Variation and Change

Variation and Change PDF Author: Mirjam Fried
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027207836
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The ten volumes of the "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, interactional, or discursive angles, this sixth volume focuses on the dynamic aspects of language and reviews the relevant developments in variationist and diachronic scholarship. The areas explored in the volume concern several general themes: specific methodological approaches, from comparative reconstruction to evolutionary pragmatics; issues in intra-lingual variation in terms of standard and non-standard varieties; cross-linguistic variation, including its cross-cultural dimension; and the study of diachronic relations across linguistic patterns, including changes in all areas of pragmatic patterns and categories. The contributions document two prominent and interrelated trends that shape contemporary variationist and diachronic research. One, it has moved from situating change within context-independent systems toward incorporating patterns of language use and the speaker s role in language change. And two, it has reoriented its focus away from cataloguing instances of variation and toward seeking theoretically informed accounts that aim at "explaining" variation and change. On the whole, the volume argues for accepting and developing actively a systematic connection between research in diachrony, synchronic variation, and typology, while also incorporating the socio-cognitive perspective in linguistic analysis as a particularly promising source of useful methodology and explanatory models."

Variation and Change

Variation and Change PDF Author: Mirjam Fried
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027207836
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book

Book Description
The ten volumes of the "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, interactional, or discursive angles, this sixth volume focuses on the dynamic aspects of language and reviews the relevant developments in variationist and diachronic scholarship. The areas explored in the volume concern several general themes: specific methodological approaches, from comparative reconstruction to evolutionary pragmatics; issues in intra-lingual variation in terms of standard and non-standard varieties; cross-linguistic variation, including its cross-cultural dimension; and the study of diachronic relations across linguistic patterns, including changes in all areas of pragmatic patterns and categories. The contributions document two prominent and interrelated trends that shape contemporary variationist and diachronic research. One, it has moved from situating change within context-independent systems toward incorporating patterns of language use and the speaker s role in language change. And two, it has reoriented its focus away from cataloguing instances of variation and toward seeking theoretically informed accounts that aim at "explaining" variation and change. On the whole, the volume argues for accepting and developing actively a systematic connection between research in diachrony, synchronic variation, and typology, while also incorporating the socio-cognitive perspective in linguistic analysis as a particularly promising source of useful methodology and explanatory models."

Language and Violence

Language and Violence PDF Author: Daniel Silva
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027265224
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This book combines scholarship in pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and philosophy to address the problem of violence in language. How do words wound? What is the relation between physical and linguistic violence? How do racial invectives, misogynous language, homophobic slurs, among other forms of hate speech, affect the body and make us vulnerable to conditions of injurability that language brings about? While investigating the limits that violence poses for everyday speech action, understanding, representation, and our shared frameworks of intelligibility, this collective volume theoretically bridges knowledge from canons in linguistic pragmatics, continental philosophy and linguistic/semiotic anthropology and the dialogic perspective of subjects who are located in the peripheries of South America and Europe. The scholarship gathered here intends to offer a perspective on the violence of words that is attentive to practices and sensibilities that do not always fit into hegemonic ideologies of self and language.

Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology

Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology PDF Author: Ondrej Svec
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315453886
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction: Localizing the Pragmatic Turn in Phenomenology -- PART I Contemporary Pragmatic Readings of Phenomenology -- 1 On Layer Cakes: Heidegger's Normative Pragmatism Revisited -- 2 Heidegger's Pragmatist Readers -- 3 Primordiality and the Pragmata: A Critical Assessment of Rorty's Challenge to Heideggerian Nostalgia -- 4 Two Forms of Practical Knowledge in Being and Time -- 5 Discursive Intentionality as Embodied Coping: A Pragmatist Critique of Existential Phenomenology -- PART II Pragmatic Readings Challenged by the History of Phenomenology -- 6 The Limits of Dreyfus' View of Husserl: Intentionality, Openness and Praxis -- 7 On Dreyfus' Naturalization of Phenomenological Pragmatism: Misleading Dichotomies, and the Counter-Concept of Intentionality -- 8 Perceptual Faith beyond Practical Involvement: Merleau-Ponty and His Pragmatist Readers -- 9 Max Scheler and Pragmatism -- 10 From Circumspection to Insight -- PART III Opening Up Perspectives -- 11 Freedom and the Theoretical Attitude -- 12 The Primacy of Practice and the Pervasiveness of Discourse -- 13 Making Sense of Human Existence: Heidegger on the Limits of Practical Familiarity -- 14 Exemplary Necessity: Heidegger, Pragmatism and Reason -- Contributors -- Index

The Pragmatic Perspective

The Pragmatic Perspective PDF Author: Jef Verschueren
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027250065
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 852

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Book Description
This volume contains a selection of reviewed and revised papers, originally presented at the International Pragmatics Conference held in Viareggio, Italy, 1 5 September 1985.

Pragmatic Perspectives

Pragmatic Perspectives PDF Author: Robert Schwartz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429581394
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
For a good part of the 20th century, the classic Pragmatists—Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey—and pragmatism in general were largely ignored by analytic philosophers. They were said to hold such untenable views as whatever best satisfies our needs is true and that the end justifies the means. Despite a recent revival of interest in these figures, spurred largely by the work of Richard Rorty, it is not uncommon to continue to hear claims that pragmatism is a subjectivist, anti-realist position that denies that there is a mind-independent world, and fails to place objective constraints on inquiry. In this book, Robert Schwartz dispels these traditional views by examining the empiricist and constructivist orientation of the classic pragmatists. Based on updated and expanded versions of his influential papers, as well as a number of previously unpublished essays, in this book Schwartz demonstrates the relevance of pragmatic thought to a wide range of issues beyond concerns over truth and realism that currently dominate discussions. The individual essays elaborate and defend pragmatic, instrumentalist, and constructivist conceptions of truth and inquiry, moral discourse and ethical statements, perception, art, and worldmaking. Pragmatic Perspectives will appeal to scholars interested in the history of American philosophy and pragmatic approaches to contemporary issues in analytic philosophy.

Cognitive Pragmatism

Cognitive Pragmatism PDF Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822970589
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Nicholas Rescher tackles the major questions of philosophical inquiry, pondering the nature of truth and existence. Rescher argues that the development of knowledge is a practice, pursued by humans because we have a need for its products. This pragmatic approach satisfies our innate urge as humans to make sense of our surroundings. Taking his discussion down to the level of particular details, and addressing such topics as inductive validation, hypostatization fallacies, and counterfactual reasoning, Rescher abandons abstract generalities in favor of concrete specifics. For example, philosophers usually insist that to reason logically from a counterfactual, we must imagine a possible world in which the statement is fact. But Rescher argues that there's no need to attempt to accept the facts of a world outside our cognition in order to reason from them. He shows us how we can use our own natural system of prioritizing to resolve the inconsistencies in such statements as, "If the Eiffel Tower were in Manhattan, then it would be in New York State." In using dozens of real-world examples such as these Rescher casts light on a wide variety of concrete issues in the classical theory of knowledge, and reassures us along the way that the inherent limitations on our knowledge are no cause for distress. In pragmatic theory and inquiry, we must accept that the best we can do is good enough, because we only have a certain (albeit large) set of tools and conceptualizations available to us.

A Pragmatic Perspective of Measurement

A Pragmatic Perspective of Measurement PDF Author: David Torres Irribarra
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030740250
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
This book aims to address the challenges of defining measurement in social sciences, presenting a conceptualization of the practice of measurement from the perspective of the pragmatic tradition in philosophy. The book reviews key questions regarding the scope and limits of measurement, emphasizing that if the trust that the public places on measures in the social sciences relies on their connection to the notion of measurement in the physical sciences, then the clarification of the similarities and differences between measurement in the physical and the social realms is of central importance to adequately contextualize their relative advantages and limitations. It goes on to present some of the most influential theories of measurement such as the “classical view” of measurement, operationalism, and the representational theory of measurement, as well as more methodological perspectives arising from the practice of researchers in the social sciences, such as the latent variable perspective, and from the physical sciences and engineering, represented by metrology. This overview illustrates that the concept of measurement, and that of quantitative methods, is currently being used across the board in ways that do not necessarily conform to traditional, classical definitions of measurement, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes our technical understanding of it. Moreover, what constitutes a technical understanding of measurement, and the theoretical commitments that it entails, must vary in different areas. In this context, disagreement on what is constitutive of measurement is bound to appear. Pragmatism is presented as a theoretical perspective that offers the advantage of being flexible and fallibilist, encouraging us to abandon the pursuit of a timeless and perfect definition that attempts to establish decontextualized/definitive demarcation criteria for what is truly measurement. This book will be of particular interest for psychologists and other human and social scientists, and more concretely for scholars interested in measurement and assessment in psychological and social measurement. The pragmatic perspective of measurement presents a conceptual framework for researchers to ground their assessment practices acknowledging and dealing with the challenges of social measurement.

Translating Identities on Stage and Screen

Translating Identities on Stage and Screen PDF Author: Maria Sidiropoulou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443837237
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
This book takes a pragmatic/semiotic approach to real-life translating for the stage and screen, with a view to showing the potential of systematic linguistic analysis to reveal aspects of meaning-making. Functionalist, interpretive and critical perspectives merge to describe shifting aspects of phenomena in acculturating Pinter, Shakespeare, Wilde, Leonard, Shaw, Austen, etc., in the second half of the 20th century, for the Greek stage and/or screen. More specifically, the book tackles rendition of politeness in staging Pinter, implementation of narrative perspectives in stage and screen versions of Hamlet, rendition of semantic oppositions for humour generation across versions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, rendition of subcultural linguistic variety in Shaw’s Pygmalion on stage and screen, target identity inscription in versions of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Leonard’s Da, rendition of phenomena in subtitling and dubbing The Hunchback of Notre Dame animation film for the young, and the similarities between translation and cinematic adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Hislop’s The Island. Awareness of specificities in the treatment of linguistic phenomena is expected to inform the agenda of what is to be further explored in Translation Studies.

Perspectives on Pragmatism

Perspectives on Pragmatism PDF Author: Robert Brandom
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674058089
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Pragmatism has been reinvented in every generation since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century. This book, by one of todayÕs most distinguished contemporary heirs of pragmatist philosophy, rereads cardinal figures in that tradition, distilling from their insights a way forward from where we are now. Perspectives on Pragmatism opens with a new accounting of what is living and what is dead in the first three generations of classical American pragmatists, represented by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Post-Deweyan pragmatism at midcentury is discussed in the work of Wilfrid Sellars, one of its most brilliant and original practitioners. SellarsÕ legacy in turn is traced through the thought of his admirer, Richard Rorty, who further developed JamesÕs and DeweyÕs ideas within the professional discipline of philosophy and once more succeeded, as they had, in showing the more general importance of those ideas not only for intellectuals outside philosophy but for the wider public sphere. The book closes with a clear description of the authorÕs own analytic pragmatism, which combines all these ideas with those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and synthesizes that broad pragmatism with its dominant philosophical rival, analytic philosophy, which focuses on language and logic. The result is a treatise that allows us to see American philosophy in its full scope, both its origins and its promise for tomorrow.

Pragmatic Perspectives on Postcolonial Discourse

Pragmatic Perspectives on Postcolonial Discourse PDF Author: Christoph Schubert
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443896853
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In sociolinguistic research on Englishes world-wide, little has been published on the pragmatics of postcolonial varieties. This interdisciplinary volume closes this research gap by providing integrative investigations of postcolonial discourses, probing the interstices between linguistic methodologies and literary text analysis. The literary texts under discussion are conceptualized as media both reflecting and creating reality, so that they provide valuable insights into postcolonial discourse phenomena. The contributions deal with the issue of how postcolonial Englishes, such as those spoken in India, Nigeria, South Africa and the Caribbean, have produced different pragmatic conventions in a complex interplay of culture-specific and global linguistic practices. They show the ways in which hybrid communicative situations based on ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity result in similarly hybrid social and communicative routines. The central pragmatic paradigms discussed here include im/politeness, speech act conventions, conversational maxims, deixis, humour, code-switching and -mixing, Othering, and linguistic exclusion.