Literary Pragmatics JACOB L . MEY

Sunt verba rerum: the pragmatic life of words

Pragmatics is not about language as such, viewed in isolation, but about words as they are being used. And words are never things, pure objects; words have their history and lives: their story is the story of their users. Pragmatic thinking focuses not just on what 'is' there (the 'essentialist' method of linguistics), but on how what 'is' there, 'got' there, and what it 'does' there, in a 'fun...

Whose language

When Jacob revised his introduction to pragmatics (Mey [1990] 2001), he included an extra section on the role of body moves in communication. Here he argues that body movements and posture can fulfil complex pragmatic functions and may constitute an integral part of the action in the total context of the pragmatic act (2001: 223 227). Thus, “[p]ragmatic acts engage the whole individual in commu...

Toward a Theory of Computational Linguistics

Storm in a Teacup : What Exactly Are Default Interpretations ?

Pii: S0378-2166(99)00067-3

This paper argues that in addition to the familiar approach using formal contexts, there is now a need in artificial intelligence to study contexts as social constructs. As a successful example of the latter approach, I draw attention to ' interpretation' (in the sense of literary theory), viz. the reconstruction of the intended meaning of a literary text that takes into account the context in ...