Semantics/Pragmatics interface

Focus sensitive operators (like only, also and even) are usually taken to operate on focus alternatives to their prejacent and, more specifically, on a contextually restricted set of propositions (‘C’) which are identical to the prejacent p, except from the focused element, which is replaced by a distinct element of the same semantic type (Rooth 1985, 1992).  I will call such standard (or ‘Roothian’) alternatives, external alternatives.
The main goal of this paper is to examine cases where a focus sensitive expression can also operate on another type of alternatives, which I will call ‘internal’ alternatives. Intuitively, such alternatives are not alternatives to p, but rather alternative interpretational versions of p. That is, with internal alternatives, the focused element is not replaced by a distinct element (of the same semantic type), but rather with an identical element with a distinct interpretation. Thus, the overt material in p and the propositions in the set of internal alternatives is identical, and the difference only lies in the interpretation given to covert material in p.
More formally, I will propose that in the case of ‘internal’ altenatives the alternatives to the prejacnet are derived by assigning a covert variable in the focused element a distinct value. Depending on the semantics of the associate, this covert variable can be a standard variable (with gradable expressions), a covert quantifier, a domain restriction variable, a precision standard variable, etc. 
The main operator I will analyze in this respect is the Hebrew 'bixlal' (cf. Migron 2003, Greenberg & Khrizman 2012). I will claim that it is an 'even-like operator, which unlike the standard 'even' (and the Hebrew 'afilu') can operate on such 'internal alternatives.

In their recent book, Imagination and Convention, Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone defend a radical version of conventionalism, according to which conventions determine all of the properties of a communicative act that a hearer must interpret the act as having in order for communication to succeed. Purported  examples of unconventional communicative acts either are revealed to be governed by hitherto-unnoticed conventions, or aren't communicative acts at all, but merely invitations to open-ended imaginative reflection. In this paper, I argue that Lepore & Stone's defense of conventionalism fails, on several grounds. On one hand, they fail to account for the many ways in which intention recognition is involved in communication. On the other hand, their argument that unconventional utterances are used to provoke imaginative reflection rather than to communicate suffers from serious flaws. One problem with the argument is that it overgenerates, entailing that most literal and direct linguistic communication is impossible. But the argument is also incompatible with Lepore & Stone's own view that communication often involves becoming competent with new conventions on the fly, since the task of acquiring a new convention is roughly the same as the task of interpreting an unconventional communicative act. I conclude that although Lepore & Stone’s treatments of particular semantic and pragmatic phenomena are fascinating and possibly correct, their broader defense of conventionalism in the philosophy of language is not one about which we should be optimistic.

The text is excerpted from Peer e Kamil S.A.W (Urdu: پیر کامل صلی اللہ علیہ و آلہ و سلم‎) an extraordinary novel written by Pakistani writer Umera Ahmed. The book was published in Urdu in 2004 and later in English under the title "The Perfect Mentor" in 2011. The novel deals with the turning points in intervening lives of Imama Hashim and Salar Sikandar. It tells about eternal love, the love of Allah Almighty, that results from the love of the Holy Prophet (May peace be upon him). This love changes the whole life, smoothes the fidgets in any personality, brings spiritual maturity and leads to eternal satisfaction and success. The main characters of this novel got entangled in this love. How, when, where….etc, this is the actual story.

In its default use, tense is a grammaticalized deictic category that – interacting with, for example, temporal adverbials – serves to locate the described situation directly or indirectly with respect to the time of utterance (U). It is usually expressed on the (finite) verb. The simple past, present, and future tenses locate the situation directly as preceding, overlapping with, or following U, respectively (absolute tenses). Other tenses (e.g., the past perfect) are semantically composite, depending on a secondary time of orientation for their interpretation (relative or absolute-relative tenses). Some languages lack tense, and languages having tense differ as to how they carve up the general semantic domain of tense. Tense is closely related to the categories aspect and mood.

Given the scarce literature on the Arabic academic book reviews (BRs) and the relatively under-searched praise and criticism speech acts, this study investigates praise and criticism as reflected in the evaluative voice of Arabic academic BRs. It aims to identify the evaluated aspects, the conventional lexical resources, praise and criticism strategies, and how politeness is achieved. To this end, the non-reactive fully naturalistic approach was used to collect data from 30 academic BRs. The corpus was analyzed qualitatively, and drawn chiefly on the speech act theory, Brown and Levinson's notion of politeness, and Leech's maxims of politeness. Results showed that praise and criticism were for the author and the authored. Lexical resources were affective, judgmental and appreciative, and presenting formulaic evaluation. Praise was for general and specific aspects of content, style, usefulness and relevance to the field, publishing standards, readership, and author's repu...

This paper focusses on some aspects of the meaning and use of slurs that have been neglected in the literature so far. On the pragmatic side, it concentrates on non-pejorative uses and the distinction between target groups and in-groups. It shows that emotions play a critical role in all contexts of use, irrespective of whether these contexts are derogatory or not. On the semantic side, the paper adopts a multiple component approach and brings empirical evidence that slur terms do not only have a referential and pejorative component but also a component of degree of offensiveness. There are many sources informing a speech community about a term's offensiveness, including racist institutions, stereotypes, prohibitions, perlocutionary effects, and meta-linguistic discussions. All of these fluctuating influencing factors add to the complex picture of slur terms and make their semantic components subject to enormous changes.

Speech acts shape the core of pragmatic competence and their mastery is a prerequisite for successful discourse encounters in an L2. Cross-cultural comparisons, as claimed by Johnstone (2018), are very effective for knowing and acquiring the speech acts. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to compare a limited number of communicative routines in English and Persian within the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) developed by Wierzbicka (1991) and to examine if the words uttered by speakers at the surface level (exterior) would match their thoughts (interior) especially in such routines as compliment, request, and invitation patterns. The participants comprised 21 MA students studying Eng-lish language teaching. The data was obtained by a validated researcher-made questionnaire containing both structured and unstructured items and 10 scenarios on the basis of which the study participants provided comments, appropriate expressions, and responses. For the English routines, the data was obtained from three English plays. The aforementioned communicative routines in Persian were described in terms of their NSM while the metalinguistic components for the English routines were adopted from Wierz-bicka (1991). The results indicated that the NSM provided rich insights into subliminal cross-cultural differences. Since this study makes use of simple cultural scripts (similar to circumlocution) to describe communicative routines in both English and Persian, learners can easily understand differences within the hidden cross-cultural bound interactions. Implications of the study suggest that both EFL teachers and learners can gain more profound insights about the cross-cultural sociopragmatic differences between English and Persian.

This paper discusses some of the the actual uses, based on oral corpus, of Spanish copula verbs with adjectives in Mexican variety. I argue that copula 'estar' marks an element of subjectivity rather than simple transience as is often claimed. Forthermore, there are some signs of incipient neutralization of the commonly acknowledged semantic opposition between the two copulas, where another kind of opposition is created.

This book deals with discourse markers in the sociolinguistic context of Sicily (Italy). Proposing a broad sociolinguistic approach, two items are taken into account, 'arà' and 'mentri'. These elements are treated synchronically at first, to describe their functional and formal properties, then diachronically, to show how the discourse-marking uses have developed, and eventually from a sociolinguistic perspective, to account for how they are involved in language contact in the bilingual repertoire and how they acquire socio-symbolic value in the community. By integrating the structural, the historical, and the social perspectives, this book allows for a deeper understanding of discourse markers.

The article explains how implicature and metaphorical meaning are closely related.  Beyond the traditional Gricean framework stipulating that metaphor is a violation of conversational norms and can only be understood after disambiguating a primary literal meaning, and beyond the contextualist approach saying that metaphor is a matter of direct assertion lodged in the words and which can take primacy in interpretation, the paper attempts to open a new breach in viewing metaphor as an intuitively felt gap (Camp, 2006; 2008) between conventional meaning and intended content. Finally, the paper develops some basic premises that any comprehensive theory of metaphor ought to consider.

As we have recognized, pragmatics is a branch of linguistics. This branch concerns with the use of language in social contexts and the ways in which we produce and comprehend meanings through language. It can be concluded that pragmatists focus on what is not explicitly stated and on how we interpret utterances in some situational contexts. What is said as with its force and what is communicated by the manner and style of an utterance are the senses which become main concerns in this branch of linguistics.

Though it may seem paradoxical, there are certain things that we can do just by saying what we are doing. This is possible if we use a verb that names the very sort of act one, which is performing. There is this speech act, which is the use of language to perform some act. In general, speech acts are acts of communication, whose success requires the audience to identify the speaker's intention. Then there are only some special people that can do extraordinary things with performative verbs, like baptizing a baby, declaring war, sentencing a convict, or awarding a penalty kick to a football team. For further information, we would limit our topic only ranging in speech act theory and performative verbs as well as the connection between those in daily conversation.

Một hệ quả của những phương châm hội thoại do Grice đưa ra là mệnh đề được phát ngôn là mệnh đề chứa nhiều thông tin nhất trong số những mệnh đề quan yếu mà người nói tin là đúng (Grice 1967). Hệ quả này mâu thuẫn với thực tế trong trong trường hợp tồn tại hai mệnh đề vừa quan yếu vừa nhiều thông tin hơn mệnh đề được phát ngôn nhưng lại phủ định lẫn nhau. Sự mâu thuẫn này có tên gọi chuyên môn là “vấn đề đối xứng”. Luận văn này giới thiệu vấn đề đối xứng và thảo luận hai cách giải quyết nó theo cách tiếp cận hình thức, trong đó cách thứ hai phát triển và bổ sung cách thứ nhất.

French Adverb Franchement and Its Romanian Equivalents (2)
This paper is an attempt to give an exhaustive description of the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features of the French adverb franchement, with a stress on the modal behaviour and argumentative use of the pragmatic marker. It will also provide, in its second part, Romanian correspondents for each of the uses of this adverb (intrapredicative and extrapredicative).

Mots-clés: adverbe, (complément) adverbial, modalisation, énonciation, équivalence.
Keywords: adverb, adverbial, modality, utterance, correspondents.

This study focuses on the description of the french connective c’est-à-dire (que). C’est-à-dire enters a group of linguistic items which may be called “discourse markers”, a functional-pragmatic class which either is identical to, subsumes, or to a large extent overlaps with what has been called among other things “discourse particles”, “operators”, “metalinguistic connectives’ and so on. Although discourse markers present decided difficulties of interpretation and are frequently multi-functional, they appear to contribute, through their hedging qualities, to the mediation of social interaction. C’est-à-dire is usually thought of as providing various kinds of metalinguistic indications about the unfolding discourse. It flags an upcoming repair or gloss and appear utterance-medially as a general rule.Within this perspective, we propose to offer some account of its distribution and function by examining a group of linguistic items which are considered to be part of the same class (à savoir, en d’autres termes, autrement dit, etc.,). Three approaches are taken into account: semantics, syntax and the theory of grammaticalization. We will also present a contrastive analysis between French marker c’est-à-dire and Greek δηλαδή (δilaδi). The analysis shows coincidences in their prototypical functions such as explanation and definition, whereas differences arise when pragmatic factors are involved. Assuming that those differences have roots in discourse, parallel differences are expected to be found in their semantic instructions. We argue that their comparison can lead us to seize their common properties allowing them to permute in similar contexts and that new markers, that there were not taken into account initially, can reveal new data for this study. A fine comprehension of discourse markers, taken individually, can lead to general propositions concerning both their functions and classification.

過而不改、是謂過矣 (孔子) This paper discusses foundational issues in nominalization, focusing on empirical , conceptual, and theoretical problems that have plagued the field for years. Current definitions of nominalization are based on narrow observations on verbal-based nominalizations, while languages across the globe display nominal-based ones, many of which share morphology with the former. Nominalization morphology in many languages also applies to units larger than words, yielding grammatical nominalizations besides lexical nominalizations. The imbalance in the past studies, which have focused on so-called relative clauses at the expense of grammatical nominalizations, has resulted in a lopsided view on the relationship between the two. This, in turn, has led to the mishandling of different manifestations of nominalizations as if they are derivatives of relative clauses, as suggested by the widely used terms such as "headless relative clause" and "internally-headed relative clause". We demonstrate that these, including the ordinary restrictive relative clause, are not independent grammatical structures but are epiphenomena arising from the uses of grammatical nominalizations. A clear distinction between structures and their use is a theoretical prerequisite in arriving at a satisfactory understanding of the nature of grammatical nominal-izations and their role in grammar.

The adoption of ontologies as a formalized approach to information codification is a constant-growing phenomenon in scientific research. Moreover, knowledge sharing and reuse can be improved by adopting hierarchical and modular frameworks and therein embedding available ontologies. Unfortunately, merging procedures may bring about severe, time-consuming problems if a careful selection process is not carried out. Based on these considerations, we propose a methodology for evaluating and selecting higher-level ontologies, given the lower-level ones. Our proposal is based on the computation of ad-hoc metrics which take into account structural and semantic aspects and on the adoption of a multi-decisional analysis procedure. The methodology has been applied to identify ontologies suitable for providing a scientific domain high-level codification to Electromagnetism. Two well-known scientific domain ontologies have been selected and evaluated with the proposed methodology.

In the last five years, the political discourse of President Barack Obama has
attracted a great number of researchers and students in Linguistics and Social Studies
around the world. The discourses through which Obama addressed the issues encountered
by the Muslim World which have been central in the political world, still require more
investigations and linguistic analysis. The current study is dedicated to investigate the
political discourse of President Obama which embodies Islamic world issues, applying the
Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the theoretical framework to study
language structure and function. Specifically, the study will apply the SFL theory as
introduced by Halliday (1985-1994) and reintroduced by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004
2014). The principle aim of the current study is to expose the representation of the issues in
the discourse of President Barack Obama through its Transitivity processes and Modality
patterns. Six speeches by the President sourced from the White House website
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/), the archive of President Obama‟s speeches are used as data.
The study applies a qualitative method to analyze the data. The results show that the
president mobilizes various types of Transitivity processes and participants, and Modality
types in order to express his views. His linguistic devices of Transitivity and Modality
featured within his speeches on the Muslim world issues can be a good linguistic account to understand his construction of these issues.

One feature of Sellars’s ‘philosophical’ semantics (EAE ¶¶40, 67) concerns ‘synthetic necessary truths’ (SM 2:53, 3:18–19), a direct successor to C. I. Lewis’s (MWO, 1929: 227–9, 254–8) relativised pragmatic a priori. Following Reichenbach, Lewis and Parrini, I argue (briefly) that the relativised synthetic a priori required for natural science cannot be merely linguistic (§3). I then argue in detail that the relevant, relativised synthetic a priori cannot be merely meta-linguistic (§§4–7). So doing identifies the key distinction between empiricism and pragmatism; the role of that distinction in contrasting Lewis’s robust pragmatic realism in MWO (1929) to his empiricist relapse in AKV (1946); the key contrast between the robust pragmatic realism of Classical American pragmatism and meta-linguistically inclined neo-pragmatism; and shows that Brandom’s (2015) inferentialist semantics is neo-pragmatist, not pragmatically realist; and that Sellars developed his philosophical semantics on behalf of robust pragmatic realism. Unlike Brandom, Sellars made his way back to robustly realist classical pragmatism by attending closely to Carnap’s use of his formal semantics and its methodological links to Carnap’s explication of conceptual ‘explication’. Carnap’s explication of ‘explication’ reconnects to Lewis’s pragmatic realist semantics in MWO. (Draft: 07.11.15)

After their conquest of large tracts of the byzantine empire and the entire sassanide territory, the Arabs used the monies found in the said lands. Almost thirty years later, they started minting coins, either overcharging a previously existing model, or adopting a derived design.
Then, more than sixty years after the initial victories, Abd al-Malik bin Marwan issued new gold and silver coins that made a stark change to monetary models that had been thirteen centuries in the making. The new coins bore no figures, neither of governors nor of divinities. They were purely epigraphic : texts occupied both faces, in the center and on the periphery.
Semantic analysis of the numismatic text leads to make a distinction between the coranic extracts inscribed on the coins and the enunciative elements that had been deleted. While the text content is religious, its discursive peculiarities can only be explained by the fiscal function (Zakat) the monies were supposed to fulfill.
The change was radical. No continuous transition is liable to describe its operation. Semantics deliver a key for the interpretation of a reform that was to perdure another thirteen centuries.

Semiotics (sometimes spelled “semeiotic”) is the name first given by John Locke, and later reprised by Charles S. Peirce, for the “doctrine of signs,” or the study of how some things can stand for other things to still other things. This deliberate inquiry can be contrasted with “folk semiotic” accounts, which assume that there is some intrinsic feature about, say, the human voice or a painted board that makes them capable of signifying. Such a naive assumption does not withstand serious scrutiny. From a philosophical standpoint, what makes something a sign is an involvement in a specific sort of triadic relation. This relation is found in human/nonhuman and deliberate/nondeliberate signs alike. Semiosis, the action of signs, is what permits communication, but it is wider than communication. For example, if while in an adjacent room I smell that the turkey in the oven is ready, my pet dog can smell it too, and the turkey is not trying to “tell” us anything. But if the cook in the kitchen tells me it is ready, I receive that message, while my dog hears the sounds but is none the wiser (in contemporary semiotic parlance, my dog and I couple our Umwelten via indices, but the symbols at hand generate interpretants only in my anthroposemiosis). In spite of the fact that it has a long and distinguished history (especially during the medieval period), general inquiry into signs became an organized research program only in the mid-20th century. Today, in addition to philosophers, semiotics attracts a wide range of scholars, such as ethologists, cognitive scientists, linguists, art historians, logicians, media theorists, literary critics, computer programmers, biologists, sociologists, and so on. From a methodological standpoint, then, parochialism is not an option. The scholarly literature can nevertheless be fruitfully divided into theoretical and applied strands. Not surprisingly, most philosophers drawn to semiotic questions work in the former strand. Semiotics is not to be confused with “semiology,” a (now largely defunct) project that originated in the lectures of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and which was active in the 1960s, mainly in France. Semiotics, by contrast, is a vibrant tradition that continues to flourish worldwide. Although some persist in employing the term “semiotics” when discussing narrow studies that focus exclusively on cultural codes, such terminological misuse masks the fact that a study of signs is broader than a study of language. A sustained philosophy of signs, then, promises (as Locke initially surmised) to yield truly novel insights.

Masyarakat Kedayan merupakan antara masyarakat peribumi di Pulau Borneo yang mengamalkan pantang larang dalam semua peringkat penanaman padi, walaupun amalan ini kini kian ditinggalkan oleh mereka. Kajian ini bertujuan meneliti makna tersurat dan tersirat dalam bahasa pantang larang pertanian (padi) dari sudut semantik dan pragmatik. Terdapat 14 informan dari suku Kedayan di Mukim Sengkurong telah diwawancara untuk mendapatkan data. Dengan melakukan analisis data berdasarkan kerangka teori tersebut, didapati bahasa pantang larang berhubung erat dengan makna tersurat dan tersirat. Dalam erti kata lain, analisis semantik dan analisis semantik  berupaya diaplikasikan untuk menerangkan medan makna, makna implisit yang terkandung dalam bahasa pantang larang. Bahasa pantang larang dalam pertanian suku Kedayan didapati mengandungi banyak tegahan dari segi penggunaan bahasa dan juga sepanjang proses penanaman padi. Dari segi penggunaan bahasa, contohnya penyebutan kata [jaan] ‘jangan’, [nda bulih] ‘tidak boleh’ dan sebagainya adalah merupakan pantang larang. Dari segi perbuatan, sepanjang aktiviti, mula dari proses penanaman hingga penuaian, pantang larang juga diamalkan, misalnya batang buah simpur akan ditanam sebelum berhuma (dengan alasan padi akan tumbuh subur); semasa berpadi dilarang menyorok di bawah buluh laluan pagar padi (dengan alasan padi tidak akan tumbuh subur); selepas menuai, padi perlu ditutup dengan tikar (agar rezeki tidak lari); dan, sebagainya. Kajian ini telah menunjukkan pada suatu ketika dahulu, pantang larang amat dititik beratkan dalam kehidupan masyarakat Kedayan, khususnya zaman yang masih mengamalkan kegiatan ekonomi yang bercorak pertanian.
Kata Kunci: Kedayan, Pantang larang, Penanaman Padi, Medan Makna, Analisis Semantik, Bentuk Logik dan Analisis Pragmatik.

Expressing that one is busy doing something, or describing others as involved in a particular event, is one of the more fundamental communicative messages humans are likely to convey on a daily basis. Most languagesin the world have (more or less) specific means of expression for thesemeanings, although their degree of explicitness may vary enormously. The most salient 'tools' in this respect include adverbials, such as English now or today, and auxiliary verbs or periphrases, such as Dutch aan het Vinf zijn or French être en train de Vinf, which confer an outspoken progressive meaning to the main verb they qualify. Most progressive periphrases are marked, i.e. they express a surplus value of some sort, setting them apart from simple tenses such as the simple present or the imparfait, which can be seen to express progression in a wide variety of languages as well. The observation that progressive meaning has an explicitly anthropocentric status in language in general, and can be expressed by both marked (periphrastic) and unmarked (non-periphrastic) means of expression in a wide variety of languages, is what ultimately motivates the present research, although more than one area of analysis was taken into account. As such, progressive aspect has been systematically contrasted with anothertype of imperfective aspect, viz. continuative aspect, which roughly expresses the continuation of an event or state beyond a particular momentin time and has periphrastic expression as well (e.g. French continuer à Vinf, Dutch blijven Vinf). These two types of aspect were examined for two languages, viz. French and Dutch, and within the frame of grammaticalization theory, according to which auxiliary verbs are the provisional outcome of an auxiliation process which causes them to gradually lose their full verb qualities. The main focus of this research lies on a factor which has been traditionally ignored in the literature, viz. the speaker’s perspective or the degree to which a speaker can select one meaning over another meaning associated with the same periphrasis or type of aspect.It was shown, for example, that a speaker can put emphasis on the positional meaning of zitten, staan or liggen te Vinf, as in Hij zat eenwhisky te drinken, or use a position verb even when the positional meaning is irrelevant, as in Zit zo niet te zeuren. ‘Position’ and ‘progression/continuation’ are thus both available meanings to speakers when using zitten, staan, liggen te Vinf and blijven Vinf; for a number of other periphrases including être en train de Vinf and continuer à Vinf, however, ‘position’ is no longer a transparent meaning, even if it etymologically underlies their present-day meaning and form.A second area in which the impact of the speaker could be identified was discourse, more precisely those contexts in which progressive periphrases are combined with verbs which normally do not allow for a progressive interpretation, such as stative détester (je suis en train de détestermon copain). For continuative periphrases, a distinction was made between situations in which blijven Vinf and continuer à Vinf express ‘simple’ continuation, on the one hand, and contexts in which the non-achievement of a conceivable ending was motivated in terms of a because- or despite-factor (Nous continuons à avancer malgré les difficultés), on the other hand.A third and final speaker’s perspective deals with pragmatics, i.e. thecommunicative effects that speakers hope to establish in the hearer’s perception of a situation. This more evaluative dimension turned out to be present in particular in continuative periphrases, which can be used to focus not only on a conceivable ending, but also on a desirable or undesirable ending. Many of these semantic and pragmatic meanings are extremely subtle and hard to pick up on outside the context of (spontaneous) discourse; this explains why the manner in which progressive and continuative events were translated in French or Dutch was taken into account as well. As such, the translation of the above example Hij zat een whiskyte drinken as Il était assis, il buvait un whisky allows us to consider the positional meaning of zitten as more or less important in the given context, whereas one will rarely find Zit zo niet te zeuren translated as ?*Ne sois pas assis en train de te lamenter. An indirect but important outcome of this corpus-based analysis confirms what has been suggested in other studies: French is further advanced in its level of grammaticalization than Dutch, which means that French, more so than Dutch, has a tendency to convert its lexically ‘meaningful’ markers into grammatically functional elements, without any other meaning than the function they hold in the construal of the sentence, althoughneither of the periphrases discussed in this study at present meet the conditions of complete grammaticalization.

The World Wide Web (WWW) allows the people to share the information (data) from the large database repositories globally. The amount of information grows billions of databases. We need to search the information will specialize tools known generically search engine. There are many of search engines available today, retrieving meaningful information is difficult. However to overcome this problem in search engines to retrieve meaningful information intelligently, semantic web technologies are playing a major role. In this paper we present survey on the search engine generations and the role of search engines in intelligent web and semantic search technologies.

Händel’s Messiah takes its well-known phrase ‘Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows’ from Isa 53:4. Looking at the context there are reasons to call the rendering ‘surely’ into question. We will discuss aspects of the language and structure of Isa 53:1–6 and of the strategy that we find at work in this passage. The Hebrew differentiates between presupposed and unexpected information. How can translators communicate this difference effectively to their readers (whose language will have its own way of making this distinction in a text)? Relevance Theory is a helpful model towards solving this problem. The conclusions of this linguistic approach and of a number of exegetical commentaries are compared to see to which extent they are consistent with each other.

This study is a pragmatic analysis of gospel tracts; the kind of pamphlets used by churches for evangelism (i.e. to win souls of unchurched people to Jesus Christ). The aim of the study is to investigate the linguistic force of the gospel tracts and the Bible quotations used to ascertain how words perform certain acts and the effects they have on the readers. The data for this study are evangelistic tracts sourced from three churches in Kaduna. A total of six tracts are purposively selected, and the biblical verses used to guide the readers to making salvation choice are analysed using Austin's Speech Act Theory as analytical procedure. The findings include, the Bible verses used in these selected tracts perform the following functions; warn, promise, urge and rebuke the readers to be vigilant for the day of reckoning. Also, the findings reveal the vanity of human existence and all created things that do not have Jesus Christ as their saviour. The perlocutionary effects the verses have on the reader include hope and salvation assurance, the need for sensitivity, alertness and vigilance in living for the soon appearing king, Jesus Christ, the hope of the convert's rapture or resurrection in glory.

An epithet is “a term used to characterize a person or thing,” and a racial epithet is a term used to characterize people on the basis of their race. Uses of racial epithets are language acts that are usually harmful to the people that they target. But what do racial epithets mean, and why are they harmful? In general, how do they do what they do? The purpose of this essay is to sketch an answer to these questions by providing an analysis of racial epithets. In doing so, I will draw on the tools provided by Elisabeth Camp in her analysis of metaphor, since Camp’s analysis of metaphor is, in my view, the proper lens through which to understand racial epithets. Lastly, since I provide a pragmatic view of racial epithets, I’ll contrast my position with Christopher Hom’s semantic view.

https://doctorcroom.com/croom-2008

La Grammaire Fonctionnelle-Discursive (la GFD) est une théorie de la structure des langues d’inspiration typologique. Elle s’organise de haut en bas dans le but d’atteindre l’adéquation psychologique, et considère l'acte de discours comme unité d'analyse de base. Bien que la GFD soit un modèle strictement grammatical, elle interagit avec des composants conceptuel, contextuel et de sortie afin d'améliorer sa compatibilité avec une théorie plus vaste de l'interaction verbale.