Literary Pragmatics

Literary Pragmatics JACOB L . MEY

Review of Formal Pragmatics . Semantics , Pragmatics ,

Formal Pragmatics discusses various topics that are at the borderline of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, in particular the treatment of indefinites and anaphora, presuppositions, and the analysis of focus. Enormous progress has been made in the last two decades in the analysis of these phenomena. It is time for this body of work to be summarized and described in a relatively e...

Why Philosophical Pragmatics Needs Clinical Pragmatics

This paper aims to show how clinical pragmatics (the study of pragmatic deficits) can fruitfully inform the classical theoretical models proposed by philosophical pragmatics. In the first part of the paper I argue that theories proposed in the domain of philosophical pragmatics, as those elaborated by Austin and Grice, are not plausible from a cognitive point of view and that for this reason th...

The Pragmatics of Literary Interaction in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Hogg’s Confessions was fiercely criticised by the Edinburgh postEnlightenment literati who considered his writing unsophisticated. A literary-pragmatic investigation, however, reveals Hogg’s strategic use of conversational principles through which he conveys additional, subversive meanings. Politeness theories, in fact, demonstrate that Hogg’s Confessions may have been perceived as a Face Threa...

Optimality-Theoretic Pragmatics Meets Experimental Pragmatics

The main concern of this article is to discuss some recent findings concerning the psychological reality of optimality-theoretic pragmatics and its central part – bidirectional optimization. A present challenge is to close the gap between experimental pragmatics and neo-Gricean theories of pragmatics. I claim that OT pragmatics helps to overcome this gap, in particular in connection with the di...