples from various languages and empirical data from corpora. Each chapter ends with a list of questions and exercises. This text provides an accessible yet comprehensive exploration of how meaning is conveyed in communication, covering linguistic, cognitive, and social aspects. Online support materials are provided to enhance and deepen understanding of the text.Assuming no prior knowledge, this is essential reading for students of semantics, pragmatics, linguistics, and related fields.

Studying Meaning provides a comprehensive introduction to semantics and pragmatics, covering all key concepts and new developments in an accessible manner. By introducing semantics and pragmatics together, the book compares their contributions to meaning and provides a coherent view. It also highlights where the boundaries between these disciplines lie.The fourteen chapters trace the historical development of semantics and pragmatics and incorporate recent subfields such as cognitive semantics, embodiment theories, and intercultural pragmatics. The book offers an up-to-date overview of research methodologies, drawing on examples from various languages and empirical data from corpora. Each chapter ends with a list of questions and exercises. This text provides an accessible yet comprehensive exploration of how meaning is conveyed in communication, covering linguistic, cognitive, and social aspects. Online support materials are provided to enhance and deepen understanding of the text.Assuming no prior knowledge, this is essential reading for students of semantics, pragmatics, linguistics, and related fields.

The nature of truth is a current preoccupation both in political and social debates. The emergence and consequences of fake news and misinformation are at the core of what some call a post-truth world.Divided into two parts, Language and Truth develops the theoretical framework of language, truth, and communication. The book illustrates the way in which fake news is adhered to or rejected using case studies taken from political discourse such as the recent use of the word’s “genocide” and “denazification” by Vladimir Putin. It explores sources of information such as gossip and the everyday as well as exceptional uses of language such as humour.This is vital reading for scholars, researchers, and students of pragmatics, semantics, philosophy of language, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, language and communication, and language and politics within linguistics, psychology, and communication studies.

The nature of truth is a current preoccupation both in political and social debates. The emergence and consequences of fake news and misinformation are at the core of what some call a post-truth world.Divided into two parts, Language and Truth develops the theoretical framework of language, truth, and communication. The book illustrates the way in which fake news is adhered to or rejected using case studies taken from political discourse such as the recent use of the word’s “genocide” and “denazification” by Vladimir Putin. It explores sources of information such as gossip and the everyday as well as exceptional uses of language such as humour.This is vital reading for scholars, researchers, and students of pragmatics, semantics, philosophy of language, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, language and communication, and language and politics within linguistics, psychology, and communication studies.

There is, at present, no book introducing the general issue of why language is specific to human beings, how it works, why language is not communication and communication is not language, why languages vary and how they evolved.Based on the most recent works in linguistics and pragmatics, Why Language? addresses many questions that everyone has about language. Starting from false claims about language and languages, showing that language is not communication and communication is not language, the first part (Language and Communication) ends by proposing a difference between linguistic rules and communicative principles. The second part (Language, Society, Discourse) includes domains of language and language uses which are generally taken as extrinsic to language, such as language variety, discourse and non-ordinary (literary) usages. Special attention is given to figures of discourse (metaphor, metonymy, irony) and literary usages such as narration and free indirect style. The reader, either specialist or amateur in language science, will find a first and unique synthesis about what we know today about language and what we have yet to learn, sketching what could be the future of linguistics in the next decades.

An accessible and thorough introduction to implicatures, a key topic in all frameworks of pragmatics. Starting with a definition of the various types of implicatures in Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, the book covers many important questions for current pragmatic theories, namely: the distinction between explicit and implicit forms of pragmatic enrichment, the criteria for drawing a line between semantic and pragmatic meaning, the relations between the structure of language (syntax) and its use (pragmatics), the social and cognitive factors underlying the use of implicatures by native speakers, and the factors influencing their acquisition for children and second language learners. Written in non-technical language, Implicatures will appeal to students and teachers in linguistics, applied linguistics, psychology and sociology, who are interested in how language is used for communication, and how children and learners develop pragmatic skills.

There is, at present, no book introducing the general issue of why language is specific to human beings, how it works, why language is not communication and communication is not language, why languages vary and how they evolved.Based on the most recent works in linguistics and pragmatics, Why Language? addresses many questions that everyone has about language. Starting from false claims about language and languages, showing that language is not communication and communication is not language, the first part (Language and Communication) ends by proposing a difference between linguistic rules and communicative principles. The second part (Language, Society, Discourse) includes domains of language and language uses which are generally taken as extrinsic to language, such as language variety, discourse and non-ordinary (literary) usages. Special attention is given to figures of discourse (metaphor, metonymy, irony) and literary usages such as narration and free indirect style. The reader, either specialist or amateur in language science, will find a first and unique synthesis about what we know today about language and what we have yet to learn, sketching what could be the future of linguistics in the next decades.

This book presents both general issues in pragmatic theories and specific arguments for an inferential approach to pragmatics. At the present time, pragmatics is generally approached from the neo- and post-Gricean perspectives. These perspectives, which stem from philosophical theories of meaning, can be viewed as paradigms, that is, sets of concepts, procedures and results which structure scientific investigations. The main purpose of the book is to defend a new post-Gricean approach to the substantial lexicon and to the functional lexicon (tenses, connectives), and more specifically to explore lexical and non-lexical pragmatics. A precise approach to lexical and non-lexical pragmatic contents will be developed, with special emphasis on non-lexical temporal and causal information. A model for inferring temporal relations in discourse (the directional inferences model based on French data) is developed. This approach to temporal representations and inferences will be completed by a discussion on how causal inferences are triggered in discourse interpretation. The role of conceptual causal relations, as well as causal procedural information encoded in discourse connectives (mainly parce que ‘because’, donc ‘therefore’, et ‘and’), is empirically and theoretically supported. Pragmatic theory can be described as a very powerful interface system which gives access to lexical and functional information, and which contains rich pragmatic enrichment processes, for non-lexical information (quantifier, tenses, connectives) as well as for lexical information (event predicates). The book’s originality stems from its demonstration that pragmatic enrichment is structurally constrained, and occurs at the level of explicature.

An accessible and thorough introduction to implicatures, a key topic in all frameworks of pragmatics. Starting with a definition of the various types of implicatures in Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, the book covers many important questions for current pragmatic theories, namely: the distinction between explicit and implicit forms of pragmatic enrichment, the criteria for drawing a line between semantic and pragmatic meaning, the relations between the structure of language (syntax) and its use (pragmatics), the social and cognitive factors underlying the use of implicatures by native speakers, and the factors influencing their acquisition for children and second language learners. Written in non-technical language, Implicatures will appeal to students and teachers in linguistics, applied linguistics, psychology and sociology, who are interested in how language is used for communication, and how children and learners develop pragmatic skills.