216 Other fopics of interest in pro9matics ///// //// / //////// í ///////////////// /////////////// / ////// /// J//// j ///// Other
Other fopics of interest in pro9matics 217
6.1. INTRODUCTION
The reader will remember that in Chapter 1 we discussed the two main general
approaches to pragmatics: a) the Anglo-American view (micropragmatics),
which sees pragmatics as one more component of the grammar of a language, on
a par with the phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic and semantic
components, and b) the broader, European Continental view (macropragmatics),
which sees pragmatics as the cognitive, social, and cultural science of
communication (Verschueren 2009). In this last chapter of our book we shall
explore sorne additional topics from the former view, namely the relationship
between pragmatics and the other components of grammar (syntax, lexicon,
etc.), moving on to explore other topics from the latter view, such as how our
systems of values and our emotions interact with language and the perspectives
offered by four interdisciplinary approaches to pragmatics: historical,
computational, experimental and cyberpragmatics.
6.2. PRAGMATICS AS AN IMPORTANT
COMPONENT OF GRAMMAR
6.2.1. PRAGMATICS AND SYNTAX: HOW THEY INTERACT
The scientific treatment of language traditionally focused on phonology and
morphology, the study of the organization of phonemes and of the component
parts of words respectively. Syntax, the study of how words combine to make
phrases, clauses and sentences, was poorly developed until the sixties of last
century, when Chomsky (1965) set out his well-known transformational-
generative theory of syntax, which unleashed an enormous spate of publications
on the syntax of English and, later, other languages. Syntax moved from being a
marginal area of interest to occupying the very center of linguistics. The claim
was made that syntax has properties that are uniq_ue to human language, that our
syntactic capacity is inbom (i.e. genetically pre-programmed) and that syntax is
autonomous, i.e. independent of meaning. It was pointed out, for example, that
nonsense sentences, like the first stanza of Lewis Carroll's poem 'Jabberwocky',
can still be parsed for their syntax:
(1) 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
Ali mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Syntacticians were skeptical that meaning could be analyzed with the same
rigor as syntactic structure and therefore concentrated on establishing the
syntactic ('transformational') relations between sentences without attempting to
specify their meaning.
To sorne extent this is still the approach of Noam Chomsky and his followers.
However, in his (1965) book he had claimed that there is an abstract structure ( or
'deep structure') that underlies the 'surface structure' of the actual sentences we
use. Whereas he denied that deep structure was a representation of meaning, a
number of scholars (such as George Lakoff 1971 or Charles Filhnore 1968) argued
that deep structure was in fact a semantic structure and that transformational
rules could be used to derive syntactic structure from that deep semantic
structure. The result was a schism within linguistics between those who remained
true to Chomsky's autonomous syntax and those who pursued the altemative line
(Harris 1993). It was the latter group who confronted the problem of representing
semantic meaning within linguistics (which actually also inspired sorne of the
former group to involve themselves with semantics, e.g. Jackendoff 1972).
Nevertheless, for all their differences and the anin10sity between them, both
groups shared a number of theoretical and methodological presuppositions,
notably the idea that clauses and sentences could and should be analyzed
independently of any context. When a problem arose in their work that had
pragmatic aspects to it, there was a tendency to dismiss it as 'a matter of
pragmatics', without entering into any detailed treatment of how that problem
would in fact be treated. As a result, pragmatics carne to be seen by syntacticians
and semanticists as a 'wastebasket', a term first used by Bar-Hillel (1971). The
idea was that pragmatics was a rather mysterious collection of odds and ends left
over from the supposedly neat and tidy study of syntax and semantics. As this
book has shown, this is far from being a true picture of pragmatics, but it was one
that dominated linguistics for a while and discouraged many linguists from
contributing to it.
In the seventies, the idea began to take hold that pragmatics contained
insights that were directly relevant for understanding the syntactic structure of
sentences. For example, it could be shown that alternative formulations of the
same message were not only connected by grammatical rules but also that
the reasons for a speaker to choose one rather than another of the options could
be fommlated in pragmatic terms. Consider the following examples:
(2) a. ?A bus driver contacted the pollee.
b. The pollee were contacted by a bus driver.
c. It was a bus driver who contacted the police.
d. The one who contacted the police was a bus driver.
21& Ofher fopics of inferesf in pr09mofics ///// ///// //// l /// l / ! I / I / / / / / / /// / //
There are many more variants than these four, and they all can be linked by
grammatical rules; syntacticians who llmit themselves to doing this are called
formallsts. However, you can also specify the circumstances under which a
speaker will use each structure: ü you concern yourself with this q_uestion, you
are a functionallst. Functionalists cannot do their work without invoking the
context in which the options are appropriate, and this means that their work
involves doing pragmatics. The circumstances for the use of each of the examples
in (2) are quite düferent.
Example (2b) could occur at the beginning of a text. The contextual
knowledge that makes it appropriate to begin the sentence with 'the pollee' is that
pollee stations are open 24 hours a day and are manned by operators who are
waiting for calls from the publlc. The information at the beginning of the clause
is thus said to be 'given', or contextually determined. Every clause will also
contain 'new' information, information that is not (yet) shared by the speaker and
the addressee and w hich is therefore not part of the context. In (2b) this comes
as an identification of the source of the contact, a bus driver. The natural order
in English, and in many other languages, is for given information to precede new
information, as in (2b). In addition, given information is typically grammatically
definite (the) while new information is typically indefüúte (a). There is a tendency,
stronger in English than in severa! other languages, for the given information to
be the subject of the clause, again as in (2b). If the subject of the clause is not the
active participant (the 'agent'), as is the case in (2b) - the bus driver is active, not
the pollee - then the passive voice is used (as in were contacted). The context
of the clause thus determines (a) the word order, (b) the use of determiners, (e) the
choice of grammatical subject and (d) the voice of the verb phrase.
Context can also help explain why certain formulations are less 'acceptable'
than others, a major concern of workers in syntax. (2a) is preceded by a q,uestion
mark, which is syntacticians' way of indicating that an example is grammatical
but not fully acceptable. From a pragmatic viewpoint, we may say that it is
düficult to find a context in which (2a) would be usable. The problem is that the
sentence begins with new information and ends with given information; this is
less than ideal and the problem can be easily avoided, namely by using the
formulation in (2b).
(2c), which involves a cleft construction (cf. 3.3.2.1, 3.3.2.2) needs a more
elaborate context to be appropriate. The speaker of (2c) has already shared the
information with the addressee that 'someone contacted the pollee'. What she
adds in (2c) is the identity of that 'someone'. Notice that if she is directly asked to
provide the information, she could omit the shared 'who contacted the pollee':
(3) A: Who contacted the police?
B: It was a bus driver.
/////// / /// / ///// ///// //// / ///// //// Ofher +opics of inferes+ in pro9mofics 219
In (2d), the context is different again: both speaker and hearer know that
someone contacted the pollee and have other information about him/her as well.
Now the speaker is informing the hearer that this person has bus driving as a
profession. In this case, there is greater shared knowledge, and the speaker - for
whatever reason - is increasing that stock of knowledge. Ali these examples
show that although it would be possíble to do syntax without understanding
speakers' motivations for choosing one or another variant, it is also possible, and
in the functionalist's view essential, to have pragmatics and syntax interact in
fruitful ways. Another advantage is that we come to understand how different
syntactic structures function in discourse: only (2b) could start a narrative, for
example, while (2c) is most natural asan answer and (2d) is best suited in the
middle of a narrative.
One of the main problems of syntax is ambiguity. Consider the two sentences
in (4):
(4) a. John talked to Bill about himself.
b. Mary talked to Bill about himself.
The most natural understanding of (4a) is that the reflexive pronoun hímself
refers back to John. In (4b), the only possible interpretation is that himsel,frefers
back to Bill, since Mary is female and cannot be an antecedent for himsel,f ( only
herself). However, the interpretation of (4b) makes one think that (4a) may in
fact be ambiguous between two meanings, 'John talked to Bill about John' or
'John talked to Bill about Bill'. Rather than enter into the complex syntactic
arguments about this kind of q,uestion, suffice it to say that the problem arises
solely as a result of 'decontextualization', the treatment of stretches of language
as 'autonomous', as independent of the contexts in which they would be
appropriate.
It is not just the pragmatics of context that interacts with syntax. The
pragmatics of speech acts (cf. Chapter 2) also has an impact on how syntactic
constructions are understood (for a similar case, see Comrie 1984). Consider the
following pair:
(5) a. Since I have a train to catch, I am asking you [to be allowed to leave
early).
b. Since you are annoying me, I am asking you [to leave early].
In syntactic theory, the elements in sq,uare brackets are both 'embedded
non-finite clauses with an understood subject'. In (6a), the understood subject is
the speaker (I am asking you that I be allowed to leave early) while in (5b), the
understood subject is the hearer (l am asking that you leave early). If the matter
were purely syntactic, the determination of the understood subject should be
220 Other topics of lntarest in pragmatics / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
rule-governed, but that is clearly not the case. Rather it is the nature of the speech
acts expressed as/ am asking you .. . that is the determining factor: in (6a) it
means 'I am req_uesting' while in (6b) it means 'I am (politely) ordering'; a req_uest
is clearly self-oriented while an order is oriented to the actions of the hearer.
The way in which pragmatics can overrule syntactic regularities and
determine syntactic form inspired the functionalist Simon C. Dik to develop a
'functional grammar' (Dik 1978, 1997), in which "pragmatics is seen as the all-
encompassing framework within wlúch semantics and syntax must be studied.
Semantics is regarded as instrumental with respect to pragmatics, and syntax as
instrumental with respect to semantics" (Dik 1997: 8). This has more recently led
to Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG; Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008), in
wlúch the form taken by an utterance results from the joint operation of an
'Interpersonal Level' of analysis which covers all the pragmatic factors that
co-determine forro anda 'Representational Level' which deals with semantics.
Importantly, the Representational Level líes within the scope of the Interpersonal
Leve~ perpetuating Dik's conception of pragmatics as all-encompassing. Among
the pragmatic aspects of language covered by FDG's Interpersonal Level are the
recognition of the actional nature of language use, the grouping of discourse
acts into conversational moves, the notion of illocutionary force, the
characteristics of the speaker and the hearer, the observation that the
communicated content of an utterance is distinct from its propositional content
and the contention that reference and predication are thoroughly actional,
pragmatic phenomena. In addition, the grammatical component of FDG interacts
with a contextual component in such a way that relevant contextual factors
impinge on the workings of the grammar. For all its orientation to the pragmatics
of language use, however, FDG remains a grammar, centrally interested in
q_uestions of linguistic form. As two of its proponents have argued, "FDG [. .. )
uses pragmatic notions only to the extent that languages encode the distinctions
corresponding to these notions, be it morphosyntactically or phonologically"
(Hannay & Hengeveld 2009: 114).
The various functionally and cognitively oriented models of grammar
currently practiced in linguistics vary in the extent to which they explicitly (or
implicitly) involve pragmatics in their approaches to syntax. Among the most
interesting is Givón's (2009) 'adaptive approach'. He points to the functional
advantages of a grammatical system and draws a sharp contrast between
pragmatic communication, where interlocutors do not share a system, and
grammatical communication, where they do. In a situation of purely pragmatic
communication, as for example when foreign tourists encounter monolingual
inhabitants of the country they are visiting, morphology will be heavily reduced,
constructions will be simple and the word order will flow directly from
/ / / / / / / / I / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / // I / I / / I Other topics of interest in pragmotics 221
communicative needs; processing will be slow, laborious and conscious, and
speakers will be highly dependent on context. In grammatical communication, by
contrast, morphology is rich, constructions are varied and hierarchical, and word
order is often dependent on syntaclic relations (such as subject and object), while
processing is q_uick, effortless and unconscious. Context still plays a vital role but
interacts with a developed morphosyntax.
This section has covered sorne aspects of the interaction between pragmatics
and syntax in contemporary grammar. The next section will turn to the impact of
pragmatics on another aspect of our linguistic competence, the lex:icon, our store
ofwords.
6.2.2. PRAGMATICS AND THE LEXICON
Complementing our knowledge of the syntactic rules in the language we speak is
our knowledge of the words and idiomatic phrases that are combined by those
rules. This knowledge is referred to as our 'lex:icon', which contains a large list of
entries, rather like a dictionary. Each entry includes various parts: (a) a
specification of the sound of the word in phonemes, e.g. /'knfi:/ and possibly of its
spelling (cofjee); (b) an indication ofits word class (or 'part of speech'), e.g. noun,
plus other features such as [-countable]; (c) a statement of the word's meaning,
possibly also in feature format [+drink, +coffee]. Lexicology is the study of the
structure of the lexicon. Lexicologists have observed that, on the basis of their
meaning, many words group into patterns that can be described with the use of
features. Consider the words man, woman, boy and girl. Two features (or
'meaning components') are enough to distinguish the four words, as follows:
Table 1: Example of componenfial analysis
jadult -adult ·.,' j
• > :;~il~\ nian boy
-m~e - woman girl
Woman can thus be defmed as [+human, -male, +adult], and so 011 for the
other words. This approach to word meanings and the lexicon is known as
componential analysis. Although it was popular for a while, especially in the
circles around early generative grammar described in 6.2.1, it has been largely
abandoned as being too simple and mechanical (we are now better aware of
subtler gender distinctions, for example) andas only being applicable to part
of the vocabulary (coffee, for example, cannot be broken down into meaning
components). It should also be added that, for instance, many women are
222 Other fopics of inferest in pra9mafics // / // ///////// / / // // / ///// / /////////
uncomfortable about being defined negatively as (-male]; and many objectively
adult females still consider themselves to be girls!
Another aspect of componential analysis that has run into difficulties is the
assumption that each word has one meaning. Consider the acljective red. It would
be possible to define red as corresponding to a wavelength of 670 nanometers on
the visible spectrum, but the actual hue that is associated with red differs
enormously according to which item it is associated with syntactically. Consider
the following example:
(6) A girl with red hair was sitting at a red table, eating red meat accompanied
by a glass of red wine. For dessert, she ordered a red apple. She was reading
a red book.
Clearly, red identifies a different color in each case: the girl's hair is ginger-
colored; the table top is painted red on the outside (and the legs may be of a
different color); the cooked meat is liable to be brown with possibly sorne pink
inside; the wine is of a dark color; the apple is red on the outside but white inside,
and may have been peeled; the red book has a red cover but white pages (perhaps
it was this book she was reading!). The meaning of red, then, is very much
dependent upon what it combines with. One solution to this problem is to specify
that the lexicon contains a large number of entries with the phonemic form /red/
and the word class Acljective: red 1, red2, red3, ... red11¡ each entry would then
have its own meaning, with red 1, for example, have the same meaning as ginger.
This multiple-entry approach, which would apply in greater or lesser measure to
all words, was invented to rescue the idea that all meaning could be stored in the
Jexicon. A radical alternative solution would be to deny that words have any
fixed meaning and to declare that word meaning cannot be analyzed scientifically.
Luckily, it is not necessary to follow the latter counsel of despair, since we can
have recourse to a notion that was mentioned in Chapters 1 and 5 above,
underdeterminacy.
The insight that lies behind the concept of underdeterminacy is that our
knowledge of the world is much richer than the Jexicon of words we use to
describe it. We know from experience, for example, what colors human hair can
have (without dye), the colors of the wine we drink and the types of the meat we
eat; we know that a red apple is outwardly red but inwardly white, while a red
grapefruit is outwardly yellow and inwardly red. We also know that books
typically have white pages but that the cover can have any color. And so on. Just
as all the members of a family are similar, even though third cousins may look
almost totally different, so all the concrete phenomena we describe as red are
related in their hue (Wittgenstein 1953 called this 'family resemblance'). We can
say that all red things are nearer or further from a prototype (Rosch 1978, Lakoff
1987): the prototype for red is probably· the color of blood, justas the prototype
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / o+her fopics of inferes+ in pra9mofics 223
for green is grass or foliage. If the meanings of words (lexical entries) are defined
by a prototype, then it becomes possible to include a meaning in the lexicon for
each word. If red is defined in the lexicon as 'having the color of blood', however,
then this clearly underdetermines how the word is used, as we have seen in our
discussion of (6). In order to deal with actual use, we need the concept of
pragmatic enrichment.
Let us consider how the notion of pragmatic enrichment works. Consider the
following examples:
(7) a. We took the bus back to the zoo.
b. We took the escaped camel back to the zoo.
Syntactically, (7a) and (7b) are completely parallel They both also use the
verb take. Our natural inclination is to understand (7a) as meaning that we went
back to the zoo by bus and (7b) as meaning that we captured the carne! and
retumed it to its enclosure in the zoo. However, these understandings do not lie
in the verb take. Our interpretations are based upon a combination of the
meanings of the words, the syntactic structure of the clauses and essentially -
and this is where pragmatic enrichment comes in - our experience as human
beings. We normally use buses as means of transport and normally believe that
in our everyday environment it is safer for wild animals to be in a zoo. However,
this enrichment is called pragmatic because it is based on context. In other
contexts, it would be possible to understand (7a) and (7b) differently: if the zoo's
bus had been stolen and abandoned at another location, we could have taken (i.e.
driven) the bus back to its rightful Jocation, the zoo; and if we found an escaped
camel that was tame enough, we could have mounted it and returned to the zoo
on its back. The conclusion is that the two understandings of take in (7a) and (7b)
are not represented in the lexicon but are dependent upon the context for
enrichment..
Linguists hold that the lexicon is dynamic in the sense that it is not only a
storehouse of words but also contai.ns operations on words. For example, we can
derive new words by adding prefixes or suffixes (e.g. friendly fromfriend,
u~friendly fromfriendly, and un[riendliness from unfriendl,y). We can alsojoin
words together to form compound words, for example chocolate and calce to
make chocolate cake. In the lexicon, the meaning specification for a compowid
has to be very general, in this case 'cake that is associated with chocolate'. This
is because cake can also link up to forro a compound witl1 many other words, e.g.:
(8) birthday cake
oil cake
fish cake
marble cake

224 Other +opics of interes+ in pr09matics / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
Clearly, if chocolate cake were shown in the lexicon to mean 'cake one of
whose major ingredients is chocolate', this definition would extend (replacing
'chocolate' with 'fish') tofish cake but not to birthday cake orto marble cake (cake
which looks like marble) and certainly not to oü cake (food for animals, since this
is food from which the oil has been removed). This does not only apply to
compounds with cake but to thousands of other words that enter into compounds.
The moral is that the meaning of compounds involves a combination of a very
general specification in the lexicon and processes of pragmatic enrichment.
Our final example of pragmatic enrichment comes from the area of
metonymy. Very often, instead of using an exact description, we cut comers and
mention something that is merely connected with what we mean, leaving it up to
pragmatic enrichment to ensure successful communication. Here are sorne
examples of this procedure:
(9) a. I love to listen to Baroq,ue composers.
b. The entire school carne out to greet the mayor.
c. The Caesar salad left without paying.
In (9a), the Baroq_ue composers are long dead, so the speaker can only mean
that she is fond of their music; in (9b), the school cannot move, so the speaker
must mean all the teachers and pupils carne out; and in (9c), a dish of food also
cannot move, so the speaker must mean the person who ordered and consumed
a Caesar salad in a restaurant. Notice how the hearer needs to asswne that the
speaker is being cooperative and is not speaking nonsense: he uses pragmatic
enrichment to 'fill in the gaps' in what the speaker has said. In any case, the
lexical meaning of the words composer, school and salad has not changed. It
should be pointed out, however, that the regular metonymic use of a word canon
occasion lead to its lexical meaning changing. Drinking vessels were traditionally
made of metal, but when it became possible to make them from glass, the first
uses of glass must have been metonymic since the lexical entry for glass had the
feature [-countable) (and in one of its meanings still does). As a result of
the freq_uent metonymic use of glass, there arose in the language alongside the
original glass1 (the uncountable substance) a countable noun glass2, meaning a
drinking vessel made of glass.
In 3.3.3.5 above, we mentioned Horn's (1984: 13) Q Principie and R Principie.
These are relevant toan aspect of lexical pragmatics known as narrowing (see
also Huang 2009). This applies where understanding a word involves narrowing
down its interpretation. Let us talk of Q-narrowing where the Q Principle ("Make
your contribution sufficient. Say as much as you can.") is involved. Consider the
following example:
(10) Margaret broke her finger.
,t
1
./ I / I / f / I I I f f f / / f / f I f I f I I / f f f / / I I I I I / I Other ¼opics of interes+ in pragmafics 225
On the assumption that Margaret has ten fingers, the hearer understands
that Margaret broke one of them. If one of the fingers had been a thumb, then
according to the Q Principie the speaker would have specified that it was a
thumb; since she did not do so, the hearer understands that it was one of the
remaining eight fingers. In all cases of (;}-narrowing, the speaker is at liberty to
cancel the inference, as in (11):
(11) Margaret broke her finger, in fact it was her thwnb.
R-narrowing involves an appeal to the R Principle ("Make your contribution
necessary. Say no more than you must."). Consider examples like the following:
(12) a. Could I have sorne milk?
b. Could I have a drink?
The lexical entry for milk covers the lactic fluid of all mammals, but here the
speaker is understood to mean cow's milk. Similarly, the lexical entry for drink
covers all potable liq_uids, but in most layers of western culture, the hearer will
understand (12b) as a req_uest for an alcoholic drink. This is R-narrowing because
the speaker is not saying more than is necessary to have the desired effect. A
speaker will only tend to say some cow~ milk oran alcoholic drink if their hearer
is - let's say - a drinker of soy milk or a teetotaller. R-narrowing often exposes
the stereotyped way in which sorne people think. Consider the following cases:
(13) My neighbor is a doctor.
(14) My cousin worked as a prostitute.
There is nothing in the lexical entries neighbor, doctor, cousin andprostitute
to indicate the sex of the referent. Nevertheless, responses like Oh really, where
does he work? and Oh, how awfulfor her! respectively show that the speaker's
conversational partner assumes that doctors are male and prostitutes female and
has R-narrowed the interpretation in line with those (possibly erroneous)
assumptions. Finally, R-narrowing explains how we can sometimes commwúcate
by means of apparently vacuous statements such as those in (15):
(15) a. My child has a temperature.
b. My daughter has a brain.
c. Mu son has muscles.
d. Now, that's a salad!
1n (15a), the child has a fever, a higher body temperature than is healthy;
(15b) is understood to mean that the daughter is unusually intelligent and (15c)
to mean that the son has strong, well-defined muscles. (15d), finally, if pronounced
with an appropriately enthusiastic intonation, will be understood to mean that the
 :I
(¡
\ / / / / /// ! // / ////// I / /// / / /// / //// ! / // o+her tapies of inferes+ in pra9mafics
226 Other +opics of interest in pra9matics / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
¡
speaker is referring to a fine example of a salad, with many different appetizing
components.
The purpose of this section has been to show that, from the point of view of
language use, the lexicon covers only part of the meaning associated with words.
In order to understand how words are used in context we need such pragmatic
concepts as enrichment and narrowing. In discussing (15d) we mentioned the
pragmatic role of intonation. That will be the topic of the next subsection.
6.2.3. PRAGMATICS AND PHONOLOGY: PROSODY
The examples we provide in this book are all given in the form of written
language, with a few images. However, this means that a very important, sorne
would say vital, part of language behavior has been missing from the eq,uation,
the phonology of speech. In all the preceding chapters we have mentioned
intonation (e.g. in 1.6.1.2, 2.3.3, 3.3.3.1, 4.2 and 5.6). We have been expecting you,
as readers, to reconstitute the intended sound of the utterances on the basis of a
combination of words and punctuation marks, sometimes with the additional use
of capital letters to indicate emphasis. Nevertheless, the written word can never
be more than a poor approximation to the full richness of connected speech, with
its subtle distinctions of melody, pitch, rhythm, tempo, voice q_uality and
amplitude ( = loudness). In order to enrich the study of language, greater
attention is now being paid (e.g. Wilson & Wharton 2006, Barth-Weingarten
et al. 2009, Prieto & Rigau 2012) to the relation between pragmatics and
prosody, the latter being defined as the phonology of syllables and longer
stretches of speech.
It is fair to say that many domains of linguistics have tended to ignore
prosody. Not only have many linguists been content to work with decontextualized
items (see 6.2.1 above) but they also have tended to exclude prosodic q_uestions
from their work. One reason for the disregard of prosody has been the sense that
there is enormous individual variation (in sex, age, dialect, emotional state, etc.),
making it hard to díscern patterns. Another has been a feeling that prosody
cannot be reduced to the neat oppositions like [± anímate], [±plural] or [± voiced]
that línguistics discern in semantics, syntax and segmenta! phonology,
respectively. A third reason has been the suspicion that although there is sorne
connection between pragmatícs and prosody, it is unclear whether there are any
regular mappings between the two domains that would allow a researcher to
reliably recognize, say, an ironic intonatíon. A fourth reason has been that non-
pragmatic factors can have an influence on prosody, for example the two
syntactic structures of old men and women, namely [old [men and women] and
[[old men] and women] . In additíon, in tone languages such as Chinese,
227
Vietnamese or (to sorne extent) Swedish the difference between words is signalled
by prosodic contrasts: in Swedish tanken rneans either 'the tank' or 'the thought',
depending on the tones applied.
There have been q_uite sorne disagreements about the best way to notate
prosodic contours. The early work in this area by Halliday (1967) and Brazil
(1997) was based on the authors' personal observations and introspections and
thus - although brilliant - was inevitably primarily applicable only to the variety
of English they spoke and was rather holistic in approach, not revealing detailed
properties of utterances. More recently, techniq,ues (e.g. Boersma 2001) have
become available for the very precise measurement of the acoustic properties of
recorded speech. This in turn has led to the development and general acceptance
of the ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) framework (Beckman et aL 2005), a set of
conventions for labeling the distinctive properties of the sound spectrographs
of utterances, no matter what language, or what variety of a language, is being
spoken. The use of these techniq_ues req,uires extensive training, but there is no
doubt that the study of prosody has matured in recent years, allowing a fresh
consideration of its connection to pragmatics.
In the model of Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld & Mackenzie
2008) mentioned in 6.2.1, there is a di.rect connection between the Interpersonal
Level of the grammar (at which the grammatical conseq,uences of pragmatic
strategies are represented) and the Phonological Level (at which prosody is
treated). This allows the grammar, for example, to show how distinct illocutions
(Declarative, Interrogative, lmperative, etc.) are reflected in different intonation
contours. Sometimes, an interrogative may have the syntactic form of a
declarative, as in (16):
(16) You said the priest had arrived?
Here, a rising intonation (L*H in ToBI) can be used to help indicate that the
speaker is just checking rather than asking a new q_uestion. Where there is a
mismatch between syntax and phonology, as in this case, we will expect the
speaker to signa! the rise in her voice more clearly than otherwise, since it is
the prosody that alone carries the burden of indicating the nature of the speech
act Intonation is often used to signal contrast, as in (17), where capitalization is
used to represent prosodic promi.nence:
(17) Henry wore a conservative suit and tie, but hi.s WIFE was in HIGH HEELS
and a LOW-CUT DRESS.
If the speaker-for whatever reason (approval, disapproval, . .. )-wants to
bring out the in1plications of the contrast between the fashion styles of Henry and
his spouse, she can use marked intonation and a slower speech rate to emphasize
 ;j
22& Other +opics of inferest in pro9motics 111 I 11 I / I / I / I I // I // I // / I ///// // // 111
l~'i
·'
\
wife, high heels and low-cut dress. This kind of effect carries over to cases where
a speaker wishes to trigger a Gricean implicature ( cf. 3.3.3.1):
(18) Marcia: Did Bruce contribute to the fund?
Noreen: Well, CHARLIE did.
By using a contrastive intonation, Noreen can further ensure that her words
will trigger the desired implicature -we say 'further ensure', since the flouting
of the Maxim of Relation and the pragmatic marker well will already have
this effect. At times, greater reliance is placed on the prosody, as in an example
like (19):
(19) a. I have had sorne (/sm/) nice experiences here.
b. I have had SOME nice experiences here.
If the speaker does not give prominence to some, as in (19a), then the
message will be purely positive, with no implicatures being sparked off. However,
if the speaker emphasizes some, as in ( 19b), the implicature will be that not all her
experiences were pleasant.
Even when there is no intention to trigger implicatures, the placement of
what is called nuclear stress depends on the context. Nuclear stress involves not
only prosodic prominence but also a change of pitch, either upwards or
downwards or sorne combination of those movements, on the affected syllable(s ).
Consider the following examples:
(20) a. Tom never gets up EARLY.
b. Tom NEVER gets up early.
c. Tom never gets UP early either.
d. It is TOM who never gets up early.
The meaning of ali four examples is the same, but they fit into q,uite different
contexts. (20a) is approp1iate in a neutral context, where Tom is the topic and the
rest of the clause is a comment about him; so it could occur in response to, for
instance, Tell me somethin.g about Tom. (20b), with nuclear stress on the negative
word never, fits into other contexts, for example one in which it is 10 a.m. and
Tom has still not appeared for breakfast. (20c) is most natural where the
conversation has been about Tom's tardiness in everything: it could occur after,
say, Tom is always late for meals and forgets his appointments ... . (20d),
finall¡¡, shows the special s¡¡ntactic structure known as the cleft construction; this
construction (cf. our discussion of (2c) above) is often used to correct an
erroneous assumption that has arisen in the context. In (20d) it is used to point
out that Tom, not someone else, is the late riser. In cleft constructions it is the unit
that follows It + be that carries the nuclear stress.
I /// I // I ////// I ///// // // I // / ///// 11 / Ofher +opics of interest in pro9matics 229
Various hypotheses have been put forward about the role of prosody in
politeness and these are now being examined So far, the results have suggested
that sorne of the generalizations proposed in earlíer work were too hasty: for
example Brown & Levinson's speculation that positive politeness is associated
with a low, creak¡¡ voice and negative politeness with a hígh pitch (1987: 267-268)
has been shown not to apply generally across languages (Grawunder & Winter
2010). The general conclusion among researchers (e.g. Prieto & Rigau 2012) is
that there are no inherently polite intonation contours. Prosodic effects can
certainl¡¡ contribute to the achievement of politeness, but can do so only as one
of part of an ensemble of lexical, grammatical, facial, bodil¡¡, discursive and
contextual factors. In work on prosod¡¡ and Relevance Theor¡¡, too, the current
position (Wilson & Wharton 2006) is that prosodic contrasts do not carry
conceptual meaning but rather procedural meaning, suggesting that, much líke
discourse markers and facial expressions, they serve to guide the hearer during
the inferential process.
Hirschberg (2007) notes that sorne studies show a relationshíp between for
instance, turn-taking phenomena and prosodic elements such as contour, pausa!
duration and final lowering (Sacks et al. 1974, Auer 1996, Selting 1996). Other
studies (e.g. Ladd et al. 1985, Cahn 1989, Mozziconacci 1998) have scrutinized the
role of intonation in conveying affect or emotional state, a topic that we shall
develop in more detall in 6.4.
In addition, according to some scholars (e.g. Lehiste 1979, Hirschberg &
Nakatani 1996, Swerts 1997, Van Donzel 1999) prosodic phenomena such as pitch
range, rate, loudness, and duration of inter-phrase pause can have discourse-
pragmatic effects related to the topic structure of a text. In this respect,
Hirschberg (2007: 531) observes that:
... phrases beginning new topics are begun in a wider pitch range, are preceded
by a longer pause, are louder and are slower, than other phrc1Ses; narrower
range, longer subseq,uent pause, and faster rate characterize topic-final phrases.
Subseq,uent variation in these features then tends to be associated with a topic
shift.
Another feature that has also been identified as a signa! of topic shift is
amplitude. Brown et al. (1980), for instance, have found that amplitude seems to
rise at the start of a new topic and fall at the end. Regarding variation in overall
pitch contour, severa! studies have characterized itas conveying not onl¡¡ the
syntactic mood of the utterance, but also the speech act intended and
the speaker's attitude, belief or emotion (O'Connor & Amold 1961, Bolinger 1989,
Ladd 1996).
Even though the consensus among researchers is that prosody is intimatel¡¡
linked with pragmatics, many hypotheses built on impressions and introspections

'.¡¡
230 Other topics of interest in pro9motics / / Í I I I I I / / / / / / / / / / / // / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
'\;j
·.~.1
have been shown to be ill-founded. lt is therefore wise to be cautious about
proposing that prosody is a direct reflection of pragmatic phenomena, the main
reason being that prosody does not work alone. In fact most of these studies have
suggested that prosody interacts with various other phonological variables, as
well as other aspects of human communicative behavior, like gesture, gaze and
body movement. Thus from a more general sociological perspective it has been
shown, for instance, how discourse can be manipulated at the phonological leve!
in order to achieve certain social or political objectives (e.g. Margaret Thatcher
was said to change her accent purposefully during her campaign in order to
obtain more votes; Wilson 2001). Also, Wilson & Gunn (1983) observe that
speakers may adopt certain alternative phonological forros in order to sound
more Catholid Irish/ Unionist, etc., depending on their persuasive purposes.
In these first sections of the chapter we have seen how speakers resort to
the different linguistic levels and systems in order to fulfill their pragmatic
objectives, and how complex and intertwined the weave of ali these elements can
become. One thing we know for sure: there is no uniq,ue or fi.xed way for ali these
levels and systems to interrelate because language is dynamic and the contexts
in which utterances occur are also dynamic and ever-changing. Therefore we
cannot speak of strict one-to-one mappings when analyzing these variables. In
language and discourse nothing can be said to be static, as we shall also try to
show in the next section, dealing with another of the discourse-pragmatic
functions of language, namely that of positioning oneself towards the discourse
situation as well as evaluating people, things and events.
6.3. STANCE ANO EVALUATION AS A DYNAMICAL,
PRAGMATIC SYSTEM
Language is very often used to reflect our systems of values and therefore to
express our evaluations of people, things and situations, as well as our emotions.
Scholarly reflection on this fact has stimulated the study of the evaluative
function of language, which has gradually grown in strength within the linguistic
research of the late 2ou1 century and first two decades of the 21 st century. Bally
(1913), Labov & Waletsky (1967), Labov (1972, 1997a and b) and Aarts & Calbert
(1979) were among the authors whose early approaches paved the way for the
more recent approaches to the phenomenon. Bally, a Swiss linguist who
integrated axiology, the study of values and value judgments, into linguistics in
the early 20th century, noted that the axiological parameter permeates most
linguistic expressions, pointing to the close relationship between value
judgements and the expression of linguistic emotion. Labov examined evaluation
;J
i.l
/ ! /// / ! ! / ! / ! //// ! // ! ! /////// ! ! ! / I ! / ! Other topics of inferes+ in pra9matics 231
as one of the elements of narrative structure, and Aarts & Calbert contributed
semantic taxonomies of values for the English language.
Adding a new dimension to the true/false axis that has always been given
great prominence in linguistics, many researchers in the field of Axiological
Semantics (e.g. Osgood et al. 1957, Osgood 1980, Krzeszowski 1990, Felices-Lago
1997, 2003) started to argue that the most important axis is in fact the good/bad
one. They claimed that this positive/negative axis is a much more basic parameter
in linguistics, being founded on very deep emotions and thus is the earliest
distinction (in terms of values) that human babies make. This basic categorization
manifests itself in language in various different ways, reflecting the more or less
complex systems of values adhered to by different individuals and social groups.
A new wider perspective was arising, then, which conceived of linguistic
evaluation as essentially discourse-pragmatic, interpersonal, context-dependent
and negotiable. This broader view has been developed in works such as Hunston
& Thompson (2000), Martin (2000), Macken-Horarik & Martín (2003), Halliday &
Matthiessen (2004), Hunston (2008), Martín & White (2005), Englebretson (2007),
Bednarek (e.g. 2006, 2008a & b, 2009a & b) and Thompson & Alba-Juez (2014).
These authors have noted, for instance, that the values reflected in language are
not always the speaker's, for they may reflect the 'social mind' or the values of
the corresponding culture or group within which the speaker is interacting. As
Bednarek (2009: 405) explains, they may be strategically related to notions such
as self-presentation or politeness, thus becoming the mirror of the 'social mind'
orculture.
The Appraisal Model developed by Martin & White (2005) stands out as by
far the most elaborate and fully developed model of evaluation in the literature
to date. They define Appraisal as "an interpersonal system located at the leve! of
discourse semantics" (2005: 33), which is in turn divided into three main
subsystems or domains, briefly described and illustrated here as follows:
l. Attitude: the subsystem concerned with our feelings, including emotional
reactions, judgements of behavior, and evaluation of things. It is divided into
three further subsystems: Affect, Judgement and Appreciation. Affect is
concerned with registering positive and negative emotions or feelings;
Judgement deals with altitudes towards people's behavior which we praise or
criticize; and Appreciation involves evaluations of things (semiotic and
natural phenomena).
2. Engagement: the subsystem dealing with the source of attitudes and the play
of voices in discourse.
3. Graduation: the subsystem concerned with adjusting the gradability of an
evaluation.
 ;~
232 Other topics of interest in pra9mafics / /// / /// / / / / / // / //// / /// / //// / /// / //
Prototypical examples of evaluation within the major subsystem of Attitude
for each of its three subsystems can be found in (21), (22) and (23), where an
emotion, a judgement of a person, and an appraisal of a movie are expressed,
respectively:
(21) I fell in love with your blue eyes the moment I met you. (A!fect)
(22) It was silly of her to say such a thing to you. (Judgement)
(23) The movie was boring and totally simplistic in its approach to life.
(Appreciation)
The subsystem of Engagement is based on the assumption that everything
speakers say encodes a certain point of view or stance, and that all verbal
communication is dialogic.67 Thus all utterances show how their speakers present
themselves (i.e. as standing with, against, or neutral with respect to other
speakers and other value positions). But even if all communication is dialogic,
speakers on certain occasions do not make reference to other voices and
viewpoints in their utterances, in which case their Engagement is categorized by
Martin & White as 'Monoglossic'. On th.e contrary, when the utterances do invoke
or allow dialogistic alternatives, they are categorized as 'Heteroglossic' (2005:
100). In (24) and (25) we find examples of Monoglossic and Heteroglossic
Engagement found in the headlines of a broadsheet anda tabloid, respectively:
(24) Jordan hangs 11 roen after eight-year halt to death penalty (The
Guardian, December 21 st, 2014).
(25) I've called time on boozing - after 24 bottles in two weeks, says LIZ JONES
(The Daily Mail, January 3rd, 2015).
In (24) the journalist who wrote the headline does not recognize any
dialogistic alternative: she just states as a fact that 11 roen have been hanged in
Jordan. On the contrary, in (25) the journalist does not take responsibility for
what is stated and explicitly states that this is what Liz Jones said, thereby
acknowledging the dialogistic alternative by introducing another person's
voice.
However, reporting what other people say is not the only way a speaker can
recognize other voices. Interrogative utterances, for instance, are always
dialogistic and heteroglossic, because they recognize an alternative to what
would be their declarative counterpart. The same can be said of other utterances
that contain sorne clue as to the consideration of other people's stances or
opinions. Compare the monoglossic utterance in (26) to sorne of its possible
heteroglossic altematives in (27), (28), (29) and (30):
67 See Bakhtin (1981).
/ / / / / / // I / / / / ///////////////////// // Other fopics of interesf in pra9matics 233
(26) Robert has been rude.
(27) Has Robert been rude?
(28) In my view, Robert has been rude.
(29) Everyone thinks Robert has been rude.
(30) Nobody can deny Robert has been rude.
As for the third major subsystem of Graduation, Martín & White point out
that it is a general property of all values of Affect, Judgement and Appreciation
that they construe greater or lesser degrees of positivity or negativity, and that
gradability is also generally a feature of the Engagement system (2005: 135). The
system of Graduation allows speakers to grade according to intensity or amount
(Force), as well as by reference to the degree to which the graduation phenomena
match sorne supposed core or instance of a semantic category (Focus). The
utterance in (31) presents an example of Graduation of the Force type, and that
in (32) an instance of the Focus type:
(31) Kate is an extremely generous person. (Graduation: Force)
(32) Leo has been acting kind ofweird lately. (Graduation: Focus)
All the systems and subsystems of Appraisal interact and interrelate
in various and intricate ways, which is evidence of the fact that linguistic
evaluation is a complex, context-dependent phenomenon, as other authors have
also argued. In a more recent publication, Alba-Juez & Thompson (2014: 13)
define evaluation as:
... a dynamical sub-system of language, permeating all linguistic levels and
involving the expression of the speaker's or writer's attitude or stance towards,
viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that s/he is talking
about, which entails relational work including the (possible and prototypically
expected and subseq_uent) response of the hearer or (potential) audience. This
relational work is generally related to the speaker's and/or the hearer's personal,
group, or cultural set of values.
These authors also point out that in their view, stance and evaluation are not
exactly the same thing. Stance is a more abstract concept, a position a speaker
may hold for herself without expressing it, whereas evaluation is the actual
verbal realization or manifestation (through linguistic means) of the stance.
Evaluation is thus characterized as a complex, pragmatic, dynamical phenomenon
that has many faces, for it may: a) be overt or covert, b) be placed at different
points along the continuum on the polar evaluative positive/negative axis,
c) express one, two or more different values or parameters at the same tin1e, and
d) permeate all the linguistic levels. Examples (33) and (34) illustrate· overt as
234 Other fopics of interes+ in pro9matics ///// / / l / l // l // l / / l // l l / / ! / l ! l ! / I / //
opposed to covert evaluation (inscribed vs. invoked evaluation in Martin &
Wltlte's 2006 terms), respectively:
(33) Jonathan is a liar.
(34) Jonathan is very fond of making up stories about other people.
Whereas Ule criticism of Jonatilan is made clear and is inscribed in the
semantics of the word liar in (33), in (34) it is made in an indirect way, invoking
the judgement by describing what he is fond of doing, Ulus leaving the ultimate
assessment about Jonathan up to the hearer's own interpretation and deduction.
With respect to polarity, evaluations can be positive, as in examples (21) and
(31), or negative as in (22), (23), (26) or (33). However, evaluations are not always
so clearly positioned at one pole or the other: they may be placed on a continuum
whose midpoint is a neutral kind of evaluation, examples of which are found in
(36), where the speaker comrnits neither to one extreme nor the other, and
in (36), where a simple, rather objective appreciation68 of the River Nile is given
(also involving Monoglossic Engagernent), without showing or implying any
positive or negative attribute:
(36) I neither love nor bate her.
(36) The Nile is a long river.
Regarding point c) above, the fact that different kinds of evaluation can be
found in a single utterance also constitutes proof of its complexity. In (23) above,
for instance, there is a cornbination of the subsystern of Appreciation within
Attitude and the subsystem of Graduation (found in totaUy). An even more
complex interplay of systerns and subsystems can be seen in (37), an analysis69
of a headline in The Guardian (18 December 2014) where a combination can be
observed of Heteroglossic Engagement (the journalist is reporting what the
Court said), two types of Attitude (an Appreciation of the way in which the father
shook the baby, and an invoked Judgment of the father as a murderer), and
Graduation (the father's loss of self-control is assessed as "momentary", perhaps
in an attempt to minirnize his rnurderous intention, in the sense that it was not
premeditated but only the result of a moment of loss of self-control) (the analysis
and classification is within sq_uare brackets):
(37) Father fatally [Attitude (negative, inscribed Appreciation)) shook baby
[Attitude (invoked negative Judgment)] in momentary [Graduation
(downscaling)J loss of self-control [Attitude (invoked negative
Judgement)], court told. (Whole headline: Engagement (Heteroglossic)] .
68 Tlús is called "descriptive appraisal" by philosophers lilce Richard Joyce (Prlce 2014).
69 Reproduced here frorn Alba.Juez (forthcorning).
l ! / / ////// l //// l / l / l ! / / I // I // I / / I / ! / o+her topics of interes+ in pra9matics 235
Our final remark about evaluation will concem d) above, namely the fact
that evaluation permeates ali the levels of linguistic description. At the
phonological level, it is well-known that certain prosodic features (e.g. a given
intonation or high pitch) may be used, for instance, to indicate an ironic criticism
or to infuse utterances wíth different types of evaluative/emotive meanings. The
example in (38) has been taken from Escandell-Vidal, Marrero Aguiar & Pérez
Ocón (2014: 163), who show how the lengthening of the nuclear stress that
Spanish uses to indicate verum focus70 (in this particular example, on the vowel
/i/ in the second syllable of abrigo in A's 1ast utterance) may be linked to an
evaluative message of insistence and/or impatience:
(38) A: Abrígate bien, q_ue dicen q_ue va a hacer mucho frío.
(It will be very cold outside, so wrap up wann)
B: ¡Pero si hace un sol espléndido!
(But the sun is shining bright!)
A: Llévate el abri:go
(Do take your coat)
At the morphological level, evaluation can be encoded in sorne prefixes and
suffixes, such as the suffix -ie in sweetie (showing affection), or the prefix pro-
in pro-lije (showing a positive stance towards any measure in favor of life, and
in sorne contexts, a simultaneous negative attitude towards, for instance,
abortion).
Evaluation at the lexical level is nonnally the easiest to recognize, given that
many words or expressions (e.g. good, bad, pretty, ugly) include positive or
negative evaluative content ingrained wíthin their semantic features.
At the syntactic level, evaluation can be made manifest, for instance by
resorting to the lexico-grammatical systems of modality (Halliday 1994, Eggins
& Slade 1997, Bybee & Fleischman 1995, Biber & Finegan 1989) or by changing
the expected order of constituents in a clause. Compare (39), where the order of
constituents is the expected one, to (40), where the adjunct has been fronted,
adding an element of Graduation (Intensification) to Jennifer's invoked negative
evaluation of Ernest (because by fronting the negative adjunct she puts emphasis
on the fact that she does not want to visit ltlm, making her interlocutors infer,
given the proper context, that she does not like Emest). Jennifer's utterance has
to be placed in a context where her friends are planning on visiting Ernest and
giving hirn a surprise, but where Jennifer, who is Ernest's ex-girlfriend and hada
70 Verumfocus is also cnlled 'positive polarity focus', and Is defined by FénJ as a "special case
of narrow focus, namely on the afflnnative part of a declaratlve se.ntence" (2006: 167).
 progmaflcs / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
236 Other fopics of inferest In
very bad experience in her relationship with him, now hates him and wants to
avoid any possfüle contact with him:
(39) I will not visit Emest on any account.
(40) On no account will I visit Emest.
At the 'purely' semantic leve!, we find, as in the lexicon, the evaluative
meanings that are inherent to words and expressions and are therefore a part of
their semantic features. At the broader semantic/pragmatic level we find a kind
of evaluation that is context-dependent, ranging from the local co-text up to
personal, social, emotional or cultural contexts. Thus, as Alba.Juez & Thompson
(2014: 11) note, "'a fat woman' was considered positive, beautiful and healthy at
the beginning of the 20th century, but not so much so in our present Western
culture". However, fatness may become desirable when talking about pigs that
are being raised for food. Another interesting example of pragmatic evaluation
is to be spotted in the utterance He wears sandal.s with socks which, according
to Thompson (2014: 51), is recognized by many British readers/hearers asan
indirect (invoked) negative judgement of the sandal-wearer's taste. Indeed, in
order for the hearer to understand pragmatic-level evaluation, he has to share or
at least have sorne knowledge of the speaker's personal, social and cultural
values, or else the invoked meaning will be lost or misinterpreted. It is important
to note here that an utterance that has a positive valence within a certain group
or culture may have a negative meaning in another or vice-versa and that
evaluative language also depends on and varies according to the text type in
which it is used.
As tlle reader may have noticed, a crucial aspect of evaluation is that it is
closely connected to emotions and the expressive function of language. We now
turn to these.
6.4. EMOTION: INTERSUBJECTIVE PRAGMATIC
MEANINGS
20°1-century linguistics was mainly centered on the referential function of
language. As was noted in 6.2, it was only at the end of the 20°1 and beginning
of the 21 st centuries that other functions of language started to be explored in
depth, such as the evaluative and the expressive functions. We have seen that the
expression of evaluation is very closely connected to the expression of emotion:
hwnan beings normally have opinions and feelings about other people, things or
situations, which are expressed by both verbal and non-verbal means (e.g. gestures,
posture). Verbal communication, as we now know, plays a very important part in
// I //// / / / // // / / / I I I / // I I I I I / / I I I /// Ofher topics of inferesf in pragmafics 237
the expression of stance, attitude and emotions. In fact, there is very little
language (if any at ali) that can be said to be devold of stance or emotions.
As we saw in the previous section, theories of evaluation have incorporated
emotion into their conceptual schemes. Appraísal Theory includes the subsystem
of Affect, involving emotions, wlthin the major subsystem of Attitude. But the
researchers who are now exploring emotion in detail (e.g. Foolen 2012, 2016,
Dewaele 2013, or the EMO-Fundett group71 ) have seen that there is more to
emotion thanjust the subsystem of Affect Thompson (2014) has shown how both
Emotion and Emotional talk (using Bednarek's 2008b tenns) are not only found
in the Affect subsystem but also overlay Judgement and Appreciation, as well as
the main areas of Engagement and Graduation. The reflections developed within
our research group (EMO-Fundett) have led us to hypothesize that ali emotive
language is evaluative but not ali evaluative language is emotive. Testing this
hypothesis will depend upon how we define emotion (a difficult task indeed!),
which will involve considerations from not only linguistics but also psychology
and sociology. This matter, as wlth ali issues in the Humanities, is complex, and
we cannot yet say that ali the variables that underpin the phenomenon have been
established. Above ali, there is still no consensus as to which and how many
emotions there are. TI1ere have been many attempts to categorize and represent
the human emotional space (see for instance the psychological theories of Russell
1980, James 1884, or Ekman 2007) but there is a great diversity of opinions as to
how this should be done. Within the field of linguistic:s, Schnoebelen (2012) points
out that the basic categories which are mentioned in the majority of studies are ten
in number, namely: 1) Anger/rage/hostility, 2) Fear/fright/terror, 3) Joy/happiness/
elation/eajoyment, 4) Sadness/sorrow/distress/dejectio n, 5) Disgust, 6) Shame,
7) Love/tender emotion, 8) Anxiety/worry, 9) Surprise, and 10) Guilt But this is by
no means the standard, for some authors only work with two main types (positive
vs. negative emotions), while others speak of an infinity of categories.
We shall try, however, to present here a succinct picture of what has been
done so far in the field of linguistics regarding this iniportant aspect of human
communication, taking into a ccount that emotions are crucial for the
comprehension of human nature a nd interaction, and that the expression of
emotion is therefore essentially a pragmatic phenomenon. For that reason, in
Cognitive Linguistics the c onceptualization and expression of emotion is
considered to be a natural fw1ction of language.
Dewaele (2013: 6) points out that, when learning a language, knowing the
affective valence and degree of emotionality of a word or expression is as
important as learning its grammatical class or its gender, because an inaccurate
71 http://www.W\ed.es/pro1Jeclofwldett/.
238 Other topics of interest in progmatics l / l / l l l l / ! // I / i / I / J //////////// I J / // //////////////////////////////////// Other topics of interest in pragmafics 239

understanding of this aspect may result in unwanted illocutionary effects "whlch 2) We rnight also think that language always has a direct connection to emotion,
rnight be more embarrassing than phonological, morphological or syntactical as seems to be the case with verbal utterances such as Ouch! or Yummy!, a
errors". Dewaele also remarks that emotion can be a very strong motivating possibility that is illustrated in Figure 2:
force behind the acq_uisition of a foreign language. Furthermore, other authors
(e.g. Arbib 2005 or Tomasello 2008) support the thesis that emotion was an Figure 2: Hypofhesis 2: Language and emofion ore direcfly
important basis for the emergence of human language in the first place, given c:onnecfed
human beings' obvious need and desire to share their emotions and/or attitudes
, ~:- •~ I f , •[' ~... !---- -
with others. Within Cognitive Linguistics, Langacker (2012: 100) has confirmed
,.
..,,. ---··EMOTION
- , __,_ , -..t-!

•
this general perception by stating that every instance of language use "has
conceptual import involving four dimensions: descriptive, expressive/emotive,
interactive, and discursive".
All these considerations make it rather difficult to conceive of communicating LANGUAGE"
in any natural language without expressing emotion. Foolen (2016) points out -~~"·--- -~ ~
that emotions are relevant for language for two main reasons: a) because they
are expressed in language, and b) because they are part and parce) of the 3) A more reasonable hypothesis, in our opinion (which is in line with Foolen's),
grammar and lexicon of languages. The difference between these two aspects is would be that language has both a direct and an indirect link to emotion,
illustrated in (41), where Lucy's pain immediately after having hammered her i.e. language both reflects the conceptualization of emotion and expresses it,
finger is directly conveyed and expressed but not described, as opposed to ( 42), as represented in Figure 3:
where Lucy shows that she has conceptualized the feeling of pain and is
describing it by making use of the grammar and vocabulary of English: Figure 3 : Hypofhesis 3 : Languoge has both o direcf and
(41) Lucy: Ouch!!!!! an indirecf link to emofion
(42) Lucy: My finger hurts! It's a terrible, acute pain. r 1i ~2
•. 1 , t ,. 'h.-:..
.:;--..-:: -
¡r<~~~~ª~;;-~ -ir é~-~t,Í;;;~~.1r r:.&~¿;;
These two options, i.e. the direct expression and the conceptualization of ~

♦ ·-
emotion, are in fact two of the ways in which the relationship among cognition, eyonqN

•
language and emotion can be seen. Foolen (2012) explains that there are four : • {l'l..,-:-'}'.ñ_; ;i\~'.f;~ r, i_~t ,; ,-..
0
>; .. f"jX:a_/'·~:..;,.•.
... ~

ways to see this relationship:

1) We might hypothesize that there is no direct connection between language ·~-- T.·•r.-J:.· ~

and emotion, and that cognition always stands as an intermediary between
them: emotion is conceptualized in cognition, and cognition is in turn reflected
in language, as seems to be the case with the lexical differentiation between
emotions (l'm happy, sad, angry, etc.). This possibility is illustrated in
Figure 1:
Figure 1: Hypofhesis I: There is no direcf connedion befween
language and emofion
LANGUAGE~ -
i"'-:;4'
4) A final hypothesis would state that the relation between la nguage and
emotion varies, depending on the types of emotion. Thus, Foolen explains
that it could be claimed that for instance, surprise is typically expressed,
while anger or fear are only conceptualized in language but expressed in non-
verbal ways. There are no conclusive studies or results that could support this
hypothesis.

:.· , -~'1ir?a~ ;;;-: __.. . ·:r :;,►r..;·;-.,...- -~ .. ~ , ~.,;::,.::j-t..·l'."r:,,"; '~<--11\.._~ 1

As noted in 3), our view of this issue tends towards conceiving of this
- -~ó'fl6iit,.~\r:-~\~ -lc;o?iNrncf;'Ñ ., "'mi :'. l ANctuÁó'E~.· relationship as 'mixed', given the observable fact that people not only have the
..s-•,:Eq.~..-1,.~r~~· I _·;_. •. r{ '·
•_., ·-t· ·_.:_ 4 t -~.. ' ~-~~
1
::· ..~r r~- ~-.:.t.· ability to conceptualize their emotions and those of others (e.g. I love ice-cream,
but my boyfriend hates it), but also to express their own emotions directly via
240 Other +opics of lnterest in pr09motics // / // / ////// / // // / / / / // // //// / // ////
language, resulting in expressive language (e.g. Argh! Eek! Pew!) and that at
tintes these two possibilities may be conflated in the same expression (e.g. That
news is soooo good!!!!.').
Potts (2007) writes about the q,ualities of expressives, the most salient of
which are the following: a) they have an inunediate and powerM impact on the
context¡ b) they reveal the perspective from which the utterance is made and may
have a dramatic impact on the way current and future utterances are perceived
by tlle hearer or audience¡ c) their meaning cannot be easily articulated¡ and d)
they are indispensable to language.
Let us discuss sorne of the ways in which emotion, as we saw was also the
case for evaluation, is encoded in language at different levels.
Sorne words or morphemes have special emotional meanings: The -k that is
appended to Cantonese particles acts asan emotion intensifier (Sybesma & Li
2007). Schnoebelen (2012: 13) points out that Klima (1964) writes of negative
polarity items like any as affective elements that are normally attached to
(negative) emotion, which, for instance, allows "It is {not possible/impossibLe}
for him to do any more without allowing *It is possibl,efor him to do any more".
Olmos & Ahern (2009) explain that the connectors pero 'but' and aunque
'although' in Spanish suggest the speaker's positive emotional stance in utterances
like La casa está lejos pero hay una estaci6n de metro (The house is far but there
is a metro station).
a) Emotions are taken into account in the categorization of verbs in sorne
languages like the East Caucasian languages, in which emotion verbs are
split from perception verbs and mark experiencers with a different case.
Schnoebelen (2012: 10) notes that in Godoberi and Tsakhu, for instance, the
dative case is used for the emotional experiencer, while the affective case is
used for the experiencer of a perception.
b) We saw in the previous section that diminutives can also have an evaluative
dimension which interacts with the emotional dimension in obvious ways, as
is the case in Spanish. For instance, if someone is called mi amorcito
(literally: 'my little love') by their partner/lover, the meaning added by the
diminutive - (c)ito to the noun amor (love) has nothing to do with its 'small
size' (it is not the case that the love s/he feels for her/him is little, or that the
addressee is a small person), but much to the contrary, with an intensification
of the closeness, love and affection felt for the addressee.
c) Changing the syntactic order of the constituents of a clause can alter not only
the evaluative load of an utterance (as we saw in 6.3, but also its emotional
load. Compare the following two possible ways of starting an e-mail message
to a friend: Dear John, vs. John, dear, or their eq,uivalents in Spanish: Querido
/// I // I / / I / I / / // I // I I I / I / I I I I I I I / I / / Other +opics of interes+ In pr09mofics 241
Juan: vs. Juan querido:. In both languages the second option, which is the
marked72 one, wil1 be most surely understood or interpreted as showing a
closer, more affectionate relationship between the writer and John.
d) There is an undeniable relationship, as is also the case with evaluation,
between phonetics/phonology and emotion. Pitch, intonation, high stress or
the lengthening of a syllable or sound is connected in many languages with
strong (or at least sorne kind of) emotional involvement, displaying a great
variety of affective meanings which may go from ironic, mild negative
criticism to the dramatic and direct verbal expression of anger, pain, joy or
any other emotion (as for instance, when screaming out of fear).
e) In Computer Mediated Communication, or communication involving any of
the new technologies (mobile phones, tablets, etc.), emoticons have become
a normal feature of messages which aid in the representation of the writer's
emotional states and reactions. As Wharton (2009: 14) remarks, emoticons
encourage the reader "to construct a higher level explicature•,rJ and therefore
add to the pragmatic meaning of the message, making up for the absence of
real face gestures. Indeed, there is a connection between emotions and
procedural meaning,74 as we shall brieflg explain in g) below.
f) Blakemore (2009) writes about interjections such as Ah, Oh, and Good
heavens/ in fiction as a useM way of capturing emotions that are new to a
character or mixtures of emotions like excitement and regret. These
expressions encode "a procedure for activating a range of emotional
attitudes" (2009: 22), a process that the reader will do on his own, given the
context and his own experiences in real life, and that mag give more emotional
immediacy as well as increase involvemenL
g) Taboo words are typically loaded with en10tional content, as we all know, and
this is why Dewaele (2013) points out that they play an important part in the
learning of a foreign language. Furthermore, he writes about his own
experience with the "double standards" of native speakers who do not always
interpret foreign leamers' use of expletives in the same way as they would
judge or interpret other native speakers using the same words in similar
situations: a swearword or risq,ué joke uttered by someone who sounds
foreign may be judged as inappropriate or even gross (thereby raising
negative emotions in the natives), while if the san1e word or joke were uttered
by a native speaker, it would be judged bg her peers as totally appropriate
n Foolen (2012) also remarks that there seems to be a tendenc!J for markedness in language
to be assoclated with emot!on.
73 See Chapter 6 for the concept of higher leve! explicature.
74 See also Chapter 6 for the concept of procedural meaning.
 ·'t
1 ~
242 Other tapies of interest In pr09motics / / //////////////////////////////////
(and would therefore be received with positive emotion). In relation to this
topic, Schnoebelen (2012: 17) notes that taboo words "seem to carry with
them the imprint of power, authority, and rebellion".
h) The abstract character of emotions makes them good candidates for
conceptualization by means of metaphors. It is in fact very comrnon to use
figurative language to describe emotions, as in She exploded or He was
boiltng with anger, where anger is seen as a fluid in a container. Many of
these metaphors use body parts and organs to refer to emotions, and are
therefore metonymical, as in My heart sank into my boots, He was head
over heels in love with her, He had coldfeet, or His knees trembled. Sorne
others are orientational, as in She has her ups and downs or We sank into
despair. Crawford (2009) observes that metaphors are used in all kinds of
discourse but they are especially freq_uent when the discourse topic is
emotional, and even more so when dealing with intense emotions. fu short, it
appears to be a fact that the use of metaphors and figurative speech in general
is fundan1ental to expressive language.
To conclude this section, we would like to stress that language is used by
human beings to position themselves with respect to their opinions, thoughts,
feelings and emotions, thereby also positioning their audiences and topics. When
expressing emotions, people not only make their intemal states visible but also
perform linguistic actions which are interpersonal in nature and have particular
conseq_uences. There is perhaps nothing more human than the verbal expression
of emotion (animals may express certain basic emotions in non-verbal ways, but
cannot talk about them!) and by doing so human beings reveal, and at the same
time affect, certain aspects of the cognitive and social systems they fonn part of.
It is lúgh time the humarúties, and linguistics in particular, paid more attention to
them. We are now in the process of what might be labeled 'a happy start'.
6.5. HISTORICAL PRAGMATICS
It is a fact that pragmatics has played a very important role in much of the recent
historical work on semantic change. Present-day historical linguistics has
branched into several subfields, one of them being historical pragmatics, which
became institutionalized as a field of study in the mid-1990s, mainly thanks to the
work done by Andreas Jucker and the body of research presented in the Journai,
ofHistoricalPragmatics, whose founding editors were Andreas Jucker and Irma
Taavitsainen. Jucker (2006: 329) defines historical pragrnatics as "a field of study
that lies at the intersection of historical linguistics and pragmatics". Thus, as
/ / / / / / / I / I / / I I I / / // I /// I / I I I / I I I I I / I Other tapies of interest in pr09moties 243
Traugott (2007: 638) has put it, "Historical Pragmatics is a usage-based approach
to language change". The field is also known as Historical Discourse Ana/,ysis15
or Historical Dialogue Ana/,ysis, and although the choice of one or the other two
names may irnply a particular perspective, the three terms are used largely
interchangeably.
According to Jacobs & Jucker (1996), the field of historical pragmatics is
subdivided into two main types, reflecting the distinction between extemal and
interna! language change respectively: 1) pragmaphüology (a macro-approach
whose focus is on the pragrnatic aspects of linguistic change as found in historical
texts within their sociocultural context of commurúcation) and 2) diachronic
pragmatics (a rnicro-approach whose focus is on the interface of linguistic
structure and use, and on the historical development of pragmatic elements, such
as speech acts or discourse rnarkers). The data for the former are written or
spoken text types, such as conversations, monologues, etc. viewed in the context
of their legal, pedagogical, etc. norms of production and reproduction. The_data
for the latter come from textual evidence of the development of the pragmatic.
elernents under analysis.
Historical pragmatics can be considered a kind of contrastive analysis,
insofar as different stages in the development of pragrnatic elernents or issues
down the history of a language are compared. Brinton's (1996) study, for instance,
compares a variety of pragmatic and discourse markers in Old English and in
Middle English, exploring a diachronic form-to-function rnapping in which sorne
rnarkers whose forros stayed relatively stable are taken as a starting point, and
tracing their various functions. Arnovick's (1999) study, by contrast, carries out
a diachrorúc function-to-form mapping by retracing the histories of a number of
speech acts and speech events. Here the starting point is the function, and what
is explored are the different forros used to realize the function at different stages
in history. The distinction between these two perspectives is, however, sornetirnes
not easy to make, because certain linguistic elements may change both in forro
and in function in the course of time or because the object of research rnay in
sorne cases be a whole system of interconnected entities (such as, for instance,
evaluative subsysterns or politeness strategies), and not a particular fonn or
function.
Taavitsainen & Fitzrnaurice (2007: 16) note that the methods of research
used in historical pragrnatics "rely upon the adaptation and application of current
theories of language to earlier periods in language history", i.e., it has been
generally assumed that the linguistic forces that operate today are the same as
75 This is one more lnstance in which researchers (especlally those who support the wider
view of pragmatics (macropragroatlcs) do not seem to find or establish a clear distinction
between disc01use analusis and pragroatics, as ,vas explained In Chapter l.
244 Other topics of lnterest in pro9maflcs ////// / ///// // / // / /// /// / / ///// /////
operated in the past. However, these authors point out that this assurnption rnay
bring along rnethodological problems and therefore they commit themselves to
accepting a weaker staternent (in line with Rornaine 1982: 123) that there is "no
reason for claiming that language did not vary in the sarne patterned ways in the
pastas it has been observed to do today•.
Sorne historical pragmatic studies have used dictionaries as data but rnuch
of the current work is based on large electronic corpora (e.g. of literary and
biblical texts) or on new corpora which have been cornpiled for specific research
projects. As for the language scrutinized, the bulk of research in historical
pragmatics has been devoted to the history of the English language, but sorne
important studies have also been carried out on other languages (e.g. Xing 2004
for Mandarin Chinese, Lunde 2004 for Medieval East Slavic, Bax 2003 on various
rituals (for instance in the Vedic Hymns or in rnodern Dutch) or Fanega 2010
on Spanish). Other studies have focused on a certain genre: Ungerer (2000)
and Herring (2003), for example, have studied the language of rnass media
communication and have shown that historical pragmatic analysis can also be
applied to changes currently in progress (Jucker 2006: 331).
In order to understand a discipline, it is important to know what research
q,uestions are being asked in that discipline. Traugott (2007: 640) states that there
are two central q,uestions that have been asked within the Gricean pragmatic
tradition since the mid-1970s, and a third one that has been posed prirnarily
within historical linguistics, giving the following three:
1) Do different conversational rnaxims motívate different types of semantic
change?
2) Does Grice's distinction between particularized and generalized
conversational implicatures help account for how semantic change occurs?
3) Are there additional irnportant factors that need to be considered in
accounting for freq,uently observed types of semantic change?
We do not intend to answer these q,uestions in this section; rather we will
conclude by showing how sorne scholars have attempted to find the answer to
sorne fundamental issues by taking a glirnpse at how historical pragrnatic
research is carried out in the study of discourse rnarkers (DMs). Fanego (2010)
tracks the evolution of the DM de hecho in Spanish and finds that it is analogous
to that of infact, indeed or actually in English, the essential property of these
markers being that they have primarily procedural meanings (Blakernore 1987,
2002) in present-day Spanish and English and hence are to be distinguished from
sentence adverbials, which have conceptual meaning. She thus shows how these
expressions started out at an earlier period of time as clause-internal adverbials,
then came to function as epistemic sentence adverbials and ended up as discourse
//// I I / I I ///// I / // / I / I /////// I I I I / // Other +opics of inferest in pro9matics 245
rnarkers. Traugott & Dasher (2002: 40) assume the following correlated paths of
directionaUty in semantic change, viewing pragmatic implicatures as playing a
crucial bridging role in semantic change:
Truth-<:onditional --~► non-truth conditional
Content---+- content/ procedural--~► procedural
Scope within proposition-+ SCOpe over proposition -scope over discourse
Non-subjective ---► subjective - - - • intersubjective
The diagram illustrates the fact that sorne expressions with a given
conceptual meaning gradually develop a semantic or pragmatic rneaning
primarily indexing speaker attitude or viewpoint (subjectivity) and ultimately
speaker's attention to the addressee's self-image (intersubjectivity). This position
is also supported in Traugott's (2007) study of the DM ajter all, or Alba.Juez &
Martínez Caro's (2016) study of the pragmatic/discourse marker no wonder.
However, as we saw in Chapter 5 and as Fanega (2010) explains, discourse
rnarkers evince different layers of rneaning at the sarne time and therefore cannot
be said to be purely procedural.
Another q,uestion that these and other researchers have posed is whether
this ultimate procedural meaning becornes grammaticalized or conventionalized
in the corresponding language at sorne point of its historical development Aijmer
& Sirnon-Vandenbergen (2004: 1788) note that "sorne contextual meanings are
more freq,uent and conventionalized than others" so that the answer for DMs has
to be explored case by case. But there is no room for doubt that the processes of
grammaticalization and lexicalization are indeed, and will continue to be, two
of the main concerns of historical pragmatics.
We now turn to another subfi.eld ofpragmatics that has developed and grown
in recent years: cornputational pragmatics.
6.6. PRAGMATICS AND COMPUTATIONAL
LINGUISTICS
The main concern of computational pragmatics, as is also the case with general
pragmatics, is the phenomenon of i11Jerence. Jurafsky (2007: 678) defines
cornputational pragmatics as "the cornputational study of the relation between
utterances and context", which means that it is concerned with the relationship
between utterances and action, or with the place, tin1e and environment in which
they are produced.
 l!
246 Other fopics of lnferesf in pra9maflcs ////////// / //// / / / /// //// /// / / // / / / /
The basic aim of computational modeling in linguistics has been to provide
mathematical foundations, the formal underpinnings of the models, such as
rules or trees. Another purpose of computational models is to do language
engineering, a major goal within this line of research being to build artificial
agents that are able to carry out a conversation with human beings and therefore
to perform speech acts such as answering a q,uestion, giving directions or even
reacting to people's emotions in an expressive way. This leads us to the third goal
of these models, to develop computational psycholinguistics, defined by
Jurafsky (2007: 579) as "the use of computational techniq,ues to build processing
models of human psycholinguistic performance".
Thus the problem for computational pragmaticians is how to compute the
relationship between language and context, i.e. how to decode those aspects of
linguistic expressions that encode contextual information. This involves, as BWlt
& Black (2000) explain, the difficult task of building effective and explicit
representations at both ends of the relationship. The linguistic side of the
relationship does not pose as many problems as the contextual side, which is
much less well understood by computational linguists, and for that reason they
have not yet been able to generate accurate formal representations of it. It is
assumed that any natural language processing system will need to be able to
understand the intentions behind utterances relative to an evolving context,
which means that it will be capable of making inferences of a non-deductive, or
better, an abductive kind. There are different kinds of abductions, but their
common characteristic is that "the inference mechanism is permitted to assume
additional premises in order to reach a conclusion deductively" (Bunt & Black
2000: 9). As the reader may have understood by now, the pragmatic inferences we
studied in Chapter 3 of this book, such as conversational implicatures, are
abductions. Abduction is formally related to Default Logic, a type of logic
proposed by Reiter (1980) which is concerned with drawing conclusions from
incomplete evidence. Default logic draws inferences of the kind If p, then q.,
unless there is evidence that not q, (Bunt & Black 2000:10). Sorne authors
(e.g. Errault 1989, Beun 1989, Jurafsky 2007) have used Default Logic to explain,
for instance, how a declarative utterance such as He's dating our friend Marta
may be interpreted as a q,uestion rather than an assertion. But as we know,
abductive reasoning may produce non-valid conclusions, which is one of the
reasons why implicatures are cancelable (as explained in Chapter 3).
Another area that preoccupies computational pragmaticians is the
distinction between knowing and believing and, for that matter, the reasoning
that human beings make about their beliefs. A complete computational pragmatic
system should therefore have an inference engine that is able to reason about
beliefs, which poses another very serious challenge to researchers in the field.
/ / / / /// / / // // /// I // I /// I / / I I I /// /// I Other fopics of inferes+ in pr09mofics 247
Sorne attempts have been made in this respect (e.g. Ballim, Wilks & Barnden
1991, Lee & Wilks 1996), but these are restricted to simple forros of reasoning
about belief. A more recent model is the Rational Speech Act model, developed
by Frank & Goodman (2012), which presents an attempt to model cognitive
aspects of the interpretation of sentence fragments and implicatures.
To conclude and summarize, computational pragmatics is a rapidly growing
Tield which is to be found at the interface between linguistics, cognitive science
and artificial intelligence and which is very relevant for linguistic pragmatics,
considering that it can enable advanced experimental testing of pragmatic
theories. And it is precisely this subfield, experimental pragmatics, which we
shall deal with in the following section of this chapter.
6.7. EXPERIMENTAL PRAGMATICS
Experimental pragmatics is a relatively new sub-field of pragmatic research that
draws on pragmatics, psycholinguistics and the psychology of reasoning
(Sperber & Noveck 2004).
Within the field of pragmatics alone, there has been very little experimental
evidence that could clearly confirm ( or disconfinn) any of the theories we have
discussed in this book (e.g. Gricean, Neo-Gricean or Politeness theories). Not
being familiar with or interested in experimental psychology, pragmaticists
initially had their own ways to account for their findings, and were in general
guided by their intuitions and observational data. It has only been in the 21st
century that they have started to make use of Experimental Psychology to
obtain experimental evidence that could allow them to evaluate and compare
their pragmatic clain\s.
As Sperber &Noveck (2004: 8) argue, pragmatic research isnot to be censured
or discarded on the grounds that it is mostly based on intuition and observational
data. However, the incorporation into pragmatic studies of the more established
and developed field of experimental psycholinguistics has opened up the scope
of research by adding experin1ental evidence to researchers' intuitions and
recordings of discursive data, thereby offering them better tools to understand
a variety of topics, from the perception and decoding of the acoustic or visual
signal to the interpretation of discourse in general. The three kinds of evidence
put togetl,er (intuitions, observations and experiments) can therefore give high
reliability to the results of research. There are, however, sorne disadvantages
in including experimental data within pragmatic studies, the main ones being
248 Other topics of interes+ in progmatics / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
that they are harder to collect and that they are generally more artificial than
observational data of the type found in corpora, for instance.
Ervas & Gola (2013: 8) point out that "the tension between philosophical and
experimental pragmatics seems to be the dialectic motor of the evolution of
pragmatics itself', and indeed it can be said that in the last decade or so there has
been a considerable body of research in the field supporting this assertion, much
of it coming from Relevance Theorists. Breheny et al. (n.d.), for instance, suggest
that an important place to start research in the field is the source of relevance for
an utterance, by exploring the more general mechanisms that anticipate its
completion. Sorne research on children's pragmatic performance (e.g. Farroni et
al. 2003, Guasti et al. 2005, Liebal et al. 2009, Southgate et al. 2009) has shown that
babies as young as 4 months of age are already employing sophisticated
pragmatic abilities, which suggests that human pragmatic competence may
involve specific neural structures and thus have an innate basis (Grossman et al.
2008). In Guasti et al.'s (2005) experiment, children had to carry out the felicity
judgement task of obligatorily choosing between two images, one in which all the
characters performed a given action and another in which some did perform it
but sorne others did not the 5-year-old children consistently chose the scenario
which respected Grice's expectations of informativeness. Southgate et al.'s (2009)
experiments show that infants seem to understand communicative acts in terms
of what their interlocutor would deem relevant and not simply in terms of what
is relevant to them.
Sorne other authors have devoted their research to testing the generation of
scalar implicatures, such as Breheny et al. (2006) or Cummins et al. (2012), who
provide experimental data that examines the apparently generalized assumption
that categories of q_uantifying expressions such as more than n, at least n, and
fewer than n, fail to give rise to scalar implicatures in unembedded declarative
contexts. In a later study, Cummins (2015) also investigates, by means of two
experiments, the interpretation of modified fractions.
From a different perspective, Gibbs & Colston (2012) present a new,
dynamical approach to the interpretation of figurative language (e.g. metaphor,
irony) and propose sorne theoretical altematives, based on empírica! work from
psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics.
All in all, it can be said that psycholinguistic experimental research has shed
and will continue to shed light on the cognitive mechanisms that underpin
pragmatic phenomena. However, as Sperber & Noveck remark, "fruitful
interactions between pragmatics and experimental psychology are not limited to
psycholinguistics" (2004: 12), for ALL experiments that involve human verbal
communication present results concemed with how the participants understand
language and discourse and should conseq_uently involve considerations of the
/ / I / / I / / / / / / / I / I / / I I I / / / / I / / I / / / I I / I Other topics of interest in progmatics 249
pragmatic interpretations of, for instance, the instructions given for the correct
execution of the experiments. This opens an enormous window of interdisciplinary
research for pragmatics, where only the sky seems to be the limit.
6.8. CYBERPRAGMATICS
Cyberpragmatics is the term coined by Francisco Yus (2001) to refer to a strand
of pragmatic research devoted to the study of intemet-mediated communication
and interaction from a cognitive perspective, and more specifically, from the
viewpoint of Relevance Theory. Yus (2011: xi) argues that this approach can
explain not only face-to-face communication but also asynchronous
communication and the multiplicity of multimodal exchanges on the intemet. He
explains that most of these exchanges have an oral connotation, and this is the
reason why most texts in intemet-mediated communication are hybrid in nature:
on the one hand they have the rigidity of typed text, but on the other they present
the spontaneity of speech. This feature has also been discussed by other authors
(e.g. Murray 1990 or Herring 2001) for computer-mediated communication in
general. There is a blending of speaking and writing that may cause the
impression that this type of discourse is 'less correct' than standard written
language, dueto the fact that interlocutors on the web generally try to mimic the
spoken language as well as to economize on typing effort, among other features
such as the use of symbols or emoticons to compensate for the lack of facial
expressions, sound or body language and the freq_uent use of the so-called
electronic utterance (Sotillo, 2000), a single clause with complements and
adjuncts.
One interesting aspect of internet-mediated communication - Yus notes - is
the fact that it is very common for participants to engage in multi-tasking,
especially in the case of adolescents, "who usually chat with other users while
answering messages from Messenger and searching for information in a portal"
(2011: 12). While doing ali this (although it is obvious that more mental effort is
involved76), these users are pem1anently searching for relevance and dismissing
potentially irrelevant information at the same time. But the social character of
much of internet discourse may bring along sorne payoffs, such as the
strengthening of community-related assun1ptions, in order to compensate for this
extra mental effort. However, and at the same time, this social orientation of
internet communication may be detrimental to the estimation of relevance in
76 See Chapter 6 ln this book, where the relationship between cognitive effort and contextual
effects within Relevance Theory is e."qllained.
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250 Other fopics of inferest In pra9moflcs / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
terms of a reduction of both the credibility of the source and willingness to
process it Yus even argues that it is very possible that multi-tasking on the web
is altering the way human beings process and store information more generally,
which eventually will affect the organization and functioning of their brains.
They may, for instance, feel reluctant to invest cognitive resources in stimuli that
involve deferred relevance (e.g. reading a novel).
Yus points out that the main objective of cyberpragmatics is to explain the
role of context "in the eventual q_uality of interpretations" (2011: 3), a task for
which Sperber & Wilson's (1986) Relevance Theory has proved useful. In this
respect, he explains that the different forros of internet communication exhibit
variations related to accessibility to context, which has conseq_uences for the
q_uantity and q,uality of information communicated and interpreted. The following
are, then, the hypotheses that "make up the foundations of cyberpragmatics"
(2011: 14):
1) On the Internet, the "addresser users" have communicative intentions and
devise their utterances with the expectation that these intentions will end up
being relevant to the otller users and that their utterances will be interpreted
correctly. Since users are aware tllat, in principie, there are multiple ways in
which their utterances can be coded, they type (or talk in voice-enabled
Internet communication) with the expectation that these coded utterances
will be adeq_uate evidence to lead "addressee users" effectively towards the
intended interpretation.
2) Internet users use inferential strategies when they interpret messages on the
Net, and these do not differ from the ones used for the comprehension of
utterances in oral conversations shaped by physical co-presence. We are
eq_uipped with a biologically evolved tendency to maximize the relevance of
the utterances that we process, but we do not apply different inferential
procedures for our interpretation of stimuli (verbal and nonverbal) in physical
or virtual contexts.
3) Internet users expect their interlocutors to be able to access the necessary
amount of contextual information that will allow them to arrive ata correct
interpretation of their utterances. In the same way, their interlocutors will
invariably access contextual information as a necessary stage in a relevance-
oriented interpretation of these utterances.
4) The attributes of the different cyber-media (chat rooms, e-mail, messenger,
web pages, social networking sites .. . ) influence the q_uality of the user's
access to contextual information, the amount of information obtained, the
interpretation selected, the cognitive effects derived and the mental effort
involved in obtaining these effects. (2011: 14)
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Thus, the different cyber-media are placed on a scale of contextualization
ranging from highly context-saturated media (videoconferencing, Internet-
enabled phone calls, etc.) to highly cues-filtered media (e-mail, instant messaging,
etc.), and so they may have a greater or smaller information gap to be filled in
inferentially by the interactants.
As we know, the Internet world is constantly changing and evolving, and its
impact on our Uves has been huge. Sorne initial fonns of intemet communication
have become obsolete, but others have emerged and others will emerge in the
future for sure. The challenge for cyberpragmatics wil1 be to answer the new
cognitive and analytical q_uestions that wil1 come along with these new forros.
But cyberpragmatics is not isolated from other strands of pragmatic study.
In fact, ali the different avenues of research within pragmatics are interconnected,
and it may very well be the case that we find studies in which, for instance,
theoretic-philosophical, experimental, computational and cyberpragmatics are
ali combined and used to attain the objectives of a particular piece of research.
6.9. CONCLUSION
In this chapter we have seen, as was anticipated in Chapter 1, that pragmatic
analysis may be carried out both at a micro leve! (in relation with the syntax,
lexicon or prosody of utterances) anda macro level- which involves a more
holistic view of the field and takes into account its interaction with other fields
of research (e.g. historical or computational linguistics), as well as with different
subsystems of language, such as those related to the expression of stance or
emotion.
Our overall intention throughout the book, as also in this chapter, has been
to present this linguistic subfield of research in ali its vigor and complexity with
an open mind and heart, in the hope that the reader will malee a proper assessment
of how important and necessary it is to look at language from a pragmatic
perspective. Exploring a language without taking into account its pragmatic
aspects is like contemplating a flower witllout being able to smell its perfume: a
great and fundamental part of the information that we should perceive is lost.
Pragmatics is an extremely rich, healthy, and prosperous field of knowledge. We
hope to have succeeded in making the readers enjoy the trip through ali this
richness, health, and prosperity.